Against the Ice, page 13
After that we knew, and we also knew that our lives were at stake, for it was obvious that we could not afford to wait for the seals to grow fat. We must, therefore, without wasting time, try to reach a place where we might find land game, or else stake everything on an attempt to get to the next cache, a good seventy miles further south, hoping that it was still in existence.
We were now critically short of food, for all we had left was a little pemmican, one tiny tin of tea and the two dogs, which certainly had not a shred of fat on their thin tortured bodies.
Before we continued on our arduous way, we wanted to try and salvage one of our seals which had sank in some ten feet of water. For a whole day we dragged for it, with no other result than that we became soaking wet and caught some sand-hoppers. That gave us a crazy idea, that we might be able to catch enough to give us a meal of sorts for a day’s hard work; so we sacrificed the last bit of Girly for bait, fastening it to a shirt which we lowered into the water, and then carefully watched the sand-hoppers as they swarmed round the titbit. As soon as there were a lot of them within the compass of the shirt, we carefully pulled it up towards the surface, yet, no matter how careful we were, the sand-hoppers always discovered our foul purpose and the next instant were gone. We tried, time after time, but at the end of five or six hours’ fishing, all we had got was half a jugful of sand-hoppers, which grated between our teeth and tasted revolting. They had as little effect on our hunger as a snowball on the fires of hell.
After that we gave up fishing for sand-hoppers and made off southwards with Bjørn and Grimrian securely tied to the sledge, so that there should be no chance of their escaping their ultimate destiny, which was to be killed and eaten.
We struggled on as best we could, toiling till we ached in every joint. We jumped the narrow leads and hauled the sledge over; we ferried across the broader channels on a piece of ice or paddled across, lying on our sledge-boat with our legs in the water. Often we had to jump off into the water and stand on the bottom, to prevent the sledge-boat capsizing.
We managed it, but it was a laborious and appallingly slow business relative to our microscopic store of provisions. We were sopping wet from the moment we started sledging in the evening, until the warm sun stood high in the heavens the next morning and we stopped our all but hopeless labours. Then we wrung the water from our clothes and crawled into soaking sleeping bags to get some sleep, while we waited for the cold of night to lessen the flood of water rushing across the ice and enable us to move on again.
We toiled on across the ice a little to the north of Lamberts Land, where Mylius-Erichsen and Høeg-Hagen had succumbed “twelve miles off the glacier in the middle of the fjord,” as Jørgen Brønlund had described it. But there was no glacier wall to be seen there. The inland ice did come thrusting out there, between Lamberts Land and a mountain a little farther north, but it was in an even stream of ice that merged imperceptibly with the sea-ice, so that we were quite unable to identify the spot Jørgen Brønlund had described as “off the glacier.” There was no glacier wall. However, when seen in deceptive moonlight, as Brønlund saw it when he left his companions in their last camp, perhaps some eminence in the inland ice had looked like a glacier wall.
Those were just thoughts that occurred to us as we struggled past the scene of the catastrophe in 79 Fjord, almost as near to succumbing as Mylius-Erichsen and his two companions had been. We were starving and exhausted, as those three had been; but where they had been subdued by cold and darkness, we had sparkling sunlight and relative warmth to give us a little hope. That meant a lot; but, on the other hand, we had the water to contend with, and that was bad.
We reached land very near Jørgen Brønlund’s grave, and, tired though we were, we went off hunting straight away in the hope of being able to spare one of the dogs. Iver had the double-barrelled shot-gun with shot for one barrel and ball for the other, and I the rifle which could only be used against bear or musk oxen. We went separate ways so as to be able to cover as large an area as possible, and for ten hours I stumbled about that hilly country that was fertile and covered with tracks of musk oxen and hare.
I never saw anything edible, not a living creature. As I was on my way back to the tent, dead tired and my mind paralyzed by the thought that only one pound of pemmican and two emaciated dogs separated us from death by starvation, I heard strains familiar from the relatively merry days, when we were sledging across the inland ice:
“Why should we sorrow,
Why let things annoy?
The world’s…”
What could have happened to Iver? Probably he had bagged something and was letting his joy resound over hill and dale; yet he had been so peculiar those last few days that I wondered whether the combination of hunger, toil, water and disappointment had not broken his courage and affected his brain. A cold shiver ran down my back at the thought. I had to find out; I had to know the reason for this gay song in the midst of our wretchedness. I yodelled an answer and listened anxiously till Iver replied: “Twelve ptarmigan,” and the mountains echoed the cry and flung it back a hundredfold: twelve, twelve, twelve — from mountain to mountain across the whole land.
I felt so weak at the knees that I had to sit down on a stone. I could scarcely believe that fortune at last had smiled on us. To the mind of a famished man, twelve ptarmigan was a mass of meat and meant not only relief, but freedom from hunger. I got to my feet and hurried at a stiff-legged trot across the mountain to where Iver sat on a stone, his face beaming with delight, and in front of him lay twelve lovely ptarmigan — several days’ freedom from gnawing hunger.
