The Voyage of the Dolphin (17 page)

Another dog might, at this juncture, have reflected on the terrible power behind that casual blow and called it a day. Not Bunion. He licked the blood from his muzzle and climbed to his feet, shaking his head like a punch-drunk prizefighter. Through the filter of his goggles, which had stayed in place despite the force of the slap, his adversary was a muddy blur. He flung himself forward with renewed ferocity. Again the bear was taken aback, again enraged by the smaller animal's impudence. It charged and batted, reared and jabbed, but Bunion was wise, scuttling around to nip at the hind-quarters, darting beneath to tear at the underbelly.

Round and round they went, first one way, then the other, the bear's howls of pain becoming ever more anguished, its flailings, as dizziness took hold, wilder. Only once more did it appear that Bunion might be in trouble – an uppercut that caught him under the chest and flipped him high in the air. He landed badly and had to twist from under the paw that almost trapped him. All the while, the bear was being driven back towards the edge of the pack and at last, extensively japped with crimson, it gave a yodel of frustration and plunged into the water.

‘Right everyone, let's go,' Fitzmaurice shouted.

‘Wait,' Phoebe said, pointing. ‘Bunion.'

The ship's dog was staggering towards them, attempting to follow a straight line but tottering sideways as if inebriated. As they watched, it came to a standstill and collapsed. Doyle and Crozier rushed forward and between them managed to heave the comatose beast onto the sledge and, with the cabin boy hauling, they set off at a jog in the direction of the
Dolphin
.

After half a mile they slowed. Running on ice in many layers of animal skin was hard work and after months at sea none of them was in peak condition. Panting, Crozier lifted the field glasses and scanned the way they had come.

‘No sign,' he reported. ‘With any luck he's turned his attention to the seals.'

‘Thank Christ. Did you see the size of those teeth?'

‘And those paws?' Phoebe said.

‘I know. Have your face off in a jiffy.'

Rafferty was examining Bunion, who was still unconscious. ‘Some blood coming out of his ear. When we get back to the ship I can take a closer look.'

They resumed at a walking pace. The sky had become congested and a fresh breeze was frisking out of the south, bringing a few shavings of snow. Up ahead, still several miles away, the outline of the
Dolphin
hovered on the horizon, wavering as though behind a heat haze. Fatigue, largely the after-effect of a deluge of adrenaline, was telling on the group and there was little conversation. Noticing that the cabin boy was about to drop, Doyle took the reins of the sledge. The hiss of its rails and the crunch of their boots were the only sounds in the dead silence of the bright Arctic night.

They had been labouring through sporadic squalls of snow for what seemed like days -- in truth little over an hour -- when Crozier spotted the bear again. At first he wasn't sure he'd seen anything more than an eddy of flakes, a ripple of white within white, but as he swung the glasses back and focused, a discrete shape melted into view and out again. A few moments later he saw it again and this time there was no mistaking what it was, or the trajectory it was following. The news was poorly received.

‘On the plus side, he's still a good way off and more than likely following us by scent alone. I don't think he's seen us.'

‘That's a great comfort.'

‘We're only a mile from the ship,' Fitzmaurice said. ‘
Nil desperandum
.'

‘Last one back's a sissy,' Phoebe yelled.

They quickened their pace, Fitzmaurice lending a hand with the sledge, but despite their efforts the ship never seemed to be any nearer. After a while Crozier stopped again to check on their pursuer.

‘Gaining ground,' he reported.

They pounded on, the snow, which had turned icy, sticking to their goggles, narrowing their field of vision. Up ahead, the ship was a smudge, a faint watermark glimpsed through wreaths of vapour. Driving them on, through the exhaustion, was the invisible predator at their heels. Crozier was seized yet again by a sense of unreality. He remembered a dream he'd had in childhood, an encounter with an escaped lion that appeared, inexplicably, in the back garden and how shockingly
actual
the creature was in proximity and how the fear – it was a nightmare really – had paralysed him even though he'd wanted, with all his being, to run away. All these years later he still recalled the horror in that feeling of powerlessness. He was tempted to stop and take another look – there was a chance the beast may have given up – but he didn't. He knew in his heart it was still loping relentlessly in their wake.

