BY THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, SNOW CAME AND COVERED THE dories that Bradley had left for us, a half-dozen of them buried upside down on the beach.
The snow set in for good long before the harbour froze. Everything was white but the water, which was grey. The incongruity of it seemed to mesmerize Dr. Cook. He would stand at the water’s edge at dusk, staring at the waves that washed ashore as if there was some implication for him in the sight of the snow-surrounded water that he could not puzzle out.
One morning, when we awoke, the harbour had disappeared. It had frozen and snow had fallen on the ice, so that what the day before had been open water was now a flat white field.
As secondary layers of ice began to form on the harbour, they were pushed up onto the beach, where they were left at low tide, a never-melting, meandering high-water mark of ice that, by the time the harbour was fully frozen, had risen to a kind of seawall, a breakwater that looked like our first line of defence against invasion. The Eskimo women would stand behind this wall at sunset and stare out across the harbour and the larger sound beyond it, as spellbound as Dr. Cook had been by the water, all of them silent and strung out at even intervals along the wall, all with tears streaming down their faces. It was a custom that Dr. Cook had witnessed before but whose meaning he could not discover, so reluctant were any of the Eskimos to talk about it.
We did not have to hunt. We merely traded with the Eskimos for meat and clothing, thereby saving the energy that Dr. Cook predicted we would badly need to get us through the months-long polar night. We traded tobacco, rifles and cartridges, biscuits and soap (with which, for some reason, the Eskimo women washed themselves from the feet up).
In exchange, the Eskimos made coats and stockings from the furs of foxes and hares. From the fur and hide of reindeer that the men had killed, the women made us sleeping bags that they sewed together with sinew, painstakingly working the thread, which they clenched between their teeth and manipulated with both their fingers and their toes. From seal hide, they made us sealskin boots and coils of lashing for the sleds.
Dr. Cook spent much of his time making sledges out of the hickory wood, which came from trees he had cut on his brother’s farm. He made runners for the sleds by first heating and then straightening the staves of barrels. He made seven sledges and lashed them upright to the outside of the box house so they would not be crushed by snow. He made hickory snowshoes, the toes of which he turned up because, he said, this would make for better walking over the ice and snow of the polar seas.
Finally, he made one large sled that would pull the tent he had made in Brooklyn, in which we would shelter whenever it was not possible to build a proper igloo.
Our fuel, during our winter stay in the box house, would be coal. Bradley had left us a heap of hard coal, which was preferable to the soft kind because it did not leave grimy black dust on everything or clog up the stovepipe.
The already short days grew swiftly shorter. Ever since the box house was finished, the Eskimos had been coming down from the hill to visit us for cups of tea. Starting from the middle of the afternoon, they had been coming in groups of two and three. But as winter set in, they came in larger groups and stayed longer, so that their visits overlapped and the box house was often crowded.
The Eskimos, as if, off-puttingly, they dreaded the coming polar night as much as we did, hated to leave and became morose when told it was time for them to go back to their igloos on the hill.
Eventually, a “day” consisted of an hour-long twilight, the sun barely clearing the almost-flat horizon to the east before it began to set again.
We could not keep our minds from reacting as they normally would to the light conditions, could not help feeling that this was the dusk of a day in which the sun had run its course across the sky and now was setting. We did what people do at dusk: gave in to reflectiveness, to thoughts of the past and what the coming days would bring.
We could not, for a few hours every day, resist regarding the night as a welcome break between the days. And then we would brood on the fact, which always seemed to dawn on us like some disheartening surprise, that there were no days, only these recurrent dusks, with long stretches of darkness in between.
It was as if that distant line of light was all that remained of the past, of all things recorded or remembered, as if history and memory were fading and soon nothing would be left of them but darkness. This notion was not unique to me. “The light of other days,” Dr. Cook said once, quoting what he said was the first line of a poem in Palgrave’s treasury of English verse. He said he had first called the ebbing light that on the Redcliffe expedition.
One day the sun failed to clear the horizon, showing all but a fraction of itself, then sinking slowly. As the days went by, less and less of it showed: nine-tenths, three-quarters, a half, a third. It became a great red dome, then was crescent-shaped, then like a sickle, until soon all we saw when we dropped everything and watched was the barest skullcap-like rise of red, after the disappearance of which, on October 25, we had a few weeks of pale, zodiacal light until even that shrunk in from the sides and faded to a faintly luminous, amorphous glow, a faint candle encased in frosted glass, which we still referred to as the sun.