We were so happy, Iver and I. We wanted to yodel, to awaken the echoes and hear life around us; for the sun was shining and when we got back to the tent, we were going to cook ptarmigan; we would only cook them a little though, we were agreed on that, for to have cooked them properly would have taken too long for people in our state.
But the musk oxen? No, we never saw anything but their tracks, which perhaps were years old. It was also obvious, from the multitude of tracks, that there were hares in those parts, but we very seldom saw one.
You can do very well on ptarmigan, however, provided there are enough of them, and there we had twelve, inconceivable wealth! Iver guiltily confessed that he had gobbled up the bloody head of one of the birds, had thus had something that I had been unable to share. And how we ate! Boiled ptarmigan is tasty, and ptarmigan soup not to be despised. Add to that a jug of tea, and what more could man desire? Nothing. But yes: rest and sleep, and that too we had in more than full measure, for, being relieved of the nervous tension of the last month, we overslept and had to wait almost a whole day before the night’s frost made it possible to continue. We made what use we could of the enforced wait by going out hunting again in the sparkling sunshine. This time, the only animals or birds we saw were a hare, which we got, and a flapping snow-owl that we missed.
CHAPTER XII
Things Get Worse
About dog’s liver — Hard alternatives — One good cache and some not so good — Poisoning — Verbal orgies — Dreaming of food — Just a little box of tea
There was certainly nothing to keep us at Lamberts Land, so once more we tied our two wretched dogs on top of the load and set off, I pulling in front and Iver shoving behind. We emerged on to the outflow of the inland ice and had to contend with all the difficulties we now expected of it: narrow crevasses which we could just get across, or broad gullies with foaming rivers at the bottom, which were both difficult and dangerous to cross on ice-bridges that the sun had rendered fragile: perhaps they would hold, but they might also break, and then!…
None broke, however, though we crossed many, but we could never help shuddering at the possibility of falling in and meeting a certain death in the swirling icy water beneath. We got off that fearful ice as quickly as we could and toiled on towards the large island in the south where, according to the message left for Mylius-Erichsen at Mt Mallemuk, we should be able to find four or five cases of provisions, if our luck were with us. That would allow us to stay quietly on the island, the dark mountains on which appeared so near, though it took us four or five days to reach it.
By the time we got to the island, the last of our tinned food had been eaten and Iver had shot his dear Bjørn, skinned him, and, as he put it, made him nicely fit for human consumption. It was nice to be able to get our teeth into something, but there was not a particle of fat on the meat, so Iver had been wrong when he fingered Bjørn’s back and said that he could feel fat there. But what about the liver? Were we to eat it or not? It looked really inviting, yet we had an idea that dog’s liver was poisonous if the dog had died of exhaustion, and we felt that perhaps the fact that so many of ours had died in the autumn sledging was partially due to the fact that the live ones had eaten the livers of their dead fellows. It was rather a dilemma.
We tried to persuade ourselves that the poison which killed a dog need not necessarily be dangerous to humans, at the worst slightly harmful. We both thought that that sounded logical, yet I was not altogether happy in my mind about it. Then I remembered that there was something about putting a silver spoon into the pot in which anything possibly poisonous was to be cooked, so I got out a little silver frame I always carried on me, prised out the photograph, rubbed the frame till it was shining, and tied a thread to it, so that we could pull it out of the pot to see whether the liver was poisonous or not.
We felt that we really were taking all the requisite precautions, and so we boiled the dog’s liver along with the silver frame, and anxiously awaited the result: two pounds of meat is a tremendous quantity when you are nearly dying of hunger.
We must have forgotten something important about colours; but, however that was, when the liver had been cooking for about ten minutes and we hauled the frame out to see what had happened, we found that nothing much had changed, except that the frame was definitely not as bright as it had been, and also it had become slightly brown. The colour, we decided, did not look dangerous, so we agreed that, unless the frame actually turned green, the liver would be all right to eat.
The brown tint grew darker as the liver cooked, but the frame did not turn green, so we ate the liver and patted ourselves on the back at the clever way we had rescued that titbit for our shrunken stomachs.
However, the liver was not as good as we thought, for, shortly after we had eaten it, we fell into a heavy doze and only woke twenty-four hours later, and then with splitting headaches. Thus, despite our precautions, there must have been some poison in poor Bjørn’s liver, and we made each other a solemn promise that, when Grimrian’s hour came, we would not eat his liver.
There is not much meat on a worn-out, exhausted dog, and what there is does not have a nice taste; but it satisfied us more or less and that was the main thing. However, even with the liver and what we called marrow from the bones, the whole only provided meagre rations for a couple of days, and then it was Grimrian’s turn to go to the pot.
Iver shot him, and he had orders to throw the liver into the water at once, so that we should not be tempted. There was something I had to do in the tent, and when I had finished and looked out to see how it was going, I saw Grimrian’s skinned body lying on the ice, looking incredibly small and, for the first time, handsome and appetizing, while beside it lay the liver, also washed and appetizing.
I looked reproachfully at Iver, who said that he had just not been able to bring himself to throw that lovely pink food into the sea. Would I not do it myself?
Seeing that he had not done it, I must. Reproaching him for his failure, I walked briskly up to the liver, raised my foot to give it a good kick that would send it far out into the water — and gently lowered my foot again. I then turned to Iver, whose guilty expression had now become rather mocking.
