Preparation for the expedition to Musgrave’s camp began the next day and we watched the weather, waiting for the wind to drop. Teer went with the beefy sailors, Ferguson and Morrison, onto the rocks across the harbour and brought back seal pups, soft things still suckling, clubbed lifeless. The men cut the pink and brown flesh off in strips and I was given the task of threading the meat on stinkwood skewers, my fingers drenched in the pups’ dark blood. Nicholas Allen took one of the skins for himself and Teer laughed at him, holding the dripping pelt at arm’s length, asking if he intended to cure it with his spit.
“Put it back so the men can deal with it,” Teer said.
“You have no authority over me, Irishman,” said Allen. He looked foolish and clumsy with the heavy thing and I noticed none of the men stood with him.
“You could make a silk purse,” said Teer. “Though I’m thinking you already have one of those.”
Allen turned his back and rolled the thing into a ball and went off somewhere. I thought of a dog going to bury a bone. A while later he returned to sit where I rested by the fire, far away from the men busy with their knives.
I tried to find the memory I had of him from the ship but I had him confused with another man, very similar, who carried the same look of hollow pride. The memories of those days on the ship were merging and blending, their reality out of reach.
After a while, Allen pulled a woman’s purse from his pocket and turned it over and over. I watched his hands the way I watched the grass. Somewhere to put my eyes.
“Look,” he said, dipping his fingers into the cloth. With the theatrical act of a conjuror the bag fell away and between his fingers he held something small, the size of a knuckle. Something shining, polished the colour of firelight.
Gold.
I’d seen bigger nuggets. I had three bigger than his sewn into a pocket in my dress and several smaller in my petticoat. But in my heightened state his revealing of the lump to me seemed obscene. He’d taken something that should have remained private on his person and flashed it at me.
“The rest’s back there in the wreck.”
I didn’t get his meaning. My thoughts had gone back to the drowned children. I felt ashamed that, even for a second, I had been distracted by the gold he held up.
“The chests would have gone directly down. We have to go back and recover it.”
“Back?” I shook my head at him. “I don’t follow your meaning.”
He ducked his head then, and pressed his fingers across the bridge of his nose as if the smoke had caught in his eyes. The wood, along with everything else, was wet. I welcomed the smoke. I wanted it to rise so high and black in the sky it could be seen from miles away.
“All those portables,” he said, and pressed his knuckles into his eyes. I hadn’t seen him hide his gold nugget away, a slip of the wrist and it was gone. His shoulders drooped and he shook. The pathetic man was crying.
I pushed myself slowly to a crouching stand, rocking away the pain in my back. Then I turned away from Allen and returned to skewering seal flesh. After all we had witnessed, the men, women and children we had watched drown, Allen was mourning his gold.
One of the sailors, either Ferguson or Morrison—I was too tired yet to mark all the men—built a drying frame from forked branches, but it rained all afternoon and the meat steamed and smoked and remained raw and revolting. Then the rack caught on fire and the meat tumbled into the ash. Teer cursed as he pulled the fatty stuff out and rebuilt the frame himself.
I followed Joseph into the forest and we stripped bark from trees. It was rough and flaky. We took it back to Teer.
“Kindling for the boat,” said Joseph, as he laid the pile at Teer’s feet. “It’ll keep the fire alive.”
Teer nudged it with his foot. “Ironwood,” said Teer. “Good man. Thank’ee, Jewell.”
Later, Teer selected his men. Sanguily had chattered all day of what they would find at Musgrave’s camp, expectations growing from fishing nets to suits of fine clothes hanging on a row of hooks. He wanted to be part of the expedition, but Teer was growing tired of the fidgety Cuban and he selected the more experienced seamen. He took Mr McClelland for his knowledge of rigging, and for strength, both Morrison and Ferguson. Their friend Cornelius Drew was also chosen; he was a soft man but perhaps he had skills. I was no judge of these men. McNevin was the last of the group. Joseph, Teer left with me.
“It’s guns they need to find,” Joseph said later. We had been sent by Mr Brown to watch the signal fire on the hill. “No point in stocking the island with pigs without leaving guns. Guns and pots and building supplies. Then we can wait in a comfortable hut with bacon in the pan until a ship comes by.”