At last they came within range of the
Dolphin,
its dark solidity eliciting a chorus of relief. Harris waved at them from the poop deck and turned away. Smoke drifted from the funnel. Victoor, they surmised, would be cooking up one of his fiendish stews. A second later their elation turned to dismay. The crack they had stepped across without a care on the outward trek had widened by some fifteen yards. They stopped dead.

‘What the hell do we do now?' Rafferty said.

They stared across the shivering black water. Crozier did a sweep of the horizon.

‘I see him. About a quarter of a mile away. He's heading straight for us.'

Doyle, who had been stamping his feet along the edge of the pack, suddenly dropped to his knees and began hacking at the ice with his boning knife.

‘Doyle, have you lost your mind? This is no time for fishing.'

As they watched, the bosun winkled the barrel of his rifle into the hole he had made and heaved on it until there was a cracking sound. A crevice opened up. Fitzmaurice leapt forward with a cry. He plunged the point of his shooting stick into the gap and he too started tugging with all his strength. A grumbling noise came from beneath their feet.

‘Quickly, get the sledge over here.'

‘He's definitely spotted us now,' Crozier reported. ‘Speeding up. Looks angry.'

Grunting with effort, Doyle and Fitzmaurice worked at the fissure they had made. The ice creaked and splintered. The bear was visible to the naked eye now, barrelling towards them through the swirl.

‘One more heave,' Fitzmaurice shouted.

With a huge sigh of release the ice pan they were standing on – and not much more – came free of the pack and they were adrift. Everyone cheered. Doyle, using the rifle butt, and Fitzmaurice his shooting stick, began paddling the unlikely raft towards the far side. It was unwieldy and tended to rotate as it moved, but the current was with them and they were halfway across within a minute. Behind them, their pursuer reached the edge and stopped, rising up on its hind legs.

‘Can those things swim?' Phoebe whispered.

‘I'm afraid they're excellent swimmers,' Crozier said.

Bang on cue, the bear crashed into the water and disappeared. They reached the other side, the ice pan slamming into the bank and sticking fast. They leapt off and ran, not daring to look back. As they approached the ship, closing the last fifty yards, Harris appeared, walking briskly towards them with a rifle. He passed them by. Three shots rang out.

*

The pack had loosened sufficiently the following morning for the
Dolphin
to break out under steam and they followed a long lead west, dodging through several fields of small bergs, for the best part of three days before bearing south towards the Gulf of Boothia. Crossing the Sound took them a week, but once they entered Prince Regent Inlet the going was easier. Hugging the east coast of Somerset Island, and helped by a southerly current, they crunched through two hundred miles of young ice, often under full sail.

At the start of August, as they passed Cape Nimrod on the Boothia Peninsula, conditions worsened again. Gales and heavy seas battered the ship as it navigated along narrow channels between encroaching pack ice on one side and treacherous offshore shoals on the other. Several times they were nipped between moving floes. On one occasion, so convinced was he that the
Dolphin
would be crushed, McGregor ordered boxes of provisions to be hoisted up on deck in readiness for a swift exit.

Matters were not helped by the collective insomnia afflicting everyone on board (except the cabin boy who seemed unable to wake up). Though duty rotas were adhered to, people could be found sleep-walking around the ship at all hours: haunting the mess and the galley, pacing the deck, staring luminous-eyed into the radiant night. Tempers often frayed and the antagonism between Crozier and Rafferty flared more than once.

At last they entered the latitudes where Sir Hamilton Coote's map indicated they would find the object of their voyage. Leafing through the diary itself, Crozier read, under the entry for 14th of July, 1865:

 

We have laid McNeill to rest on an
island – unmarked on the chart
–
located in the open water
of a bay on the western side of the Gulf,
some hundred knots south of Cape Nimrod
.
He lies at
peace under a simple cairn of stones on a mountain-
top on the southern tip of the island, which we
have named Prospect Island after the County Tyrone townland of
his birth, a place he loved well. I shall miss
him greatly, but most especially, having endured another night of
Jackson's filthy hoosh, his cooking.

