Dead Water (14 page)

Halstad agrees: ‘There are more rescuers pulling other rescuers out of trouble than there are teams heading for the Red Tent. So,’ he turns to his companion, ‘Captain Dalebø, sir: are you going to tell him about our brilliant plan or am I?’

Halstad loves drawing attention to Dalebø: it is so easy to throw the old sod out of his stride. Dalebø stares into his coffee cup. ‘Well,’ he says, put on the spot. ‘Well. It’s like this.’

Then Halstad, who cannot contain his excitement a moment longer: ‘Hey ho! Listen to this! We’re off to get ourselves killed!’

At 4.10 a.m. on 18 June, a crew hired among the miners at King’s Bay brings the
Cormorant
into Beverly Sound, overladen with equipment, impossibly cramped, rowdy with dogs.

Eric Moyse, Peder Halstad and Tor Dalebø disembark and spend the evening loading their sleds. With the dogs in harness they set off, shortly after 1.00 a.m. on 19 June. The sky is clear. The sun, low in the west, casts their shadows before them across the snow.

The survivors of the
Italia
disaster have split into two. Engineer Giovanni Bonfanti and meteorologist Lothar Eling are trying to walk off the ice. They are heading for the island of Foyn. Dalebø’s plan is to rendezvous with Bonfanti and Eling on Foyn. Dalebø, Peder and Eric will walk from Cape North as far as Cape Platen. From there they’ll take their chances on the frozen, crevasse-riddled waters of Dove Bay. Nearby, barely half a day’s trek away, lies another beach, the starting point for an even more daunting sea crossing: a journey on churning pack ice all the way north to barren Foyn and their hoped-for rendezvous.

The landscape changes subtly as they advance. The accretion of ice on a succession of low peaks, the angle and extent of bare scree, the texture of the snow: all these things, to the sensitive eye, reveal the nature and strength of that other, invisible territory of winds and weather which sculpts, with a slow and cruel hand, the solid world, and will outlast it.

Fourteen hours in, their difficulties begin. Eric is making tea when he notices Peder Halstad, goggles off, eyes screwed shut, pinching the bridge of his nose with an ungloved hand. ‘What’s up?’

Halstad shakes his head. He fumbles the goggles back over his face and adjusts his mittens.

Dalebø takes his cup from Eric and gives a little shake of his head: let it go. ‘One more run and the dogs’ll need feeding. Then we may as well call it a day.’

It is early afternoon. Dalebø wants them resting within the hour, and on the move again by midnight. Nights under such a sky, at such a season, can be murky, but the fractional drop in night-time temperature improves the snow under their runners.

Dalebø, so composed, so taciturn, becomes a different man once you get him inside a tent: a windmill of ineffectual fuss. He has surrounded himself with junk: a compass, a penknife, chocolate bars, spare bootlaces, a whistle, silk socks, pencils. He is taking things out of his pockets and putting them into other pockets, seemingly at random. Eric taps a finger to the corner of his eye. Dalebø understands. ‘Let’s get a good sleep,’ he says.

Halstad keeps his goggles on. He turns on his side, away from his companions. He is doing everything right. If his eyes are troubling him, then rest is the only cure. There’s no point fussing over him.

An hour before they are due to rise Halstad sits up, struggling with the toggle of his sleeping bag. He gets a hand free and pulls off his goggles and presses his hands over his face.

‘Peder?’

‘
Fuck
.’

Dalebø sits up, arms still pinned inside his bag, stiff and symmetrical as a corpse rising from an open coffin. Eric hides a smile.

‘It’s not fucking funny.’

Sharp pains are shooting through Peder’s eyeballs. The snow-glare has burnt his corneas.

For another half-day, from Cape Wrede to Cape Platen, Peder Halstad struggles to keep up, over slushy snow that has refrozen, forming treacherous crusts. His vision has begun to darken. He can go no further.

It is about eight in the morning: the snow already has an edge of rot about it and the sleds’ runners are bogging down.

‘Go on,’ Halstad insists.

‘That’s all very well.’ Dalebø is angry with himself for bringing Halstad this far. ‘We’re hardly going to leave you out here alone on the ice, silly sod.’

‘Why not?’ Halstad, slumped against his sled, looks up at them with eyes made huge and black and blind by snow goggles. He still has to shade his eyes from the sun. ‘I know what I’m doing. In a day or two my eyes will be better and I’ll walk out.’

