A Man's Woman
"I can spare the dogs," wrote Bennett in his journal for that day—a Sunday—"but McPherson, one of the best men of the command, gives me some uneasiness. His frozen footnips have chafed sores in his ankle. One of these has ulcerated, and the doctor tells me is in a serious condition. His pain is so great that he can no longer haul with the others. Shall relieve him from work during the morrow's march. Less than a mile covered to-day. Meridian observation for latitude impossible on account of fog. Divine services at 5:30 p.m."
A week passed, then another. There was no change, neither in the character of the ice nor in the expedition's daily routine. Their toil was incredible; at times an hour's unremitting struggle would gain but a few yards. The dogs, instead of aiding them, were rapidly becoming mere encumbrances. Four more had been killed, a fifth had been drowned, and two, wandering from camp, had never returned. The second dog-sled had been abandoned. The condition of McPherson's foot was such that no work could be demanded from him. Hawes, the carpenter, was down with fever and kept everybody awake all night by talking in his sleep. Worse than all, however, Ferriss's right hand was again frostbitten, and this time Dennison, the doctor, was obliged to amputate it above the wrist.
"… But I am no whit disheartened," wrote Bennett. "Succeed I must and shall."
A few days after the operation on Ferriss's hand Bennett decided it would be advisable to allow the party a full twenty-four hours' rest. The march of the day before had been harder than any they had yet experienced, and, in addition to McPherson and the carpenter, the doctor himself was upon the sick list.
In the evening Bennett and Ferriss took a long walk or rather climb over the ice to the southwest, picking out a course for the next day's march.
A great friendship, not to say affection, had sprung up between these two men, a result of their long and close intimacy on board the Freja and of the hardships and perils they had shared during the past few weeks while leading the expedition in the retreat to the southward. When they had decided upon the track of the morrow's advance they sat down for a moment upon the crest of a hummock to breathe themselves, their elbows on their knees, looking off to the south over the desolation of broken ice.
With his one good hand Ferriss drew a pipe and a handful of tea leaves wrapped in oiled paper from the breast of his deer-skin parkie.
"Do you mind filling this pipe for me, Ward?" he asked of Bennett.
Bennett glanced at the tea leaves and handed them back to Ferriss, and in answer to his remonstrance produced a pouch of his own.
"Tobacco!" cried Ferriss, astonished; "why, I thought we smoked our last aboard ship."
"No, I saved a little of mine."
"Oh, well," answered Ferriss, trying to interfere with Bennett, who was filling his pipe, "I don't want your tobacco; this tea does very well."
"I tell you I have eight-tenths of a kilo left," lied Bennett, lighting the pipe and handing it back to him. "Whenever you want a smoke you can set to me."
Bennett lit a pipe of his own, and the two began to smoke.
"'M, ah!" murmured Ferriss, drawing upon the pipe ecstatically, "I thought I never was going to taste good weed again till we should get home."
Bennett said nothing. There was a long silence. Home! what did not that word mean for them? To leave all this hideous, grisly waste of ice behind, to have done with fighting, to rest, to forget responsibility, to have no more anxiety, to be warm once more—warm and well fed and dry—to see a tree again, to rub elbows with one's fellows, to know the meaning of warm handclasps and the faces of one's friends.
"Dick," began Bennett abruptly after a long while, "if we get stuck here in this damned ice I'm going to send you and probably Metz on ahead for help. We'll make a two-man kyack for you to use when you reach the limit of the pack, but besides the kyack you'll carry nothing but your provisions, sleeping-bags, and rifle, and travel as fast as you can." Bennett paused for a moment, then in a different voice continued: "I wrote a letter last night that I was going to give you in case I should have to send you on such a journey, but I think I might as well give it to you now."
He drew from his pocket an envelope carefully wrapped in oilskin.
"If anything should happen to the expedition—to me—I want you to see that this letter is delivered."
He paused again.
"You see, Dick, it's like this; there's a girl—" his face flamed suddenly, "no—no, a woman, a grand, noble, man's woman, back in God's country who is a great deal to me—everything in fact. She don't know, hasn't a guess, that I care. I never spoke to her about it. But if anything should turn up I should want her to know how it had been with me, how much she was to me. So I've written her. You'll see that she gets it, will you?"
He handed the little package to Ferriss, and continued indifferently, and resuming his accustomed manner:
"If we get as far as Wrangel Island you can give it back to me. We are bound to meet the relief ships or the steam whalers in that latitude. Oh, you can look at the address," added Bennett as Ferriss, turning the envelope bottom side up, was thrusting it into his breast pocket; "you know her even better than I do. It's Lloyd Searight."
Ferriss's teeth shut suddenly upon his pipestem.