How long was he expecting to wait for rescue? They were just words to cheer me with nothing behind them and I couldn’t bring myself to respond to him. We were not intending to set up a settlement and live here. We’d be away with the first ship.
We were on dog watch—two hours in the early evening—though there were no bells and no way of telling the time. The next watch would replace us when they arrived. We had carried fuel up the hill and stacked the pile, and for a while we wove flax and grass into the frame of our shelter as our eyes adjusted to the darkening night.
While we worked, I waited for the right time to tell Joseph that I carried our baby, chewing the words over, delaying the conversation until he was still.
Finally we rested. Our bellies were full of meat and for the first time since the boats the squeezing pain in my spine relaxed. I sat on the ground with Joseph’s arm around me and he breathed into my hair, warming my neck. With warmth came hope. Joseph would save me and take me home. Always I was aware of the life inside me growing and beginning to take form. Now was the time to tell him.
“Joseph,” I began.
“We should bury our gold,” he said.
I had almost forgotten about the stones I carried, though perhaps they should have been on my mind. My thoughts concentrated in another pocket, beneath my flesh, which was altogether more precious to me. But a quick glance showed Joseph with his brow furrowed and eyes on the future. The stones, which were worth nothing more than a heaviness in my hem on the island, would buy our farmhouse in Devonshire and I must keep them safe.
I fingered the heavy fabric of my dress for the lumps hidden below, guilty for my neglect of them. I had lived in Melbourne long enough to know that gold had a different weight for those who dug it from the ground, and I was always careful when Joseph raised the topic. It was never a matter for casual discussion; words about gold weighed more than normal words.
Even so, I was surprised at his suggestion we bury it rather than keep it hidden in our clothing. When a ship came, we wanted to get aboard without delay.
“Are you afraid I will lose it?”
I thought of the ways the gold I carried could be lost. I could tumble off a cliff. My petticoat seams could tear on the bushes and the stuff tumble out. The men could rip my clothes from me. I could go mad and throw it in the forest. And the worst—which made me shudder in Joseph’s arms—I could fall from a boat into deep water and the weight of the stones pull me down.
He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me so he could look at my face. “It’s a weight we can set down, for a while.” He kissed my forehead, unexpectedly tender. “You already carry burden enough.”
It was hard to read his eyes. The firelight shifted and I couldn’t be sure what I saw. Did he know the burden I carried—had he guessed?
“We’ve got an hour before we are relieved,” he said. “Unstitch everything. We’ll bury it under that tree, there—it’s an easy mark. We’ll dig it up when we’re rescued.”
He took his arm away.
“Take off your petticoats,” he said, and he untied the tobacco pouch from his belt and laid it down for me to fill.
While he dug between the roots of the twisted tree, with my teeth and my tongue I unpicked the heavy stitching around the lumpy stones in my garments and when he handed me his trousers I did the same for him, pulling the threads I had stitched into the false band of his waist. If our watch replacements had come early they would have found us by the fire with our clothing laid out and assumed that we were just a man and a wife doing what married couples do. But there was a desperation in undressing like that, dried hot by the flames. I was shy of my white legs and couldn’t look at Joseph. Nakedness is unattractive out of doors in the wild. The thought of lovemaking was far away.
When David Ashworth came to replace us we were back by the fire, picking the dirt from our fingernails.
“Where’s Scott?” he asked, looking around as he came into the light. He sounded suspicious—Scott’s theft of the tinned meat had branded him. “He was ahead of me.”
Joseph shook his head. “Not seen him,” he said. “We’ll wait with you if you like, until he comes.”
Ashworth checked the wood supply and, happy there was enough for the night, sat with his back against the pile and stretched out his legs. “You go on,” he said. “Can’t say I’ll miss him.”
Before long, Mr McClelland’s prediction came true. The snow he had smelled came over the hill on the wind and fell in a sleety drizzle. Later when Scott appeared out of the darkness on the track, snow was already gathering, a white dust blowing in to cover the freshly dug earth under the gold tree.
* * *
We slept that night in the broken hut, Allen on his fresh pelt that began stinking as his body warmed it. They had propped the fallen roof back to keep out the snow, but though we had found a handful of nails to secure it in the rotten wood of the hut, we had no hammer and no rope. Fierce arguments broke out between Sanguily and McNevin on the best way to wedge the cover in place so it didn’t crash down upon us in the night, and it looked so unstable I was reluctant to go inside. Sanguily escorted me in, insisting I stepped in with my right foot first and taking my elbow to make a ceremony of it, but I crouched close to the door unhappily and wouldn’t lie down. Eventually Teer arrived from the forest dragging a small tree, which he shoved in the corner as a crutch, propping up a cover.