His plan is to return to Cape North and wait for a boat. There are enough of them involved in the rescue effort: he is sure to be picked up. It is a good plan – assuming he sticks to it.

Eric hunkers down beside him. ‘You can’t follow us.’

Halstad laughs.

‘You mustn’t try to catch up with us.’

‘Do you take me for a complete fool? Well, I won’t follow you.’ ‘Good.’

‘Bloody sod, you, in fact.’

Eric grins: ‘That’s the spirit.’

Even so, he does not entirely trust Halstad’s promise. Halstad is a gifted outdoorsman but he has come late to the discipline. He lacks a northerner’s caution.

A couple of hours later, Peder Halstad is settled comfortably in his bivouac, surrounded by two weeks’ supplies. They have rearranged the sleds, overloading the larger ones so as to leave Halstad with a burden he can pull by hand. ‘Even when you’re better, keep wearing your goggles when you sleep,’ Dalebø warns him when they are ready to leave. He gives Halstad the rifle. ‘Try not to blow your foot off.’

Halstad makes a facetious salute.

Eric and Dalebø pitch camp on Cape Platen and rise again at 9 p.m. to begin their crossing of Dove Bay.

Wave action and the swirling currents of the bay have shattered the ice field. The danger is not so much open water – there is very little of that – but the amount of time it takes them to negotiate mazes of piled ice. The weather is slowly deteriorating: by mid-morning there are snow flurries. They are halfway across the bay when a violent front moves over them, bringing squalls that reduce visibility to a few feet. Unable to progress, Eric and Dalebø secure the dogs and hunker down in the shelter of jagged blocks of ice.

For two days they lie trapped, listening as the storm wears the dogs down to a frenzy. By the time the storm has passed one dog has been mauled to death, another has had her leg broken, and a third is down with a fever. The pistol is to hand but Dalebø seems dissatisfied: he checks and rechecks the breach. Saying nothing, Eric takes the gun from him. Like most lifelong hunters, Dalebø has grown sentimental with age.

Eric leads the casualties away and shoots them cleanly in the head.

On the morning of 29 June, Eric Moyse and Tor Dalebø complete their crossing of Dove Bay. After their enforced bivouac on the pack ice they have no need of their planned half-day’s rest. Instead, they press on, over the headland, steadying the overburdened sled as the dogs struggle through snow that leaves their coats suspiciously wet.

Having seen to their dogs and erected their tent, the two men climb a rocky promontory of Cape Bruun. There they sit and smoke, contemplating the nightmare to which their efforts have brought them. The pack is shattered like a window pane. You could be slipping and staggering from one platform to another for hours and never venture more than a stone’s throw from your starting point.

The next day Dalebø and Eric repack their gear and erect a snow cairn over the items they intend to abandon. It is not likely they will be back this way and any further retreat on foot is not even an option since, following the storm, the ice on Dove Bay will be dangerously rotten. Once on the pack and headed for Foyn, they are committed. Boats and planes involved in the rescue attempt will be using Foyn for their navigation and will spot them there.

The rest of the day they spend making a desultory survey of the coast. Great blocks of ice have been cast up like ships upon the lichenous rocks. The blocks, in their scale and disarray, are an absolute barrier. Only where rip tides keep the surface ice thin and fragile is there any hope of reaching the ice pack.

‘We will have to chance our luck where we began,’ says Dalebø, even more morose than usual. In the golden overcast that serves here for night, the men strike camp, harness the dogs, and head for a precariously thin ice platform, jammed by the tide between lines of rocks. They detach the dogs and wrestle the sled, foot by foot, on to and across the cambered ice. On its seaward side the waves are wedging another small berg under the lip of the platform. The drop from one block to the other is, even at the peak of a swell, a good three feet. When the waves withdraw the block slides away another foot or two and grinds the shingle beneath it: a dull sound.

To negotiate a drop of that sort they should first unload the sled, but there is no time: the pull of the water is scraping the platform past them even as they stand debating their next move. Eric waits for Dalebø to say something. Finally Dalebø turns and shoots Eric an exasperated look.

‘What?’

