The Ice Master (35 page)

Everyone was sick of the pemmican and barely able to hold it down. It made them sick to eat it. They had sixteen days' full rations of pemmican left now, so they figured they would be fine until the middle of June. But they knew they had to get some fresh meat soon or they would be in dire straits. On May 23, things looked up when Hadley and the Eskimo saw the first seal on the ice near camp. Kuraluk shot but missed, his snow blindness hampering his vision.

The weather had been miserable all month, and it stayed that way. The snow blew continuously, and Munro had to postpone his trip to the ridge until further notice. Kuraluk now announced he did not want to go back to the ridge, and Munro knew he could not force him, even though they were all reliant upon Kuraluk, who was their most skilled hunter. Munro knew he had to handle him delicately, being careful not to offend him for fear he would give up the hunt altogether. So he said nothing about Kuraluk's decision to stay in camp, confiding instead to his diary, “It's Hell to
¹²
be in a position like this.”

Then, to everyone's surprise, Kuraluk left Icy Spit the morning of the twenty-fourth with a loaded sled. He didn't say a word to anyone before leaving, just headed off alone, tight-lipped and stoic.

In the midst of it all, Breddy returned from Skeleton Island with a note to McKinlay from Mamen. He and Malloch and Templeman had been sick and suffering and now they had moved down to Rodger's Harbour. It was a long way across the island to the harbor—about seventy miles—but no one else at Icy Spit was willing to make the trip. So McKinlay would go alone. Munro would have to keep his own counsel because Mamen, it was clear, needed McKinlay's help more.

O
N PEARY'S 1909
N
ORTH
P
OLE
expedition, while the admiral and Bartlett and the rest of the company were camped at Cape Sheridan, Dr. J. W. Goodsell and Professor Donald B. MacMillan had opened a case of books and afterward had come down with violent colds. The books were brand new and had never been read or owned by anyone. But they had, apparently, been packed by a man infected with a cold.

Bartlett thought of this as he sat in the relative comfort of civilization and suffered through an excruciating case of tonsillitis. Because of the extreme cold and remoteness of the region, germs didn't breed in the Arctic as they did in more normal climates. All those weeks trudging through the Arctic freeze, snow, blizzards, without so much as a sniffle, and now he was laid up in East Cape, his throat ulcerated and searingly painful. He coated it with peroxide and alum, which eventually seemed to help, and finally he began to recover.

On May 10, he was still weary and ill, his legs and feet mysteriously swollen. His host, Baron Kleist, was eager to leave for Emma Harbor, aware that, this late in the season, a thaw might come at any moment, breaking up the ice and thus complicating their sled journey. Bartlett could only walk with difficulty, but he decided it was time to depart. It would be best not to wait for a complete recovery, since there was no telling how long it would take for him to be fully well again.

Kataktovik saw them on their way. Bartlett gave him the rifle they had carried with them from Wrangel Island on their journey across the ice and wilderness, and then he shook hands with him and thanked him for all he had done. Bartlett was indebted to Kataktovik, and he told him so, thanking him for showing faith in their mission and having faith in Bartlett himself. He had been the bravest and most reliable companion the captain could have wished for and Bartlett was loath to say good-bye.

The distance from East Cape to Emma Harbor was about the same as the distance from New York to Boston. With dog drivers and sleds, Bartlett and Baron Kleist set out shrouded in fog in the late afternoon of May 10. Both the captain and Kleist were worried about how they would feed the dogs; the season was so advanced that the meat supply of the Eskimos was beginning to thin. Bartlett left his own dogs at East Cape.

They traveled through heavy snow and thick fog, rain, and wind, frequently finding their way strictly by compass because they were unable to see ahead of the dogs. They often drove on through the night, stopping at different arangas for nourishment and rest.

Bartlett had searched for an oilskin coat at East Cape because his fur clothing was soaked through from his trek across the Siberian wilderness. There were none that fit him, though, and now he worried about the effect these wet clothes would have on his already poor health. He rode on the sled most of the time, to save his strength, and this gave him a chance to appreciate the views of this wild and unfamiliar country. But now and then he walked alongside to keep warm. His legs were still weak and swollen, and before long, he would climb back onto the sled.