Long after that was gone, we kept a daily vigil for the sun, staring at the place where we had seen it last, waiting as if we believed that it would somehow rise out of season.
What would the Arctic night be like? The question nagged at me more and more as each day the twilight grew shorter. Nothing like Etah had been. That much was clear already.
Dr. Cook noticed my apprehension. “You will do fine, Devlin,” he said. “We will not be cold or hungry. There is only the darkness to contend with. We have our work to do, our books to read, a great adventure after Christmas to look forward to.”
Every day, he spoke some such words of encouragement to me. “You are by nature well suited to the Arctic night,” he said. “You are patient, even-tempered. You are not unused to loneliness.”
Dr. Cook assured me that we would not be cold inside the box house, or even outside it, though it would be some time before I knew from experience that this was true. Peary himself, as he gripped my hand, had assured me that I knew nothing of the Arctic from having spent one summer on a beach in southern Greenland. With a bed on the well-stocked Erik to sleep in every night, I had found Etah easier than summering on Signal Hill.
I thought of the ice trench—the grave that had been dug by the crew of the Belgica for the body of Lieutenant Danco, the only casualty of the South Pole expedition—dug to a depth of six feet, as though the ice, like earth, would stay forever fixed in that one place. It was not the cold that had killed Danco but the darkness.
I had never really tried to imagine myself as a member of a real polar expedition. Ice igloos. Makeshift huts like Redcliffe House, through every crack of which the wind would shriek, the wind that the members of the North Greenland expedition had wound up speaking to, screaming at, begging for mercy. I doubted that I would make it through months of darkness and confinement, that I would ever become what people thought I was, an Arctic explorer.
I thought of the state to which the Arctic had reduced a man as large and strong-minded as Peary. I remembered the colour of his face as he hung from my hand in the gap between the Windward and the Erik. How presumptuous I had been to think that I could endure what a man like Peary had barely endured.
I tried to resist these thoughts, but they weighed more and more on my mind. There was not much of a purposeful nature to do once the most severe cold set in, though Dr. Cook devised all sorts of outdoor games for us: stone-throwing contests; a version of marbles played with pebbles; three-legged races, in which we competed in pairs with the Eskimos, who found inactivity unbearable.
I told Dr. Cook of Captain Bartlett’s misgivings about starting a polar bid from so far south. A southern start would ensure us fresh supplies of meat through the winter, Dr. Cook said, as well as fresh dogs. It was true that our route would be four hundred miles longer than Peary’s, but it would take us through country where game was plentiful.
I made no attempt to disguise my scepticism.
“Try to imagine how you will feel when you see the sun again,” said Dr. Cook. “You can make yourself feel better simply by pretending to feel better. Remember how hot and bright it was the day we met, the day you stood outside my house for hours in the sun? Remember how good that glass of orange juice I gave you tasted?” I tried what he suggested, but remembering sunlit days only made me pine for them that much more.
There came upon me a reluctance to speak, the urge to hoard up words, as if by speaking I would lose something, as if, like everything else, language was in short supply and I had no intention of sharing my allotment of it with the others.
Dr. Cook devised a strict schedule to which he said Franke and I would have to adhere if we wished to avoid becoming ill. We rose at six, had breakfast at six-thirty, read or wrote until ten, when we had coffee, then went outside to perform exercises, a regimen of calisthenics that Dr. Cook had first prescribed for the ship-bound crew of the Belgica expedition. When the sky was cloudy, the darkness was absolute. If not for the lanterns we kept burning on either side of the box-house door, we could not have seen our footprints in the snow.
We had dinner at noon, after which came everyone’s favourite part of the day, when there was no work to do and the Eskimos came to visit in great numbers. They brought with them drums made from animal skins, which they played while they chanted and danced about the house. Thick smoke from the tallow candles, and from cigars and cigarettes, made the air of the box house almost unbreathable. The Eskimo dancers, women included, stripped to their waists and cavorted about until their torsos gleamed with sweat. Everyone drank tea and ate dried auk’s eggs, of which the Eskimos seemed to have an unending supply. The more loath we became to venture out into the cold, the more eager were the Eskimos to visit us.
