CHAPTER 21

The Eskimo settlement was a disappointment to all who had expected the kind of revel which Mowrey had so often described. True, no one was there to object to the enlisted men coming ashore, but there was nothing to see except about a dozen tiny sod huts surrounded by dog droppings, a litter of bones, racks for the drying of fish, and rusty tin cans. Paul was surprised to see how healthy, almost spiffy the people looked in britches of white bearskin and a variety of furry jackets. These Eskimos were of purer blood than those farther south. Their faces were the color of copper, and they were far more reserved as they greeted the men from the ship. They laughed with pleasure only when they saw the crates of dried fish for the dogs which the sailors carried from the whaleboat.

“Where the hell are their damn dogs?” Guns asked, looking around in bewilderment.

None of the Eskimos spoke any English, but with gestures they caused Paul to understand that most of the able-bodied people had gone off hunting and fishing with the dogs, and many dogs had died or been killed for lack of food. Only old people, children and two young mothers with babies were left in the settlement, and they soon withdrew shyly into their huts when they saw that more boatloads of men were landing.

Guns insisted upon trying to enter one of the huts. When Paul ordered him to let the Eskimos alone, the big gunner’s mate said, “Damn, sir. I been dreaming of ping-ping ever since we left Boston. Now I got a chance for some, are you going to stop me?”

“Christ, Guns, those women are nursing babies.”

“I like that. If they don’t want me, I bet one of the old women will.”

“Forget it. Take the boat back and get some beer. Anybody feel like a baseball game?”

Instead of reveling with the Eskimos, the men played baseball, drank beer and orange cordial. Mowrey did not come ashore at all. Nathan went back to the ship and returned with cans of corned beef, Vienna sausage and tea for the Eskimos. He was the only one who saw the inside of their sod huts.

“I can’t believe it,” he said to Paul later. “Those huts are about eight feet by six feet, and I can’t even stand up in there. They’ve glued old newspapers and magazines all over the walls, maybe for insulation, maybe for decoration. Each hut had a galvanized tin tub full of rotting seal meat, guts and all. The only heat and light came from a whale-oil lamp. The children are beautiful and so are the women in their way, but so gentle and scared that only a real bastard would bother them.”

“Maybe it was different when Mowrey was young.”

“Or maybe he dreamed up his own Greenland.”

Mowrey had said he would follow the men to the beach when the boat came back, but after studying the settlement through the binoculars, he retired to his bunk and his Southern Comfort.

After the deck force beat the black gang and radiomen at baseball and the last of the beer was consumed, the crew came back aboard, picked up the boat, and Mowrey headed for Upernavik. Although they only had a hundred miles to go, the ice had been jammed into a closely compressed ring around the bay and they had to fight their way out, making only about twelve miles the first day.

On the second day after leaving the Eskimo settlement, Nathan picked up a message from the Nanmak to Commander GreenPat. It was longer than those terse sentences which Hansen usually sent to avoid radio direction finders, and used the most secret cypher, instead of the ordinary operational codes. Nathan expected to find dramatic news and was startled when these words were spelled out on his stripboard:

“My exec has medical problem. Head of penis swelling to twice normal. Fiery red. He has not been circumcised. He indignantly rules out possibility of venereal disease. Has fever of one hundred and two. Please contact physician and advise. Hansen.”

Sparks read the message over Nathan’s shoulder, and it wasn’t long before the whole crew was talking about the penis of the Nanmak’s executive officer. Amateur diagnoses ran the gamut from syphilis to cancer. Sparks put a copy of the message on the bulletin board in the forecastle, where baseball scores were usually posted, and everyone speculated about the treatment the base physicians would recommend.

Paul remembered the executive officer of the Nanmak with considerable distaste, but no one deserved to have his penis catch fire while chasing German icebreakers. He read the base doctor’s reply, which came an hour later, with horror.

“Your patient sounds as though he has infected foreskin. Not dangerous in itself but can lead to complications. Suggest soaking in warm water and bandaging with vaseline. Take sulfa as described on bottle to combat infection. If infection continues and worsens it may be necessary to lance or in effect perform circumcision. This not difficult but painful for patient. Do you have full supply of morphine in your medical chest? Base doctor, GreenPat.”

“My God, what if he doesn’t have morphine?” Guns asked. “In that ice pack there’s no way they could get the man off or take a doctor to him. They’d just have to slice the guy’s pecker cold.”

Nathan and Sparks stayed in the radio shack and kept twirling the dials to get Hansen’s answer, but none came. There was a great deal of static which sounded curiously like the roar of a wildly applauding audience.

During the following day and the next, Nathan still could not get any messages from the Nanmak.

“Maybe he’s been sending on some frequency that we aren’t covering,” he said.

“Hell,” Sparks replied, “they got exactly the same equipment we have.”

