Ice Drift (9780547540610) (14 page)

"I know," Alika said.

Sulu said, "I got very sick and could have died. I fell into the water. Alika and Jamka got me out."

Katann said, "Let's hope you never have to ride a floe again."

Sulu said, "I never will."

 

Alika and Sulu soon looked around Amadjuak, a collection of one-room sod-stone-and-sealskin houses, smaller than Nunatak. The barren rocky coastal ground was much the same as in Nunatak, with patches of snow here and there this time of year.

In the late afternoon of the boys' second day in the village, the villagers gathered outside Katann's dwelling to hear Alika tell about the epic voyage of the
Polar Star.
Despite having to stand in the spring cold, they listened raptly to every word.

At supper Alika asked Katann how far he thought they might be from Nunatak.

Katann answered, "How far up Greenland do you think it is?"

"Very far. In the winter, we can walk from Nunatak across the ice to Greenland. I've been told it's fifteen
kahloona
miles over there."

Katann said, "It's only a guess, but I'd say Nunatak is eight hundred white-man miles. You can never make it, summer by kayak or winter by sledge. There are too many bays, inlets, and rivers to cross."

"We'll never see home again," Alika said in despair.

Sulu cried out, "What did you say?"

"But maybe you will see home again," Katann said. "There's an American ship, the
Resolute,
that will be stopping here. It came here last summer on a survey. It is the sister ship to the
Reliance
that was wrecked far up north."

"The
Reliance
was near us!" Alika said. "Trying to reach the North Pole."

"You might talk the captain into taking you along," Katann said.

"I'll try. Oh, I'll try," Alika said.

"Meanwhile, you can help me hunt and fish. You can use Uming's kayak," Katann said.

The next three months went slowly, but Alika stayed busy helping Katann hunt and fish. Sulu went out with Uming almost every day, with Meeka in a pouch on Uming's back, to fish for char, and both Alika and Sulu went out on the summer tundra to help gather food for the winter. It was almost the same as being in Nunatak.

At last, in early July, the expedition ship
Resolute,
looking almost exactly like the
Reliance,
anchored off the village. Alika used Uming's kayak to paddle out, and he tied up at the gangway, hoping to talk to the Inuit dog handlers. He remembered that the
Reliance
had sixty huskies aboard, and he could hear the
Resolute'
s dogs howling in their pens.

A white man looked down on him from the main deck, saw them, and disappeared for a few minutes. Then an Inuit dog handler appeared at the top of the gangway and asked Alika what he wanted.

"I need to go to Nunatak with my brother and our dog!" Alika shouted up.

"This is not a passenger ship!" the Inuit shouted back.

"But Nunatak is on your way to the North Pole!" Alika yelled, over the howling dogs.

"You have to ask the captain!" the Inuit shouted down.

"We must go with you!" Alika shouted up. "Nunatak is my home."

"I've never heard of it! Come on up here."

Alika climbed the gangway and said, "Please help us."

The dog handler asked, "Why?"

Alika told him part of what had happened, and the handler relented. "All right, I'll take you to the chief mate. He doesn't understand Inuit. I speak a little English."

"I can help you with your dogs," Alika said.

The middle-aged handler drew in a breath, shook his head saying, "Come with me."

Alika followed him to the chief mate's cabin and listened as the mate and the Inuit talked, the white man glancing at Alika. Finally, the dog handler shrugged.

"My name is Kangio," said the Inuit. "You and your brother can sleep with the dogs. Once we get under way, they'll shut up except before they eat. You also have to work."

Alika followed him back to the gangway.

Alika paddled back to shore as quickly as possible. He couldn't wait to get back to Katann's house to tell Sulu.

"That ship will take us home!" Alika called to his brother.

Sulu shrieked with joy. "When?"

"In a few days."

Sulu jumped up and down and hugged his brother.

Alika said, "You may have to work."

"I don't care. Just so we can go home."

Katann and Uming beamed.

 

The morning of the day the
Resolute
steamed away, Alika and Sulu went about thanking the villagers, especially Katann and Uming, for all they'd done. Then they boarded the exploration ship with Jamka. It was headed to Greenland to top off its coal bunkers and then would proceed north up the strait.

Alika had never been aboard a ship, aside from the wrecked
Reliance.
He'd never been around talking and laughing
kabloona
sailors, men who seemed to enjoy their work. He'd never felt the amazing power of a steam engine that made a whole ship shake. He'd never gone belowdecks to see burning coal beneath something Kangio called a boiler. He'd never stood at the bow of a ship as the water rushed by, or at the stern, where the water became a churning white trail.

Alika was working with the deck gang, polishing brass and scrubbing the wooden decks until they gleamed. He said to Sulu, "Can you believe all this?"

Sulu replied, "I can't."

Sulu was working in the ship's kitchen, peeling potatoes and washing dishes, pots, and pans. Sulu had never gone aboard the
Reliance.
It had already been dismantled by the time he was born.

On the fifth day of their voyage, feeling the sea wind on his face, Alika decided he would become a sailor, not a hunter.

Sulu said, "I don't blame you."

Alika knew his papa and mama would be disappointed, but it was his life to live. Sailors went around the world, and what a world there was to see, Kangio had said. Alika wanted to go where there was sunlight every day.