Farewell, gentle giant.

 

Having had no sight of the coast for some time it was concluded that they had entered the bay referred to by Coote, but despite laborious calculations and several days of meandering they came across nothing more substantial than smallish bergs, and the carcase of a beluga whale decomposing on an ice floe.

‘It disn'ae make sense,' McGregor said. He and Harris were leaning over the chart table. ‘It should be right f—ing here.' He stabbed at Coote's map. ‘Islands cannae f—ing vanish.'

‘Atlantis did,' Crozier said. ‘And what about Hy-Brasil? That only appears every seven years.'

The skipper and the first mate stared at him for such a long time that he backed out of the room. Later, as he shivered in the crow's nest, he began to contemplate the possibility that they would not find Prospect Island. What then? Turn and head for home? Was he ready for that? Ready to re-enter his old life? There were moments, standing at the bow, head full of the white noise of wind and ocean, when it seemed to him they had been at sea for years. Decades. Centuries even. As though time had slipped free of its ratchet. When he thought about Dublin – the view from chambers, the cascades of cherry blossom in Front Square, the yeasty gloom of the Bailey — it was like trying to recall another lifetime, everything, himself included, just glimpses and fragments, drifting ghosts. The
Dolphin
had become their world.

He peered down through the rime-crusted rigging at the frosted decks. Far below he could see the twins tinkering with ropes, Fitzmaurice on the capstan puffing his pipe, Bunion licking himself – all oblivious. At first he had avoided watch duty, finding the exaggerated motion of the sea high on the mast nauseating, but now he had come to relish the cold cross-draughts and the sense of freedom, and to imagine, when under full sail, what it must be like to be a bird on the wing, gliding into the purity of perpetual horizon…

He turned his attention back to the interminable mosaic of the frozen sea. Fog had been lying along the starboard skyline all morning but now it was thinning, glimmers of refracted sunlight breaking through. He raised the field glasses. There was a dark smear in the clouds to the west indicating open water and he called this down to the wheelhouse. They changed course, and after a couple of hours entered a wide expanse of calm, with only the occasional floe to negotiate. For most of the day they travelled southwest, then tacked in a wide arc back to the northeast. Towards midnight, sea smoke began to billow around them, and after a while it became so thick the order was given to drop anchor.

It was late morning before there was any visibility. Crozier, his turn come round again, made his way up to the masthead. He had become adept, despite his gangly physique, at hoisting himself through the rigging (sometimes imagining he was Jack ascending the fabled beanstalk). He emerged onto the platform and straightened up. From his pocket he took a sandwich of biscuit and smoked ham saved from breakfast, chewing on it as he gazed around. The mist was on the move, dissolving here and there to reveal tracts of flinty sea.

From below he could hear the clanking of the ice anchor as it was hauled aboard. He turned a hundred and eighty degrees but in this direction fog, water and sky were one. He munched his snack, then stopped to listen: seabirds, faint, but lots of them. A colony. He tried to gauge their proximity between the breezes. Not far. Odd. They had seen very little wildlife for days, save for a scattering of terns on a floe. A bird squawked overhead and he glanced up to see the ghost of a skua float over. He shivered. The mist was damp on his face, forming scabs of thin ice. He brushed them away. His eyelashes were heavy and he wiped at them. He hadn't slept more than a couple of hours and his eyes felt gritty. In recent days the visual distortions had become more pronounced and more frequent, and it was increasingly difficult to distinguish between hallucination and mirage. What, for instance, was this dark shape looming through the sea smoke?

He tossed away the remainder of his biscuit and grasped the binoculars. Barely a knot away, steaming as though fresh from creation, was an island. Its khaki cliffs, rising hundreds of feet straight from the water, glittered with ice; birds, almost indistinguishable from the motes in his exhausted eyes, wafted in the thermals above them. The suddenness of its mass after the empty horizons of recent weeks was exhilarating, but sight of the island – so long anticipated – also brought another feeling. It took him by surprise and it was a moment before he realised what it was. It was fear. He cupped his hands to his mouth.

‘Land Ahoy!'