Soon they could hear GreenPat trying to contact the Nanmak. “CQ, CQ, CQ,” the base operator tapped out monotonously, following with the trawler’s call letters, DBPH, which he also repeated endlessly. After twenty-four hours, the radio telegraph was supplemented by a calm, disembodied voice on a higher frequency. Sounding almost bored, the high male voice repeated, “CQ, CQ, Dog Baker Pilot Hypo, do you read me?”

There was no answer but the strange roar of the heavens.

“His radio must have gone out,” Nathan said.

“Maybe their generator quit.”

“Both the main and the auxiliary?”

No one made any answer to this. At dinner in the forecastle that night the men ate in silence.

Soon GreenPat began sending signals to all ships near Cape Farewell and the east coast of Greenland to relay his messages to Dog Baker Pilot Hypo. The night was alive with messages from ships saying they were complying, but no word came from the Nanmak.

In the days that followed the men of the Arluk crowded around the open door of the radio shack when they were not on watch. Nathan and Sparks had some news to report. Three PBY seaplanes were searching the area where the Nanmak had last reported herself, but there was heavy fog and they could see nothing.

“I bet they send us up to join the search,” Guns said excitedly. “What do you think, Mr. Schuman?”

“Maybe.”

“Why can’t we volunteer?” Nathan asked.

“They’ll let us know if they want us,” Paul said, and went to tell the captain of the latest developments.

“Keep me informed,” Mowrey said thickly, as he had after each of Paul’s news bulletins. He was still lying in his bunk, making a halfhearted attempt to conceal a glass he was holding under the edge of his blanket. For the first time he looked and sounded too drunk to be fully aware of what was happening. Paul hesitated.

“Captain, are you all right?”

“Fine, fine, fine.”

“What do you think has happened to the Nanmak?”

“Maybe Wally is playing possum. Maybe he’s onto the Kraut and wants to keep radio silence.”

Mowrey sighed, brought his glass into the open and sipped from it. “Or maybe he’s just gone missing,” he continued. “Wouldn’t be the first.”

“Do you think the Germans got him?”

Mowrey leaned over, took a bottle from the drawer under his bunk, and filled his glass before answering.

“There’s lots of ways for a ship to go missing,” he said with a sigh. “It could be fire or a magazine explosion. The ice could have closed in on him fast and hard, or a big berg could have turned over near him, squashing him. Sometimes a berg will have a big ice shelf under the water. When it turns over, it can lift a ship right up in the air and drop it. That’s been known to happen.”

“But Hansen knows the ice.”

“There are a lot of floating mines on the east coast. They drift over from Europe. A plane could have got him, one of theirs or one of ours. Plenty of our fly-boys are trigger-happy. Or he could have found his Kraut weather ship.”

Perhaps Hansen had blundered right onto a big German icebreaker in the fog, Paul thought. At first the enemy ship must have looked like an iceberg in the gloom ahead. Then it would materialize into the dreaded shape, the big guns slowly turning toward them.

“Do you think they’ll send us up after him?” Paul asked.

“They’ll throw everything bigger and nearer in first. That’s a job for some of the fast new cutters.” There was a moment of silence while Mowrey drained his glass. “Somebody will have to replace Hansen’s ship,” he said, allowing his head to fall back on the pillow. “That sure as hell could be us.”

Gradually the men of the Arluk began to assume that their sister ship had been lost. They gathered in small groups and talked in whispers like people at a funeral. Only Guns was brash enough to try to make a joke about it.

“Anyway, I bet that bastard’s prick ain’t hurting him now. He probably was one man who was glad to go.”

Nobody laughed and the men shot such angry glances at Guns that the big bearded man hurried to the forecastle for coffee.

It seemed strange to continue on to Upernavik as though nothing had happened, even stranger that nothing changed visibly all around them. The unsleeping sun still oscillated in its narrow arc overhead. The silent city of the ice floe spread all around them, glittering in many pastel colors, much as it probably was on the east coast, though Paul had heard that the ice was more closely packed there, and apparently there was more fog.

Upernavik was another neat little Danish colony with tiny wooden houses painted red and white. Mowrey stood on the bridge while Paul brought the ship alongside a wharf, but returned to his bunk as soon as the mooring lines were out.

“You go ashore and pay the courtesy visit,” he said. “I don’t feel like it.”

Before Paul dressed to go ashore, a short, portly old Dane in a fur parka came aboard. He looked rather like Santa Claus and his stern expression appeared out of place.

“Please to unload your cargo as soon as possible, and please to anchor out in the harbor if you wish to stay here. No one but the captain is to be allowed ashore.”

“I guess you got the word from your friends at Godhavn,” Paul said.

“We just want no trouble. Are you the captain?”

“I’m the executive officer. The captain is not feeling well.”

