The Ice Master (28 page)

The remaining scientists—Mamen, McKinlay, and Malloch—would be separated from the crewmen, except for Templeman, who was to be the fourth member of their group. The Eskimo family would be on their own with Hadley, who, for all his bigoted remarks, felt more comfortable with them than with anyone else. And the crewmen were divided into two separate teams: Munro, Breddy, and Clam; and Williamson, Maurer, and Chafe. This way, the discordant Munro and Williamson could be kept apart. So, too, could Fred Maurer and the usually rash, unruly Breddy, whose caustic tongue had helped make them adversaries months before, when they had worked together in the
Karluk
's engine room.

McKinlay, as provision master, was given the task of allotting supplies to the men while Bartlett was away. Bartlett asked each man to write a short letter home, which he promised to deliver. They brought out pencil and paper and everyone wrote a letter, so that by the time Bartlett left, his pockets were bulging.

On New Year's Day, he had asked his men to avoid anything that would lead them to quarrel with one another. Now he made the men promise again that they wouldn't argue amongst themselves while he was gone. He knew that the Arctic conditions could bring out the worst in men—even in the best of individuals—and he also knew the dangers of this. It was his greatest fear in leaving them. They were a motley crew, with several volatile and unstable personalities in the mix, and he feared that the peace he had managed to maintain would be shattered. So keep up your courage, he told them, live peacefully, and do the best you can.

They promised him they would, and there was little else he could do.

T
HE THOUGHT OF BEING
without their leader was difficult to digest. McKinlay had long ago stopped thinking of Stefansson in that role. He was no leader, as far as McKinlay was concerned. Stefansson was no one with whom he even wanted to be associated. But Bartlett was their leader, without a doubt. They would have died without him.

The captain would take one sled, seven dogs, and rations for sixty days. On Wednesday, March 18, the sled was loaded. Bartlett, Kataktovik, and McKinlay hitched up the dogs while Mamen, from his bed, made a cup of tea for the travelers.

Then Bartlett bid good-bye to everyone and asked McKinlay to accompany him for a while. He had left instructions for Munro, and now he had some for McKinlay. Keep the peace, he asked him, and help Munro. Bartlett had wanted to leave McKinlay in charge instead, but because McKinlay had no official position on the ship, he couldn't. It was all right with McKinlay, who didn't want the responsibility. He wouldn't have it, he told the captain, for all the tea in China.

“Canny Scot,”
¹⁸
Bartlett said smiling.

Again he asked McKinlay to assist Munro in any way he could, and to do whatever he could to keep peace among the men. This last was the most important, as otherwise it spelled disaster.

Then they said good-bye and McKinlay watched Captain Bartlett and Kataktovik embark at last on their long and lonely journey. So much rested on their shoulders—the lives of twelve men, one woman, and two little girls. If McKinlay and the rest of them were ever to leave Wrangel Island, Bartlett and Kataktovik were their only hope.

W
ITH
B
ARTLETT'S DEPARTURE,
a sense of great loneliness swept over the camp. They missed the captain and his encouraging words. For his sake and theirs, they tried not to think of what would happen, should something horrible befall him and keep him from reaching land.

The weather didn't help their sinking spirits. The joy of being on land had worn thin, quickly replaced by weariness and illness, and irritation at the relentless raging wind and sweeping drifts. They went outside only for supplies and ice, otherwise remaining in their snow houses for the duration of the day, although, as McKinlay remarked, “it is neither
¹⁹
comfortable nor cheerful.”

To make matters worse, everyone was complaining of sickness, and the large igloo had been turned into a kind of hospital. Chafe and Williamson were sick but improving while Maurer had fallen seriously ill. Malloch and Templeman were weak and scarcely able to move, and Hadley was suffering from rheumatism. The sick men were afflicted with a mysterious malady, marked by a peculiar swelling in their limbs. No one could figure out what it was.