We stood a long while looking at each other and the liver, while we tried to persuade ourselves that this liver, our last piece of edible meat, could not really be harmful. We argued the point to and fro, and that took time, but then Iver produced quite a fresh argument: “Listen,” said he, “Bjørn’s liver didn’t kill us, so Grimrian’s isn’t likely to either.”
There was no contesting that, so we closed our ears to the warning voices of common sense and caution, boiled the liver without the silver frame and ate it. It tasted delicious, but, of course, we should not have eaten it, for it was naturally as poisonous as Bjørn’s and had exactly the same effect: twenty hours of sleep and then a splitting headache.
It had other consequences which were considerably worse, but those we did not notice till some days later, but then we really did have to pay for our foolishness and greed.
It was difficult to reach the site of the cache — Schnauder Island, it was called — for there was an infinity of open channels, rushing rivers and thaw-water lakes that we had to cross or ford. We were sopping wet from the moment we began sledging towards the island, to which four cases of food drew us with irresistable force, till we were standing on it with aching limbs and swollen ankles. The latter were the result of slipping and falling on the uneven but glassy ice, and of stepping into the innumerable holes that the thaw had made in the surface, accursed, dangerous holes they were, almost hidden beneath a cover of ice or snow, sometimes as much as knee-deep and just large enough for a foot to go right in.
In the end, however, we reached land, wrung the water from our clothes, flung down the traces and looked at each other interrogatively: What now?
By that time, the last of Grimrian’s bones had been scraped clean and smashed to let us get at the marrow, and we did not have an ounce of food left, except for a couple of teaspoonsful of tea. There were only three possibilities: we must either find the cache, shoot something or die of starvation.
We at once set off along the shore, hoping that the cache might be not far away and intact. It was all we could do to stagger along. Iver had pains in his back and side, and his head ached with every step he took. He had been like that for a number of days now. He was worried and so was I, for it would be much worse having to contend with illness then, than it had been when I was sick, bad though that had been.
We were approaching the southern end of the island, and our hopes had dwindled to nothing, when, at quite a distance, we saw a square case on a shoulder of rock, a heavenly sight. We could scarcely walk, yet the sight of that provisions case was so stimulating that we managed to keep going till we reached it. It was as shining and whole as the day it was packed in Copenhagen, five or six years before!
What a joyful moment that was, as we stood in the twilight at that desolate spot, gazing at the tin case that simply shone in the semi-darkness, as though it were illuminated from within by the wonders it contained; a heaven-sent gift for exhausted and famished men. There was immediate solace for all our longings, for inside that case were provisions enough for a fortnight, perhaps a whole month or even longer, if we were as abstemious as hunger had taught us to be. There was all the heart could desire, except rest. Rest we had to have, several days’ rest before we could tackle such going again. Iver, in particular, needed it, for he was so thin that he scarcely cast a shadow, so ill that he could hardly stagger along, his face so ravaged that I expected him to collapse at any moment. We must rest for at least a week and gather strength, for there might be a hard time ahead of us on the 300 miles we had still to go before we reached Shannon Island. And the autumn was at hand!
After the first flush of joy, doubt and anxiety raised their heads: there should have been four or five cases, but we had only seen one. Where were the others? We began to search and in the gathering darkness we found the rest of them in a sheltered corner, or rather the remains, for some sledgers had halted there and sampled all the lovely food. How sated and content they must have been! There were plenty of traces of the cache: it had been destroyed by people who had never thought of the possibility that others might come there later, whom the food they ruined might have saved from dying of starvation. The cases had been burst open and the contents scattered far and wide. We searched among the stones and found individual tins with the contents apparently intact, but we found many more which had been split with an axe so that the dogs could eat what they contained: stew, goulash, jam, blood pudding and such things that were never intended as dog food.
It was men from the Danmark Expedition who had made the cache to assist Mylius-Erichsen and his companions on their return journey, and, naturally, people from the expedition had every right to use what they liked of their own provisions without accounting to any but their own consciences. And if it could have helped the object of the expedition in any way, they were obviously fully entitled to feed their dogs on food meant for people, even on delicacies — if the dogs would eat them. But the leaders of the Danmark Expedition can scarcely have been justified in marking “cache” at various localities on an official map, when they themselves had helped to empty, or almost empty, some of those caches before that map was even drawn. Such a thing could be mischievous. In fact, it all but killed us.
Never, even to ourselves, did we deny that the members of the Danmark Expedition could deal with their caches and their contents as they liked, but it was hard for famished men to find all those split tins with mouth-watering labels and to see in the dogs’ excrement undigested lumps of slab chocolate or biscuit that had been thrown for the dogs to scramble for and swallowed whole with several layers of wrapping paper, tinfoil and even string.
We hoped that the poor dogs had not had too bad stomach ache or diarrhoea from eating all that lovely chocolate that we would have given a year of our lives to have had; but we felt that they had deserved the difficulties that they must have had in getting rid of the undigested lumps that still lay scattered about the site of the orgy, a sort of corpus delicti, an accusation against a thoughtless man.