I had layered more grass and moss on the peaty earth and with the press of fifteen bodies and four walls to protect us we should have been warm, but our skin sucked the chill from the ground. We were sponges for cold. It would be colder still when the men left to find Musgrave’s camp.
“Can you sew for our friend a hat, Mrs Jewell?” Sanguily asked me in the morning, indicating Mr McClelland, who had only a drift of grey hair across his bare head. He held out a brittle bit of bloody pelt and a sharp wedge of bone with a needle hole carefully drilled through. But the untreated skin was unworkable and the needle broke. I had helped Mr McClelland wrap strips of slippery skin around his feet as makeshift slippers, but I didn’t know how to make a hat from a seal. Besides, I had no thread.
Instead, I waited until Mr McClelland was alone by the fire, and I told him I had a gift for him.
“What’s this, a flute?” There was such a lift to his eyes that I knew I had done the right thing. It was something I could give.
I didn’t want to carry the whistle anymore. I knew I was never going to put myself forward to play for the men. My music had been with Mam, or a private pleasure to share with the girls, a trifle that belonged in a feminine room. I’d sung for Joseph, but playing was a performance that felt altogether more bold.
“Where in heaven did you magic it from?”
Mr McClelland put the whistle to his lips but my hand darted out to silence him.
“Joseph didn’t want me to blow it,” I said. “I don’t think he wanted Mr Sanguily to think I had been blowing it on the ship.”
“Did he not? That’s foolish.”
“Does it not bring bad luck?”
“Mrs Jewell, please don’t believe you whistled up a wind. Maybe your husband is trying to protect you—sailors have silly superstitions about such things, and Mr Sanguily, I think, may be sillier than most. But a tin flute is for music, not magic.”
“I thought you might like to make the bird songs.”
He tucked the whistle into a pocket inside his jacket and patted it thoughtfully.
“That I’ll do, Mrs Jewell. And perhaps one day you might teach me a tune.”
I shook my head but I’m not sure he saw.
Teer brought in another big seal, clubbed between the eyes as it lay fearlessly on the rocks. He butchered it as we watched. Sanguily took a small chunk of the fattest blubber to offer his collection of deities and muttered prayers while the fat spat back, ferocious in the hottest part of the fire. Teer lay the meat on a hearth stone to sizzle and smoke. This was our sustenance: breakfast, dinner and supper, and our stomachs churned with it. We ate and shat and spewed and froze. I was given a skin washed in the stream to put beneath me when I slept but it took a long time to dry and then became rigid as a plank. Even with the grass packed beneath, it did little to keep out the cold.
It was a miserable day when the wind dropped and the expedition set out. The men carried fire in a tin and lumps of cooked seal flesh wrapped in leaves and I noticed every man stepped superstitiously right-footed into the boat. They rowed northeast to the heads across a rain-pocked harbour and I felt a great wrench of loss. Teer was the last to disappear from sight, a black smudge I found hard to let go. He was a brute of a man, but I didn’t know that we could survive without him. It was a brute of an island.
After the boat disappeared into the wet landscape that fringed our world, those remaining breathed out. Once made, we had to assume the decision was the right one. Mr Brown was in charge of our party, but after his brief show of leadership he seemed to sink back into despondency. His moods were mountains and he was on the way down. Without Teer to bully us we slipped into lethargy, spent longer by the fire, lay longer in the hut. Pat Caughey stepped into Teer’s big Irish shoes but he was a different fish. He encouraged us to move, and he put food on the fire every day, but he never raised his voice or his fists. He told me he was returning to England to see his mother. He’d been away twelve years and didn’t think she’d recognise him now.
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “A mother will always know. You’ll be back in no time, with plenty of stories to tell.”
“Ah, stories. What use are stories?”
“Will you tell us one tonight, Mr Caughey?”
“If it’s you asking, Mrs Jewell, I’ll not refuse you anything.”