They were headed for a reindeer settlement on the north side of Saint Lawrence Bay. On their way there, they lost all sense of direction, and as the dog drivers stopped to discuss the matter, the dogs suddenly took off, tearing across the ice with the sled flying along behind them and a surprised Bartlett hanging on for life. The path was scattered with boulders and blocks of ice, and Bartlett expected to be thrown or crushed at any moment. Somehow, though, they reached the bottom of the hill and the dogs stopped, having momentarily lost the scent they were chasing—the scent of reindeer.

But there, miraculously, was the trail they were searching for, bringing them right into Saint Lawrence Bay. Here, Bartlett saw his first Siberian reindeer. Because spring was arriving, the animals had just moved to the coast from parts inland, where they had wintered.

Bartlett and his group were averaging five miles an hour on the journey, and the captain admired the skill and speed of their dog drivers. He didn't speak their language, but they were colorful and memorable characters, especially a man called “Little,” who was a strapping four feet tall. Little promised Bartlett that he would take him in his motor boat to Alaska, if the captain wasn't able to find a ship at Emma Harbor. Bartlett was touched by the offer and promised Little he would take him up on it if it came down to that. Little knew a few words of English and was quite proud of his vocabulary. “Me make baron
¹³
speak 'em plenty English,” he boasted many a time.

They crossed the ice of Saint Lawrence Bay and followed its shores east. From there, they traveled over land for several miles before setting out on the ice again, this time in the mouth of Mechigme Bay. They stayed along the coast, heading west, and then drove across the opening of the bay until they reached the southern shore. After this, they traveled the coast for twenty miles and then once again took a land route to Neegchan.

The air was heavy and damp with fog, and Bartlett was often wet to the skin. At the various arangas, he was often able to give his clothes a cursory drying, and was thankful for this because his throat was still vulnerable and not yet healed. He feared a relapse. Once you became sick or injured in the Arctic, it was twice as hard to heal as it would have been in the rest of the world. Resistance was down, and without adequate shelter from the cold the body's immune system wasn't able to do its job, which meant a relatively simple thing—tonsillitis or a cut on the finger—could soon prove fatal.

They were, at last, entering the final stretch of their journey. Here and there, they stopped for tea at one of the many arangas they happened upon, and in one of them an Eskimo told them he had heard of a whaler at Indian Point with a master named Pedersen. From the description, Bartlett decided it was the same man whom Stefansson had originally hired to skipper the
Karluk
. Bartlett knew Captain Pedersen personally, and the fact that he was in the area was good news. Perhaps Bartlett could persuade the captain to take him to Alaska.

M
AMEN HAD SKIED
in the mountains, taken leaps off of cliffs, trekked through snow, scaled rocks, jumped over precipices and ravines. He fell down, he got injured, he got back up again, he kept going. He was invincible. He could do anything and nothing could touch him.

Because his father was the leading funeral director in Christiania, Norway, Mamen had grown up with death, but it never changed his feelings of immortality or his firm belief in his own strength. Life just kept going, and he knew it always would.

But now he had to face the thought that he was weak, that Malloch was ill, that Templeman was helpless, and that the entire expedition might not make it off Wrangel Island alive. The worry never left him. Yet despite his own weakness, he roused himself every day to take care of his two comrades, both of whom had come to depend almost entirely upon him.

Malloch was still careless with his feet. Just as they were beginning to improve he would get them frozen again. He was in a kind of delirium now. He seemed helpless and unable to look after himself, but remained blissfully ignorant of the harm he was doing to his body. Mamen would find him outside in his stocking feet, wandering through the snow, a smile on his face.

When Mamen was too weak to tend to him, Templeman took over, washing out bandages for the patient under Mamen's supervision. But mostly it was Mamen, who went without food, giving his rations to Malloch and tending to his feet when he was negligent, which was all the time. He was, as Mamen said, “the worst man
¹⁴
I have seen in all my life . . . he will never do what other people do, it is no use telling him anything.. . .”