“Then please to come to dinner to my house tonight. I am sorry we cannot accommodate the others.”

“I understand. I’ll be too busy to go to dinner. We’ll just unload and get out of here.”

While they were discharging cargo, Nathan informed GreenPat that they were at Upernavik and requested further orders. He hoped they would be told to go to the east coast, but instead GreenPat answered, “Wait at Upernavik until further notice. Arrangements being made for you to load Danish personnel and materials for establishment of weather base at Thule.”

About half the crew appeared glad for this chance to remain out of trouble, and half were disappointed.

“I bet they just want us to finish up here before sending us to take the place of the Nanmak,” Guns said to Paul.

“Maybe,” Paul said. “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

After piling a heap of supplies on the wharf, Paul anchored the ship in the harbor without waiting for the Eskimo women to carry the stuff to the warehouses. The Danes’ booze was of course missing from their consignment. If they had been more hospitable, he might have given them some of the sweet stuff, but to hell with them.

Ever since hearing about the loss of the Nanmak, everyone aboard the ship had been in a bad mood. The enlisted men fished, and followed radio reports of the fruitless efforts of the big Coast Guard cutters and the planes which were searching for the Nanmak. The days dragged into weeks.

“Maybe all those cutters and planes up there will flush out the Germans,” Paul said to Mowrey.

Mowrey was still in his bunk and his eyes looked red, vacant and swollen. He had dropped and broken the last of his dark glasses.

“They won’t find the German,” he said in a newly feeble voice. “Until the search is over, he’ll just hole up in the ice somewhere and keep radio silence. When the cats have gone, he’ll come out and play. He’ll be waiting for us.”

“You think then we’ll be sent up there?”

“They’ll have to replace the Nanmak. I have more experience than any of the other trawler skippers.”

“Why don’t they send us right away?”

“They won’t need us till the big cutters have got tired of looking, and I guess the fly-boys want their Thule weather station. Seeing we’re here …”

“Well, why don’t they get us going?”

“I don’t know, Yale. Do you still think I know everything?”

Some of the delay caused by the Danes who were to man the weather station came when they took a small boat off on some mysterious business of their own government, and their return was delayed by the ice. When they finally showed up in a husky little auxiliary ketch, they said there was no point in starting right away because heavy ice blocked the whole area. They asked Paul to bring the ship into the wharf, where they loaded a huge deck cargo of lumber for building the weather station and boxes of instruments and radio equipment. Two Eskimos who had been trained as carpenters were to accompany them.

It was August 3 when the Arluk finally left Upernavik, and she had not sailed more than thirty miles to the north before she became hopelessly stuck in the ice.

“Christ, if this doesn’t break up soon, we could be stuck here for the whole damn winter,” Mowrey said. “Pray for a hard north wind to break up this stuff.”

But for days the weather remained calm. Mowrey remained in his bunk and the men painted the ship. For lack of anything else to do, they even chipped the anchor chain and painted the links with red lead. The only diversion came from seals, which occasionally surfaced in cracks between the icebergs, and a big mother polar bear with a cub, which often could be seen circling the ship on the ice, jumping and swimming from one iceberg to another. Guns wanted to shoot them and ran to the 20-millimeter whenever they appeared, but the presence of the cub made most of the men protective, and they laughed him out of it.

“What do you want to do, Guns,” Sparks asked, “Paint a little white bear on the side of the bridge, the way the tin cans paint Jap flags for each plane they shoot down?”

Some of the men threw pieces of salt fish out on the ice for the bears, and before long the mother, leaving her cub safely behind, would rush up to grab these.

“If she gets hungry enough, she’ll come right aboard the ship, and then you better watch out,” Mowrey said from the wing of the bridge, where he was making a rare appearance. “It’s happened plenty of times. Guns, break out a Thompson gun and leave it on the bridge just in case.”

Nathan rarely left the radio shack, from which he reported with regret that no more attempts were being made to contact the Nanmak. The planes and the big Coast Guard cutters were sending in fewer reports of their search. Apparently they were already being ordered off on more urgent business.

At Mowrey’s direction, Nathan regularly reported their position and their lack of progress to GreenPat. Usually he got nothing but an acknowledgment, but on August 11, he was told to stand by and soon received a message for the Arluk. Guessing its contents, he decoded it with eager fingers.

“Arluk will discontinue efforts to reach Thule. Take Danes and materials for weather station back to Upernavik. Proceed to Narsarssuak Fjord immediately with all possible speed to refuel and proceed to east coast. There you will search for Nanmak and maintain regular patrol.”

“That’s it!” Nathan shouted. “We’re going to the east coast!”

“What are you cheering for?” Seth asked.

“Christ,” Mowrey said when Paul gave him the message. “Well, I guess there’s no help for it. Anyway, we ain’t going nowhere until we get some wind to break up this ice.”