I tried to laugh at that, just to show I was grateful for the play, but my misery allowed no more than a forced smile. We chewed on three-day-old smoky seal blubber, and a green stew in a tin was passed around. It tasted like boiled leaves. “There’s a story coming,” I said to Joseph, and indeed there was.
“I’ll tell you one about the Melbourne days,” said Caughey. The distraction of a story was more welcome than food. He flapped his hands at the circling flies and moved around the fire to the smoky side, close to where I sat with Joseph. It was a choice we made every evening: flies or smoke.
“It’ll begin where every good Irish story begins. I was in a bar.”
“Surely not!” called Ashworth.
“Hush, you. This is my story and it’s true as I’m sitting here. I was in a bar in Melbourne. I was with James Teer, the very man. We’d met, like we’ve told you before, side by side in the diggings, like we’d been side by side at home. James had made a strike. Not the big one, that came later, but enough for a celebration.”
The fact that Teer had been lucky in the mines did not surprise me. Luck sticks to the lucky.
“He’s a man with a generous heart, James, and I pride myself on havin’ a bit of generosity, too, you know. So when he says, ‘Let’s go to town for a celebration,’ I felt bound to keep him company and drink his good health.
“We had a few drinks and got chatting with the barmaid. Lovely, she was, with a right friendly manner about her and a voice straight from home. Well, blow me down, she says she comes from Newcastle. And James asks her does she know the cottage between the end of Widow’s Row and the harbour wall, where the men sit mending the nets, and she says, ‘Know it? I lived opposite all my childhood.’ And I ask her name and she tells me, ‘Mary Caughey, and I’m thinking you’re my brother Pat.’
“She was my very own sister, there in the bar of a hotel in Melbourne! I’d not seen here since she was a girl and there we were, sharing craic and memories all the way around the world. She’d married a man called Higgins—they’d immigrated a few years before. We all became the best of friends.”
“Lucky you didn’t try to kiss her,” said Ashworth, and Caughey laughed, embarrassed or delighted it was hard to tell.
“How was I to know?” he said. And then, “Of course she was the prettiest girl in the bar. She’s a Caughey. We’re a handsome lot.” And he winked at me.
* * *
I woke to Joseph’s voice, through the thin wall of the hut.
“She can’t come with us. I have to stay. I won’t leave her on her own.”
I looked around to find I had slept late and was alone. There was something disconcerting in the fact that the men had woken around me, risen and stepped out while I was oblivious to them. I trusted that Joseph had remained behind to screen me. Modesty was not something to put down and pick up later and hope to find it unchanged. I’d seen it myself, with the girls at the hotel. Those that unbuttoned themselves to view left smartly and didn’t return. “If you drop your modesty,” Matron had told us, “the devil takes it away.”
And now I slept on the floor with sailors.
“I can’t carry a bloody seal on my own, Jewell. She stays alone or comes with us.” The voice of Pat Caughey.
“What if Scott comes back early?” And then a mutter I wasn’t sure I heard correctly. “He has an unhealthy interest in my wife.”
“I don’t know. She’s not my wife. It’s your decision.”
I scrambled to my feet and immediately fell on my knees. I was dizzy all the time. Was it hunger? The baby?
Joseph was at the door, stepping forward, reaching his hand under my arm for support.
“I’ll come with you,” I said.
“No. We’re going sealing.”
“In the boat?” My courage fell away.
“No, the others have taken the boat. But Caughey has seen some on the beach around the cove—”
“Then I’ll come.”
My stomach gripped in a spasm and I pressed my lips together, bending over, brushing down my skirt, until it passed.
Joseph looked at me warily, but Caughey was at the door behind him. “Have some soup first, Mrs Jewell.” He ran his hand over his hair, trying to push it down. He looked like a haystack. “Well, there’s my imagination running away again. Have some hot water and gull bones. It’ll warm you up just the same.”
Our way led along the rocks but they rolled under my feet and I toppled often onto all fours, the men waiting as I lifted my wet-hemmed skirts and struggled to find a purchase for my feet. I was physically removed now from the gold left buried on the hill, but still felt a burden draped around me, pulling me down. We ran out of beach and pulled ourselves up a steep face, Joseph behind me and Caughey taking my hand in front, and I wished to God I hadn’t come, but the alternative meant, perhaps, no meat on the fire that night.