He'd go home for a while, hunt for a while, but sooner or later, he'd find a way to become a sailor, perhaps even on the
Resolute
when it returned from trying to reach the North Pole.

Alika warned Sulu that their papa and mama might not be in Nunatak when they arrived. It was almost August, and all the families would be out on the tundra, hunting, fishing, gathering eggs and plants and all the other food necessities needed for winter. The summer departure from the villages and camps had been happening for centuries, and there was no reason that it would not have occurred this year.

Nor did anyone still in the village know that a ship was approaching, and among its passengers would be Alika, Sulu, and Jamka. They were presumed lost in the strait. Even Maja had given up hope. Miak was the first to see the
Resolute
as it slowly came up to anchor off Nunatak.

Alika, Sulu, and Jamka stood by the gangway, waiting for a boat to be launched to carry them ashore. Sulu said, "I do wish Mama and Papa were here."

"So do I," Alika said. "But we're home, Sulu. That's all that counts. Home again, and we're alive. The sun is up day and night. We'll find Papa and Mama wherever they are."

Standing onshore waving were Inu, Miak, and Sulu's carving mentor, Etukak, just the three of them standing there.

Sulu was holding his carving of Punna to give to Inu. He said, looking over at the dwellings, "Nothing has changed."

"We don't know. We've been gone a long time," Alika said.

Miak had gone back from the shore to the center of the village and was ringing the bell again, again, and again. The chords were as sharp as the points of a hunting lance.

Alika broke into tears and grasped his brother, holding him until they went aboard the ship's boat to take them to the rocky beach. They'd already said good-bye to the
Resolute's
captain and officers and deck crew, as well as Kangio, who all watched the departure. Even the cook stood near the gangway.

Jamka was at the bow of the boat, front paws resting on the gunwale. He leaped out as the prow ground on the sand. Alika and Sulu, having no possessions, followed him, Sulu kneeling down to put his cheek on the grit.

They both hugged Inu and Etukak. Then they went on to the meeting hall, where Miak was still ringing the brass bell, and hugged him.

They spent little time inside their empty house. Sulu said, "You see, nothing has changed."

Alika agreed, "Nothing has changed."

They loaded a sealskin bag with dried char and took a walrus intestine filled with freshwater for the early hours of their search. Farther inland, they'd cross many streams and could drink from them. They shed their winter parkas, dressing in their sealskins, and hurriedly left the house with Jamka.

Sulu said, "You said you think you know where they might be."

"You've been there before. It's the usual village campground this time of year. We'll go northwest and find them," Alika said.

They hadn't walked a mile on the tundra before Sulu said, "It's just like we left it."

Alika laughed. "It never changes on the tundra until the snows come."

The sun was strong, and the fresh air carried the sweet smells of summer. The heather was thick, and the cranberries and blueberries and crowberries were waiting to be picked on the way home.

They walked steadily northwest for two days, stopping only to rest, eat, and sleep a little in the new grass.

In the early afternoon of the third day, they could smell food being cooked far away. Trudging over the top of a low hill, they saw the Nunatak encampment, and it was alert Jamka that first howled and broke into a run for it.

Maja was cooking outside their tent when Jamka practically bowled her over, tugging at her sleeve. She looked up, saw her two sons running toward her, and screamed with joy.

They were home.

It was 1942, during World War II, when I came across an account of the most amazing "voyage" in international maritime history: a trip of eighteen hundred miles on a huge ice floe in the Greenland Strait (now known as the Davis Strait).

At the time, I was training to be a third mate aboard the gasoline tanker
Annibal,
sailing both the Atlantic and the Pacific in convoys. Among the books I'd brought aboard was
The American Practical Navigator
(first published in 1802 by the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office) by Nathaniel Bowditch, a remarkable, complex work including tables for latitudes and longitudes—endless, staggering information that goes far beyond the use of the sextant.

On page 304 was the following: "The best example of a continued drift from the Arctic is that of Captain Tyson (George E.). On October 14, 1871, he and a party of eighteen others were separated from the polar exploration ship
Polaris,
in latitude 77 or 78 North, just south of Littleton Island, and being unable to regain the ship, remained on the floe."

The nineteen "passengers" on that huge ship of ice survived blizzards, gales, iceberg collisions, encounters with polar bears, starvation, and near mutiny. They included two Inuit men, two Inuit women, and five Inuit children. More than six months after an iceberg tore the floe from its frozen shore anchorage, they were rescued off Labrador. In these times of instant communication, search aircraft, and satellites, it is mind-boggling to consider that they survived six months in temperatures that reached forty degrees below zero. Captain Tyson did not even have a parka.

Fifty-eight years after I'd first read about Captain Tyson, I began extensive research of the astonishing incident. First, I contacted Jane Glazer, widow of David "Pete" Glazer, sports editor of the Portsmouth, Virginia,
Star.
(Pete began teaching me how to write when I was thirteen.) Jane had joined the staff of the Library of Congress, and she arranged for me to copy Captain Tyson's original handwritten manuscript as well as the writings of
Polaris
steward John Herron and crewman Joseph Mauch.