Munro, Breddy, and Clam had left for Shipwreck Camp to fetch the remaining supplies the day before Bartlett set off. At last they returned, unable to reach camp thanks to the blizzard, the strong drift, and the rough conditions at the ice ridges. Besides, now Breddy was complaining of cold, and Clam was as sick and swollen as his colleagues on Wrangel. As the new invalids moved into the hospital igloo with the rest of them, McKinlay worried about this recent turn of events. The sickness was strange and no one could put a name to it. Each of the victims suffered from great swelling to the face and body, and overwhelming feelings of weakness, which made even the smallest movement difficult.

It was all so discouraging. They had counted on the extra stores from Shipwreck Camp, but with Munro unable to make it there, and with the addition of two more sick men to the company, McKinlay didn't know how they would survive.

There were only 104 pounds left of the dog pemmican, which would only last another week. The animals were placed on short rations, and soon, because they were starving, they began tearing about the camp, eating everything from mukluks to sled lashings, and anything else the men forgot to put away. They also ran off now and then with tins of pemmican, which they tore open and devoured.

On March 20, one of the dogs was racing across the top of the snow hospital when the roof caved in on top of the sick men. Unable to move, they were in danger of being smothered by the great wall of snow now covering them. McKinlay and the others frantically dug through the snow to reach the men, whom they pulled out from the ruins one by one, transferring them to Kuraluk's igloo while the healthy few worked at repairing the roof of the hospital. It was then they discovered that Chafe had frozen all of the toes on one foot four days ago, but hadn't said a word about it to anyone.

They were in even worse shape than McKinlay had suspected.

T
HE FIRST NIGHT ON THE TRAIL
, Kataktovik and Bartlett finished building their igloo and crawled inside, weary and cold, looking forward to a cup of tea. Then they noticed the hole in the boiler. The thought of a hot drink had kept them going during their long first day, but now it seemed they would have to go without.

Then Bartlett remembered something. One Saturday morning when he was a boy, he had been berry picking with his folks. They had taken along a large iron boiler in which to cook their dinner, but when they tried to use it, it leaked. Sure enough, there was a crack in it, and there went dinner. But Grandmother Bartlett pulled out a couple of pounds of hard Newfoundland biscuit, the kind that you could chip a tooth on, and soaked it. Then she took a handful of the soaked biscuit and plastered it inside the boiler, right over the crack. And it worked perfectly.

Now he chewed up a small piece of hardtack. He took the piece of biscuit from his mouth and fixed it over the bottom of the boiler. Perfect. It didn't surprise him a bit. Aside from the berry-picking time, he had once built a dam out of sixty-five pounds of biscuits and used the makeshift plaster to plug up a leak in the bow of his ship. The stuff was handy.

It was a hundred and nine miles from the southernmost point of Wrangel Island to the northern coast of Siberia. But Bartlett and Kataktovik were traveling an extra hundred miles around the shore of the island, heading east and south so that they could pass by Herald Island to look for Sandy and Dr. Mackay's missing parties. He refused to give them up for dead.

Bartlett and Kataktovik were only half a mile from Icy Spit when they were assaulted by the withering northwest wind, which gathered itself up until it was blowing with great ferocity. They couldn't see more than a dozen yards ahead of them, but the snow was hard beneath their feet, which made that part of it good going. They followed the shore to Bruch Spit and stopped in the evening near Skeleton Island, where they built their igloo for the first night.

As they followed the shore the next morning, they strained for any sign of the lost parties. So far, nothing, and conditions along the shore were discouraging. High cliffs plummeted down to the water's edge, obliterating any sign of a beach. They passed Hooper Cairn, built by a group from the United States revenue cutter
Corwin
in 1881. They did not see any game, except for one raven and a lemming.

The wind nearly knocked them off their feet at times, especially when they passed under the high cliffs, where the wind would sweep in after them as if trying to carry them away. A cloud of snow seemed to shroud the island permanently, which explained why Wrangel was always so hard to spot from Shipwreck Camp. The snow, mixed with pieces of shale from the cliffs and bits of sand, sliced at their cheeks, the only exposed part of their bodies.

On the twentieth, two days after leaving Icy Spit, they crossed the spit on the south side of Rodger's Harbour, which was on the southeastern shore of the island. Then they followed the beach, searching for encampments or signs of life. They had hoped that maybe, just maybe, Sandy and his party, or Dr. Mackay and his men had landed here. But again, there were no signs that anyone had been there before them.