I was about to lie down and tell them to go without me when Caughey called back to us. He had found a line of scrub cut through the trees, the remnants of a path, and we followed it for a few hundred paces to where it turned off, back down to the sandy scrap and rocks where Caughey had seen the seals. We stepped out at the waterline with the beach a half moon before us.
The morning mist had cleared and a pale sun gave no warmth but shot a sparkle of light across the choppy water. I could see the seals farther up the beach, glossy brown curves on the dun-coloured sand. There were two of them, sleeping, the size and heft of large pigs. Other heads popped from the waves, earless and whiskered, close to shore.
“Look, Joseph!” I said as one rolled onto his back and dived beneath the surface. It lifted a flipper as if waving. “Did you see? Mr Caughey, look, they’re in the water, too!”
Caughey stepped cautiously up the sand, turning his back on the frolics of the animals at sea and intent on their complacent brothers on the beach. He had picked up a lump of hardwood, a spiky thing and not at all club-like, and he raised it above his head. Joseph, behind him, had no weapon but held his arms wide as if he intended to scoop the animals up and carry them home. They hadn’t been with Teer or the sailors when they had taken seals.
“How do we do this, Jewell?” said Caughey.
“Go for the head,” whispered Joseph.
They were ten feet away when the nearest one raised its head and rolled to display his fat belly, looking totally helpless with puny flippers on the body of a long slug. He regarded the men, sad eyes and a mouth turned up in the sweetest of grins. He touched his flippers together in a strangely human gesture, twiddling his thumbs as if wondering whether he would be obliged to get up and do something or whether he might stay and lounge in the sun with his friend. Then he looked past the men to me at the water’s edge and, with the slow blinks of a sleepy baby, gazed out to sea. He’d seen Caughey and his club and didn’t think much of him.
Caughey hesitated by the seal’s side, the man with the club and the animal lying at his feet. Slaughter was meant to follow. A gust of wind came off the sea and rustled the grasses of the hill and still Caughey didn’t strike.
“The head,” said Joseph again, but the head was smiling in the morning sun and I didn’t think Caughey could do it. I saw his shoulders rise with an intake of breath.
When he slashed down with his spiky weapon he aimed for the belly but the useless weapon bounced off thick skin. The seal curled in a smooth, muscular movement to slash with his long teeth at Caughey’s leg, not smiling now, but attacking fast. Then, as Caughey stumbled back and Joseph shouted out his warning, both seals flipped like fish and charged past the men, whiskers raised, hunching and springing off fat chests with bounces that drove them directly towards me, faster than ever I could run.
I’d seen dog attacks before. I had no weapon but I knew enough to make myself big. I flapped my arms out and jumped with my legs apart so my dress billowed out and stuck my neck forward.
“Baah! ” I screamed at the rushing seals. “Baaah! ”
And then I cringed and turned my shoulder as they came at me and I felt the bulk of them lumber past, thumping the sand, swerving away from me to slither into the water with just a nudge against my knees, a nudge that sent me flying to lie sprawled on the beach as Joseph and Caughey came stumbling to save me. By the time they arrived I was sitting up. I had already saved myself.
* * *
“’Twas a thing of legend,” said Caughey to his audience, as he stretched his wounded leg to dry by the fire. “Mrs Jewell standin’ there, an absolute picture of woman defiant, and the seals having to run around her. They’ll be telling this story for generations. Mrs Jewell encounters the seals. Or to be true, it was more like, The seals encounter Mrs Jewell. It’s a fine story, is it not?”
We had no bandage with which to bind Caughey’s leg, but the seal’s tooth had merely scratched his calf, and though it had bled all the way home it looked clean. He’d soaked it in icy seawater and Ashworth wrapped it in damp moss and tied it with coarse strips of grass.
“I know a man, he catch spekk-finger from the bite of the seal,” said Sanguily, who offered doctoring assistance from over Ashworth’s shoulder.
Ashworth batted him off. “Get away with your pointy little fingers,” he snarled.
Sanguily stayed at his elbow, offering advice. He had taken to chewing a twig of ironwood that constantly hung from the corner of his mouth like an unlit cigar.
“He get very sick from the bite on finger. It swell and swell, very bad.”
He took the stick from his mouth and pointed with it to the grass knots. “Here, you don’t want to do that, you want me to tie it here, and you must cross your fingers while I tie it. I show you.”