There was sometimes a great deal of work done on these afternoons, when, as Dr. Cook put it, the box house became a “factory” for polar equipment and supplies. The Eskimos made pemmican for us with dried walrus meat. They cut it into six-inch strips, and hung it on hooks for three days, during which time all the moisture and the oil dripped from it into pans that littered the floor of the box house. When it was dried, we packed it in tins whose lids we tied in place with wire. Then the Eskimos hung another “crop.” In all, they made fifteen hundred pounds of it. For weeks, it hung on the walls of the box house like some aromatic form of decoration. When the last crop was taken down, the walls and hooks looked so conspicuously bare that we hung on them everything that was not nailed down.
And the Eskimos continued to bring fresh meat, hunting and trapping in the darkness as best they could. We would give them three biscuits for each eider duck they brought us. They hunted hare by moonlight with rifles they borrowed from us, then came back to the box house and gave us half of what they had killed.
Dr. Cook fashioned in the box house a little darkroom in which he developed his photographs, chinking all the cracks in the room with flour paste that when it dried was like cement. The Eskimos would line up to take their turn one by one in the darkroom with Dr. Cook, to see the red light and the magical emergence of the pictures on the submerged squares of paper. “Noweeo,” each of them said. “Noweeo,” we heard time and time again from inside the room.
They referred to Dr. Cook as Tatsesoah, the big medicine man. They remembered him from previous expeditions, including the North Greenland expedition. They recalled in far greater detail than he could what had happened on these expeditions, especially the illnesses of which he had cured them, for which they were no less grateful now than they had been fifteen years ago.
Because they regarded the past as almost coterminous with the present, they could not get past the idea that I had come to Greenland in search of my father, Francis Stead. My increasingly morose manner only reinforced this notion, and they were always disappointed to see how little consolation I seemed to derive from their company.
Each day, when we met, they would pantomime a search, looking about them as if they had mislaid some precious object, then sadly shake their heads. They were assuring me that years ago, when Francis Stead went missing, they did everything they could to find him.
I found myself resenting Dr. Cook for having conferred upon Rudolph Franke, a cook who had no experience in Arctic travel and whom he had known but a few weeks, the same honour it had taken me years to earn.
Franke was taller, more robust than I was. As his English was poor and he was by nature taciturn, we hardly ever spoke. He and Dr. Cook spoke German to each other, or rather, Dr. Cook issued orders in his broken German and Franke, mumbling a few words in reply, did what he thought he had been told.
I wondered if it was because he doubted me that Dr. Cook had invited Franke to stay behind. It seemed possible that from the moment we met, he had been disappointed with me but had kept this hidden to spare my feelings. He might merely have been going through the motions of making me an explorer because he did not want to break his promise to me. I felt as if Franke had usurped my place. Perhaps Franke had known about the polar bid before the ship left Gloucester. He was, like Dr. Cook, a German from Brooklyn. Dr. Cook might have known him for quite some time. I could not resist such absurd speculation.
Fighting my darkness-induced doubts, I went for weeks without speaking to poor Franke, if not for whom, it seemed—for such was my state of mind—Dr. Cook would not have doubted me.
I knew it was not unusual for explorers to send their subordinates back at some early stage of an expedition, beyond which, they believed, they would no longer have need of their assistance. Dr. Cook was perhaps planning to send me back and thereby save my life. I vowed that I would refuse to leave him, refuse to go back unless he went back.
At last, the winter storms that made it impossible for the Eskimos to venture even as far from their igloos as the box house set in. We no longer had visitors, were no longer able to go outside to do our exercises in the darkness.
Lying there in my warm sleeping bag, I felt ridiculously unsuited for a polar expedition, deserving of being left behind. Dr. Cook, I was convinced, had detected in me some fundamental weakness, some crucial flaw, some remnant of the Stead boy, all traces of whom I thought I had shed long ago.
All day and all night long, there was no sound from outside but the roaring of the wind and, occasionally, that of the Eskimo dogs, which, having picked up the scent of the pemmican, came down from the hill, climbed up onto the roof and tried relentlessly to claw their way through the turf, pummelling in silence, as if they believed that if they did not bark we would not notice them. When Dr. Cook threw what meat he thought we could spare outside, they went away for a while. Soon, it was simply to make him throw out some meat that they clawed at the roof, making a few perfunctory scratches at the turf, then jumping down to wait outside the door for their reward.