Bartlett had planned to head from Rodger's Harbour across Long Strait, and then to Cape North on the Siberian coast, but he suddenly realized that they would have to take another route. The ice off the coast of the harbor had been pressed into great ridges, and valleys of snow swelled in between. Better to stick to the shoreline instead. To build a road through the ice rafters and chasms of snow would be too dangerous and would waste time they didn't have to spend.

Another decision had to be made then—whether to travel on the island or on the shore ice until the point where they had to head out across the sea ice. The surface of the land was rocky and rough, and the ice onshore was so jumbled and uneven that they needed a pickaxe just to get across. They were discouraged and weary, having journeyed for two days, and were still on the island, no nearer to Siberia than they were when they left Icy Spit, or so it felt.

They tried again the next day to conquer the pressure ridges and valleys of snow. Surely, they could find a way through it. But they had to give up. They would just have to find another way.

As they followed the shoreline westward, the conditions began to improve, so much in fact that they made it past Selfridge Bay and all the way to Blossom Point, at the southwest corner of the island.

They were finally on their way, but they had seen no sign of the missing parties. Bartlett prayed that Sandy and Dr. Mackay would find their way to the others, and then he set his sights fully and finally toward Siberia. It would be a long haul across the ice, and he knew, by what he had seen already, what kind of conditions they were in for. The air ahead of them was heavy with condensation, which meant open water. Not a good sign. And at the edge of the stationary ice, just five miles from land, they ran into a towering ice ridge. It took them two hours to cut a road through.

They slept in their snow goggles, just to get used to them. The goggles were vital out there in the high winds and the snow. A man could go blind without them. Bartlett's left eye was already giving him trouble.

Immediately after leaving Blossom Point, the captain and Kataktovik lost sight of the island. The sky was too overcast, the air too thick, and the snow, once again, covered it in a great shrouded blanket of white.

T
HE CAPTAIN HAD ONLY
been gone a few days when the dissension began. All the team spirit they had developed on the trail was quickly deteriorating and, without Bartlett to keep them at peace, the different personalities began to clash.

Templeman had an unbridled tongue and an almost pathological capacity for lying, not to mention his excessive drug habit, which had been significantly curbed since they had been shipwrecked. Then there was Hadley, with his pungent way of speaking, and his gruff demeanor. McKinlay liked him in spite of it all; he was a good man to have on your side, but McKinlay tried to stay out of his way and to bother him as little as possible. And there was Munro, who seemed completely overwhelmed by his appointed charge.

They began to quarrel, and the thing they quarreled most often and most violently over was food. The first bone of contention was the division of the biscuits. In all, they had five cases, each of which contained five hundred biscuits. Munro and McKinlay consulted and decided to distribute one case and an additional 214 biscuits to each party of four, and one case plus thirty-six biscuits to each party of three. This arrangement actually gave each man in the three-person party one-sixth of a biscuit more than the rest of them, but Williamson and Breddy, who were in one of the three-person parties, couldn't seem to understand this. Instead, they demanded the biscuits be divided evenly among each group, regardless of the size of the party.

There was much complaining, too, about the wasteful way in which the Eskimos were using their provisions. They burned the stove all day and smoked fresh tea instead of being frugal, seeming to think they would fall back on the other parties when their supplies had run out. The men blamed Hadley, who shared their igloo and who should have known better.

They had begun to ration their food now, due to Munro's failure to reach Shipwreck Camp. In McKinlay's tent, McKinlay, Mamen, Malloch, and Templeman cut themselves down to five biscuits per day with one pound of pemmican. They were hopeful, though, because Templeman had taken a short walk earlier and found a feather on the ground. They couldn't tell what type of bird it belonged to, but it was a good sign.

Through it all, McKinlay acted as counsel to Munro, who sought his advice about everything. McKinlay was also called in frequently to smooth over hard feelings or difficulties. He was pleased to be of help, and happy to know that he had some influence with the other members of the party. It made him feel useful, and pleased that he was not letting the captain down.