It was strange to get such an order and still to be unable to budge. Guns and some of the deck force reacted by checking all the guns and oiling them. Some of the other men who had been most eager “to go where the action is” asked Paul if he could break out some booze for a celebration. When Paul went to the captain to ask him about this, he found that he had already celebrated or mourned so much that he refused to wake up for questions. Reflecting that once they broke out of the ice, they would probably have to sail thousands of miles before there was another chance for relaxation, Paul took some of the sweet liqueurs and helped Cookie to mix them with grapefruit juice to make a punch.

The party started merrily with songs and the harmonica on the well deck. First an argument and then a scuffle began between men who said they were eager for combat and others who said only a damn fool would want to go against a German icebreaker with a three-inch gun, but that stopped when Cookie refilled the big soup tureen which held the punch. At about eleven in the evening Paul went to the wardroom, where Nathan already slept. The sun was sinking almost to the horizon now, and the wardroom was surprisingly dark. Lying down, he quickly slept.

Paul was awakened three hours later by a blast of gunfire. Racing on deck, he saw Guns shooting the 20-millimeter at the polar bear and her cub, which were racing along the ridge of an iceberg about a hundred yards away. The tracer bullets were kicking up the ice just behind the cub. By the time Paul reached the gun deck, both the cub and the mother bear had collapsed, and the tracers continued to arch into the spreading red pools where they lay.

“Stop!” Paul kept shouting, but the steady gunfire deafened the marksman, and he did not stop until Paul clapped a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“I got ’em, I got ’em!” Guns shouted, and a drunken cheer came from the well deck.

“Get the hell to your bunk!” Paul said.

“What’s the matter with you? Boats said I could shoot.”

“I thought we needed a little target practice,” Boats said, slurring his words. “We got to be ready, don’t we, sir?”

Blasted from his sleep by the sound of gunfire, Mowrey groped his way to the bridge. “What the hell is going on?”

“Guns shot the bears.”

“Oh crap, is that all?” Trying to go back to his bunk, Mowrey stumbled, and Paul had to help him, straining to lift his heavy body.

Standing on the bridge, Paul watched, stomach turning, as the Eskimo carpenters scrambled out on the ice with a long line. When they had made that fast to the mother bear, the men winched her toward the ship. She left a long trail of blood behind her. When the Eskimos returned carrying the cub, they too were drenched with blood, and in the golden rays of the early morning sun, their hands and faces looked lurid. More lines were used to hang the bears from the mast, apparently in preparation for skinning.

Paul went to the stern and stood looking out over the endless jumble of ice castles, from the tops of which a rising wind was blowing snow spume. If that wind kept increasing, it wouldn’t be long before the ice pack broke up and freed them. How long would it take them to get to the east coast, and what were the chances that the Germans who probably had sunk the Nanmak were waiting for them? Then there might be more blood on the ice.

Suddenly Paul suffered from a dizzying sense of unreality. He was going to go hunting a German icebreaker, and all the Arluk had was a three-inch gun, two twenty-millimeters and a drunk skipper. Since Mowrey appeared to be sinking lower and lower every day, Paul would, in effect, be in command. Neither he nor his two sober officers really were more than hopeless amateurs when it came to fighting battles in the Arctic. How long could they expect to last?

Shaking his head, as though to clear it after a bad dream, Paul went back to his bunk. For what seemed many hours he lay there, his whole body too tense for sleep. The sound of a lot of shouting came from the well deck. For a while it quieted, but suddenly it reached a crescendo. Leaping from his bunk, Paul ran to the bridge, followed closely by Nathan. They did not have to ask what was happening. The mother bear had been skinned and her great red body lay in a pool of blood on the deck. On top of it Guns was pumping while a ring of men cheered.

“Jeez, I never thought I’d see a man fuck a bear,” Boats said.

Nathan went to the rail, where he was sick. Paul went to the bridge and pushed the button which sounded the general alarm. Picking up the megaphone he returned to the gun deck.

“Now this is a fire drill! Break out the hoses and wash down those decks. Wash Guns down too if he stays there. If you don’t get moving, I’m going to get a hose and wash you all down myself.”

The men scrambled to their fire stations, and Guns, covered with blood, bolted for the forecastle. Soon the fire hoses were washing off the decks and causing the scuppers to run red with blood.

“Cookie, get two men to help you hack what meat you can use off that carcass. Then I want the rest thrown overboard, Boats, all of it.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Within an hour the decks were clean and there was no sign of the bears except red streaks on the topsides of the ship under the scuppers.

“Secure from fire drill,” Paul said.

Suddenly the decks were strangely quiet. All the men except those on watch on the bridge had disappeared.

“What are you going to do to Guns?” Nathan asked.

“Take the bastard to war, I guess. Maybe he’s the only one of us who’s really made for it.”