Ashworth pushed the Cuban away with his elbows. “I’ll thrash you,” he warned.
Sanguily puffed at his imaginary cigar, watching from a distance, visibly straining to keep quiet.
“Mrs Jewell’s heroic tale will be our first story, when James and the others return,” said Caughey, and he caught my eye through the smoke and smiled at me. I blushed at the attention and turned my cheek into Joseph’s shoulder.
“You should have run,” Joseph said.
We had nothing for that night’s meal other than a couple of shellfish. You should have clubbed the seal, I thought.
The temperature dropped, the rain fell and the winds ran in a gale. The seals went out to sea.
Day after day we found nothing for the pot other than shellfish: pipis burrowed in the sand, limpets from the rock and the fleshy pāua that Mr McClelland beat with a rock before warming them on a fire stone. The pāua were tough and salty and lived far out on the rocks. We collected their shells with the sea-blue swirls and used them as containers but liquid ran out through the holes. Once a fish washed up and we put its bones in the tin with some green stuff, but we were all sick with it the next day. On the rocks at the end of the harbour penguins began to gather and we hoped for eggs, but there were none so we ate the penguins. They tasted of blood.
Birds came to us for our discarded mess, gnawed bones and seal grease, and they were a permanent affront to our ears and horrible to watch. They pattered back and forth snatching and screeching, the little ones crying with their heartbreaking mewing, the same noise that comes from a starving animal.
With the wind the forest groaned and muttered with things rustling and falling, an endless creaking like disappointed voices. The sound of ghosts. I lay at night with my hands over my ears but I couldn’t keep out the moaning. For a while I thought the noise was in my head but I noticed even Ashworth, who believed in nothing, lay with his hands covering his ears.
I survived the days. I can’t say more than that. Every morning that I woke up in the freezing hut I thanked God that I hadn’t died in my sleep, and a day without giving up every vestige of hope felt like a miracle. I still suffered from the cramps I had endured in the long boat and when I bent over to collect wood, sometimes I fell. I wasn’t Caughey’s heroine who shouted at the seals but something small and afraid.
I don’t know what I ate: I chewed anything that was put in my hand and spat the gristly bits out when there was nothing left to suck. Every day I grew weaker and my stomach hollowed and my fear for the life I carried consumed me and made me uncommunicative. I turned my back on the men and stared blankly at Caughey when he told small stories to make me smile. I turned away from Joseph at night.
We waited for the return of Teer’s party, wondering what treasures they might bring us, how long they would be away. Whether they would hail a passing ship on their journey. The days passed in wind and rain and still they didn’t come. We were in limbo, our eyes always on the end of the harbour. All our hope on that grey patch of water.
Mr Brown continued downhill. Occasionally he went out with the men in the boat, but offered nothing and sat talking to himself.
“I should have sunk with the ship,” he said clearly to the gathered company one night. “If I couldn’t save her.” I don’t know if “her” referred to the ship or to his wife.
With the sinking of his courage came a lethargy of his body and spirit. If he roused himself he’d shuffle along the beach at low tide but return with little for the pot, a handful of limpets perhaps. A strip of seaweed. He often forgot where he was. After a while he stopped going out at all and spent what little daylight there was with his head in his hands. Caughey let him be. I don’t think Teer would have been so kind.
* * *
After the storm blew over, we were visibly thinner.
The relief from the wind was a blessing, the unexpected stillness so quiet I rubbed my ears to check I hadn’t gone deaf. It lasted a day, a pocket of tranquillity, and we all sagged gratefully into our own private doldrums. Even the birds stopped their squawking and turned their heads soundlessly, eyes on the sky. By evening the voice of the island returned: a rustle of leaves across the fireplace, the tips of the forest spinning and a shiver in the trees. The waves collected in the wind at sea and flopped on the shore, raking the gravel into a pattern of swirling curves. When we turned in, the hut was creaking its familiar tune of the westerly wind and the ferns scratched the long nails of ghosts over the roof.
Sanguily, Joseph and Hayman finally managed to club a seal and we had meat on the fire again, but it was hard to keep down and after two meals of dark gamey seal meat it was easier to say no to a third. And a fourth. I forced myself to eat limpets and mussels for breakfast but I knew I would throw them straight back up. Everyone was sick and the fact that I gripped my stomach and crawled away into the undergrowth every morning went unremarked. At first we talked about what we could do to improve our lot but our talk went around in circles and we had no energy to act on our ideas. It was enough that we kept the fire alive. By the end of the week no one had the energy to swing a club or skin a seal. We had not the speed or agility anymore to strike a bird.