Dalebø mutters something and then, without warning, jumps. He lands without difficulty, knees bent, feet apart, on the further block, which is just now grounded on the shelving beach. The waters advance, lifting the block off the gravel and Dalebø turns, arms outstretched for balance as the berg tips, accommodating his weight. He rises into Eric’s view – shoulders, chest, hips – as the block rises. At the top of the cycle he leans forward and takes hold of the sled. Whether he means to pull the sled, or simply to steady himself, is unclear – but suddenly the rip causes Dalebø’s berg to swing and Dalebø, still clinging to the sled, brings it bearing down on top of him. He steps aside, slips, and falls on his backside. The sled lands beside him. Dalebø cries out and sits up, reaching for his foot.

Eric, furious, shouts an obscenity. Dalebø gets to his feet, limping. A swell lifts Eric’s block off the shingle. A couple of dull collisions shake the platform, and Eric jumps.

His timing is bad: the berg is rising to meet him and he lands heavily, out of balance. He keeps his footing, but then the dogs make up their minds to follow him. They knock him back against the sled. There is a deep, resonant crack and the ice rocks beneath him. Dalebø shouts a warning, and the platform shears.

One dog tumbles into the water, then another. Eric crawls to the edge of the ice. He reaches into the water, fishing for fur, a bit of leash, something to grab on to.

‘For Christ’s sake!’

Eric glances up. Dalebø is standing on the other side of the crack with their sled and all their supplies. The gap widens. Eric gets to his feet. Dalebø steadies himself with his axe, pressing hard upon the shaft while he extends his other hand. With a puff of splinters, the ice under Dalebø’s axe explodes and Dalebø staggers. All his weight comes down on his injured foot and he gapes in silent agony.

Dalebø’s berg moves toward deeper water and begins to tilt. The sled slides towards the water and Dalebø after it, slithering head-first down the ice as the berg rolls. Dalebø’s left hand paddles frantically for the axe leashed to his wrist. He gets hold of the leash. The axe slithers towards him, past him, and into the water. Dalebø follows.

Seawater slops over Eric’s knees and he falls, his gloved fingers digging for purchase on the ice. The platform steadies. The surviving dogs dance round each other in futile circles. The ones in the water are silent, beyond panic. They pull each other down into the freezing water. Eric uses his axe to fish a leash out of the water. He yanks a struggling dog towards him. The dog bites his sleeve, hangs on, and drags him in.

He flounders. He kicks something. He thinks at first it is a dog. Then he finds his footing. He stands. The water laps at his chest.

There is a rock under the water. A large, flat rock. He is standing on a rock and the water comes up to his chest. A big wave comes in and he loses his footing. The wave goes out and here he is again, on the rock. He turns around. He is about ten metres away from the beach. He laughs. ‘Tor!’

He looks about him. There is open water all around. The bergs and ice plates they had meant to ride have vanished, drawn away as swiftly as flats in a theatre. The dogs are paddling to shore.

‘Tor!’

The sled is bobbing in the water, half-submerged. Eric wades out to it. He has to move quickly, before his shock falls off him and he begins to freeze. His skin is already burning with the cold. He spots the end of a rope. He grabs it and pulls. The lashing around the sled unravels. A sleeping bag bobs to the surface of the water. The sled, losing buoyancy, sinks deeper into the waves. Eric paddles frantically over to the sled. He takes hold of it and the combined weight of sled and man submerges both. He slaps his way back to the surface and struggles there, the water suddenly deep, bottomless. ‘Tor, damn you!’

He tows the sled to shore. By the time his feet touch shingle, he feels as though he is walking on knives. He strips and hobbles up and down the beach, forcing the blood around his body, tottering on legs that are as toneless as columns of tinned meat. He unloads the sled, hurling equipment carelessly up the beach. Ham-fisted, he twists and punches his way into dry clothes. Once the sled is light enough to manoeuvre he heaves it a couple of feet up the beach and anchors it with stones.

He huddles with the dogs on the shingle and, screwing up his eyes, hunts for his companion. There is a break in the cloud cover. Sunlight hits the water. The sea erupts in blue fire. The fire winds itself into a snake. The snake curls around him and strikes randomly at the beach, as though it too is hunting for Tor Dalebø, desperately, among the empty spaces that are even now invading the peripheries of Eric’s vision. Eric shuts his eyes against the hallucination, the glare, the blind-spot dark that’s swallowing his sight. His snow goggles. That’s all this is.

His snow goggles.

He has lost his snow goggles.

Eric’s best hope is to head for Foyn, holding out there long enough for the pack to disintegrate, permitting a rescue by boat or seaplane.