It made Mamen all the more determined to see Malloch and Templeman better and to beat this mystery illness himself. Though still weak, he was improving steadily and soon hoped to have his usual good health back. Their biscuits were gone, the pemmican inedible, but they looked forward to the birds that would soon be there and the eggs they could already taste in their vivid imaginations.

The weather could not have been worse. Hurricane-like gales blew snow and threatened to rip their fragile tent apart. Unable to build a fire and with little oil for the Primus stove, the men often had to content themselves with dry meals—plain pemmican, with no tea to wash it down. They had enough pemmican to last them through the rest of the month but it was now their only food source and, as Mamen observed, “Half a pound
¹⁵
of pemmican twice a day is certainly not much, but we have to be glad as long as we can get that. It will soon be better times for us, as soon as the birds come from the south and the ice breaks up the sun will shine for us day and night.”

As the gale raged on for days, the men were confined to the tent, making tea sparingly on the Primus stove out of water from melted snow. There was only enough for a mouthful for each one of them, and the flavor was unsavory; but they were grateful for a hot drink.

When the weather cleared at last, leaving sunshine, Mamen left the tent to go walking. He headed down the sandbank, but his strength soon gave out and he was forced to turn back.

On May 5, as the wind began to blow about the tent and another blizzard swept through the camp, Mamen lay inside and remembered the people he had left behind when he'd set out on his quest for adventure a year ago.

If only he didn't feel responsible for Malloch and Templeman. He felt such a mix of pity and disgust for them, forever fluctuating between anger and sympathy. Malloch's left foot got so frozen that Mamen held it against his own stomach for three hours just to get life into it. He was sick of taking care of this man. “I for my
¹⁶
part will have nothing whatever to do with him now,” he wrote. “He will have to take care of himself. I have ruined myself completely for him.”

The night before, Mamen had dislocated his knee yet again, but he had no time to think of himself. It was always Malloch now, and although he was not about to turn his back on his comrade, no matter what his private threats, he did ask the geologist for a written statement noting that Mamen had done all he could to help him, and that Malloch alone was to blame for the condition in which he found himself. But the worst part of it was that Mamen was overexerting himself on his colleagues' behalf. They were too weak to make the trek to rejoin the main party, but Mamen sorely needed the help. “I feel weaker
¹⁷
and weaker for every day that goes,” he wrote on May 6. “I don't know
²²
how this will end, if only McKinlay could come down here and help me a little. This hard work with Malloch and Bob has been too much for me.”

Mamen had taken over most of the culinary duties since the three of them had been together, but Templeman helped when he could, making Mamen hot water for tea or giving him a nip of whiskey to brace himself up. It was little comfort, though, and Mamen felt hopelessly and wretchedly alone. Malloch had been a good friend, but now he wasn't himself. No one would have recognized this shell of a man, rambling and defeated, helpless as a child. The strapping, cocky fellow he had been only weeks before had vanished. Mamen knew that Malloch might lose his right foot and possibly the left one from frostbite, and now he worried that Malloch was losing his mind as well. “It is getting
¹⁸
darker and darker for us instead of brighter,” Mamen wrote. “Malloch has truly been of much trouble to me from the beginning, I have worn myself out for him.. . . I suppose he is kind of insane. He became a little sad when I told him tonight in what condition his feet were, but right afterwards he was merry and content, They are not any worse than my fingers were, he said.. . . I sincerely hope that I may have strength to keep him alive until we are taken from here. It is my only wish.. . .”

Malloch had not had many moments of mental clarity lately, but whenever he did, he realized that if it were not for Mamen, he would be dead. He was grateful then and, although such moments were fleeting, Mamen at least knew that Malloch was aware of all he was doing for him.

Mamen prayed for the weather to clear and for his strength to grow so that he could make the trip to Skeleton Island for the supplies they had left behind. But by May 10, Mamen's body was so swollen from head to toe that he had a great deal of trouble moving around. The strange thing was that he was not in pain—he just found it difficult to move or walk. There was no rest to be had, though, and on the eleventh he operated on Malloch's finger, cutting off the nail and the dead skin. He hoped he would not have to remove the finger itself, especially since it appeared that one of Malloch's toes would have to be amputated before long. To make matters worse, they were nearly out of bandages.