The flux made its way through the camp. My bowels ran with blood and my stomach cramped and bloated. I feared for the baby but there was no sign that it had gone. Every day I poked through my disgusting shitty messes but there was no skin and bone, nothing solid. I pictured the baby as a tiny thing, a doll the size of my thumb, perfectly formed, warm in its cave and protected from what we suffered out in the world.
I told Pat Caughey about Mr McClelland’s island cabbage and he went up onto the cliffs and found it there. I said we should eat the root, so he pounded it to mush and put it in the tin. Rubbed with blubber it made a paste that was easier to swallow than flesh. Bill Scott, who alternated between ignoring me and positioning himself as my champion, mixed little balls of cabbage root and seal fat which he fried on a stone and tried to feed me with his fingers. He usually fed me when Joseph was asleep or away, but sometimes, deliberately, he did it with Joseph watching. If my husband objected to a man hand-feeding his wife he said nothing. I ignored the discomfort of this—I was ravenous and the foul stuff was all I could take, though I tried to grab it from his fingers and feed myself. I was trying to stay alive.
Nearly two weeks had passed and Teer and his party didn’t return.
The snow had gone but sleet came from the south, gusting in blasts down the valley. Hayman, without shoes, had feet red with chilblains. When I had the energy I rubbed them with melted blubber and wrapped them in moss, but he couldn’t leave the hut and nor would Mr Brown or Allen. With three men staying behind and Joseph now too shaky to stand, the others found they couldn’t go out either, and we had no nourishment but to chew blubber off an old carcass. The weather ran over us, day after day of rain or wind or sleet. We took turns to stagger out and keep the fire alight, and I took my watch with Joseph, although we dragged along on our knees from the wood pile to the fire.
Our stock of wood grew dangerously low and the fire on the headland went out. We had all succumbed to such a weakness that none of us could walk that far. We had taken to shitting behind the hut and the pile of muck steamed and stunk.
I fell on my knees in the pile one night and sat on the damp ground in the rain trying to gather the energy to crawl to the creek to wash the shit off my dress. I thought I could get that far but didn’t believe I would make it back, so I simply rolled into the hut and lay beside Joseph on my bed of grass, reeking like a sewer.
With shrieks and rattles and the sound of things falling, the weather enveloped us.
I thought we would all die that night.
I opened my eyes to a cold white light. The world was quiet. Part of the wall of our hut had blown out in the night’s wind and I looked out on a snow-white landscape lit with the sun. I moved my head and felt a dagger between my eyes, the pain so sharp I cried out. Joseph, beside me, stirred and reached out to clasp my hand. There were other rustlings in the hut, a mass awakening after a long time asleep.
“Hayman?” said Joseph tentatively, and shook his friend’s shoulder. I felt relief when he stirred. I looked around, wondering who was still alive. Caughey lifted himself from the straw. Scott and Allen lay face to face as if plotting something in their sleep, but one and then the other began to twitch and roll. Scott, as had become his habit, lay with his head at my feet and I curled my legs away to perch in the corner. Mr Brown, when prodded, coughed and muttered.
There was no sign of Sanguily. We found him later by the fire. He had relit the beacon on the headland and dragged a stack of driftwood from the beach to revive our camp fire. He smiled, his fresh stick cigar stuck between teeth as white as the snow behind him. He looked no more than a boy.
“Look, my friends! William Murdoch Sanguily, he is not dead!”
It changed our mood to see the sun. Even Mr Brown came from the hut and made some effort; he encouraged Caughey to take anyone who could walk to collect mussels from the rocks.
“And you see, Mrs Jewell,” Mr Brown said, with a pitiful smile in an attempt to cheer me, “the flies have left Sarah’s Bosom.”
Winter had come and the sandflies had gone. It was a small blessing.
When Teer and his party drifted back after the weeks away, emaciated and near exhaustion at their oars, there was food and a fire. But nothing more. We were still fifteen. The exploration had found nothing, and the men returning were in worse shape than we who had remained behind.