I felt a constant weariness, a chronic urge to sleep that I saw no reason to resist, it being warm and safe inside my sleeping bag, which I left less and less often, despite the urging of Dr. Cook. Other days, after sleepless nights, I could neither get to sleep nor summon up the will to leave my sleeping bag. I lay in my bunk with my eyes closed, my mind racing as if energy was being diverted to it from my body. Sometimes, with Franke’s help, Dr. Cook would stand me up, so that the sleeping bag fell about my feet. Then they would walk me around the box house until I was fully awake and Dr. Cook would assign me some task, like planing the runners of the sled he was making or keeping the stove supplied with coal.
But the length of our confinement took its toll on Dr. Cook and Franke as well, and soon they were making only token efforts to keep me from sleeping all the time.
In early December, when there was a lull in the weather, Dr. Cook decided to take a journey in the darkness to test the sledges and snowshoes he had made. He told us he would be back in two weeks. Several days after he left, I fell into a fever from which I did not fully emerge until long after he returned.
I dreamed that I was back in the Dakota; that Dr. Cook had not taken me with him on this expedition; that I was waiting for him to come back from the Arctic, waiting to hear if he was still alive, waiting for a letter from him. I felt as I had years ago, when, because he was on some expedition, it had been months since his last letter and there was no telling when or if the next one would arrive.
I dreamed that he had written to me from Etah just as he had written to Mrs. Cook, explaining why it had been necessary to mislead me. Here I was, once again, being written to by this man with no way to write him back, no way to ask him what the real meaning of his words might be. I had no doubt that when I next heard from him, it would be by letter.
I awoke momentarily from the fever to find Dr. Cook taking my pulse, his hand holding my wrist. “When did you get back?” I said. He smiled at me but either did not speak or said things I could not hear. The next time I came to, I was sitting up. Franke had his hands on my shoulders, holding me in place, while Dr. Cook moved his stethoscope about my bare back.
I returned to lucidity for good on Boxing Day. “The midnight of winter passed two days ago, Devlin,” said Dr. Cook. “The sun is on its way back.”
The worst of the storms had passed. We were able to go outside again. I knew we would leave for the pole in February, which meant that I had a little more than a month to recover from my illness.
I tried so hard to make myself a model expeditionary, performing more than my share of tasks, continuing my calisthenics long after Franke and Dr. Cook had finished theirs, that Dr. Cook warned me I was risking a relapse.
We saw, for a few minutes each morning in the east, a Milky Way–like cloud of light that Dr. Cook said was the first sign of the sun.
“There will not be sufficient food for three of us,” Dr. Cook said. I had been expecting him to say some such thing for weeks. I felt fully recovered from my illness, but I knew that, having seen me reduced to such a state so early in the expedition, Dr. Cook had to have grave doubts about my ability to survive a bid for the pole. At the very best, he had to think I would impede his progress and ensure the failure of the expedition.
He smiled at me—smiled, I thought, as if to say that he knew what a disappointment it would be for me to be left behind, but he hoped I would understand why it was necessary that he and Franke proceed without me, and he believed that I would receive the bad news gracefully, such was my nature. I prepared myself.
“Franke will not be going with us to the pole,” he said.
I threw my arms around him and hugged him and danced about in imitation of the Eskimos.
Dr. Cook told me that he had known from the moment he invited him to stay behind with us at Etah that he would send Rudolph Franke back long before we had reached our goal or turned back ourselves.
“We needed his help to build the box house, and I knew we would be grateful for the company of an extra man, a man from Brooklyn, during the Arctic night. That might sound ruthless, but I told him from the start that at some point I might send him back.”
Dr. Cook told Franke of his decision after the sun returned. They spoke to each other in German, Franke gesticulating at me, clearly saying that it was unfair of Dr. Cook to send him back and take instead the illness-prone man both of them had been tending to all winter.
After arguing for days with Dr. Cook—who never raised his voice but simply told him that someone needed to stay behind to guard the box house and its contents—Franke finally relented.