Bennett rose. "Tell Muck Tu," he said, "in case I don't think of it again, that the dogs must be fed from now on from those that die. I shall want the dog biscuit and dried fish for our own use."
"I suppose it will come to that," answered Ferriss.
"Come to that!" returned Bennett grimly; "I hope the dogs themselves will live long enough for us to eat them. And don't misunderstand," he added; "I talk about our getting stuck in the ice, about my not pulling through; it's only because one must foresee everything, be prepared for everything. Remember—I—shall—pull—through."
But that night, long after the rest were sleeping, Ferriss, who had not closed his eyes, bestirred himself, and, as quietly as possible, crawled from his sleeping-bag. He fancied there was some slight change in the atmosphere, and wanted to read the barometer affixed to a stake just outside the tent. Yet when he had noted that it was, after all, stationary, he stood for a moment looking out across the ice with unseeing eyes. Then from a pocket in his furs he drew a little folder of morocco. It was pitiably worn, stained with sea-water, patched and repatched, its frayed edges sewed together again with ravellings of cloth and sea-grasses. Loosening with his teeth the thong of walrus-hide with which it was tied, Ferriss opened it and held it to the faint light of an aurora just paling in the northern sky.
"So," he muttered after a while, "so—Bennett, too—"
For a long time Ferriss stood looking at Lloyd's picture till the purple streamers in the north faded into the cold gray of the heavens. Then he shot a glance above him.
"God Almighty, bless her and keep her!" he prayed.
Far off, miles away, an ice-floe split with the prolonged reverberation of thunder. The aurora was gone. Ferriss returned to the tent.
The following week the expedition suffered miserably. Snowstorm followed snowstorm, the temperature dropped to twenty-two degrees below the freezing-point, and gales of wind from the east whipped and scourged the struggling men incessantly with myriad steel-tipped lashes. At night the agony in their feet was all but unbearable. It was impossible to be warm, impossible to be dry. Dennison, in a measure, recovered his health, but the ulcer on McPherson's foot had so eaten the flesh that the muscles were visible. Hawes's monotonous chatter and crazy whimperings filled the tent every night.
The only pleasures left them, the only breaks in the monotony of that life, were to eat, and, when possible, to sleep. Thought, reason, and reflection dwindled in their brains. Instincts—the primitive, elemental impulses of the animal—possessed them instead. To eat, to sleep, to be warm—they asked nothing better. The night's supper was a vision that dwelt in their imaginations hour after hour throughout the entire day. Oh, to sit about the blue flame of alcohol sputtering underneath the old and battered cooker of sheet-iron! To smell the delicious savour of the thick, boiling soup! And then the meal itself—to taste the hot, coarse, meaty food; to feel that unspeakably grateful warmth and glow, that almost divine sensation of satiety spreading through their poor, shivering bodies, and then sleep; sleep, though quivering with cold; sleep, though the wet searched the flesh to the very marrow; sleep, though the feet burned and crisped with torture; sleep, sleep, the dreamless stupefaction of exhaustion, the few hours' oblivion, the day's short armistice from pain!
But stronger, more insistent than even these instincts of the animal was the blind, unreasoned impulse that set their faces to the southward: "To get forward, to get forward." Answering the resistless influence of their leader, that indomitable man of iron whom no fortune could break nor bend, and who imposed his will upon them as it were a yoke of steel—this idea became for them a sort of obsession. Forward, if it were only a yard; if it were only a foot. Forward over the heart-breaking, rubble ice; forward against the biting, shrieking wind; forward in the face of the blinding snow; forward through the brittle crusts and icy water; forward, although every step was an agony, though the haul-rope cut like a dull knife, though their clothes were sheets of ice. Blinded, panting, bruised, bleeding, and exhausted, dogs and men, animals all, the expedition struggled forward.
One day, a little before noon, while lunch was being cooked, the sun broke through the clouds, and for upward of half an hour the ice-pack was one blinding, diamond glitter. Bennett ran for his sextant and got an observation, the first that had been possible for nearly a month. He worked out their latitude that same evening.
The next morning Ferriss was awakened by a touch on his shoulder. Bennett was standing over him.
"Come outside here a moment," said Bennett in a low voice. "Don't wake the men."
"Did you get our latitude?" asked Ferriss as the two came out of the tent.
"Yes, that's what I want to tell you."
"What is it?"
"Seventy-four-nineteen."
"Why, what do you mean?" asked Ferriss quickly.
"Just this: That the ice-pack we're on is drifting faster to the north than we are marching to the south. We are farther north now than we were a month ago for all our marching."
II
By eleven o'clock at night the gale had increased to such an extent and the sea had begun to build so high that it was a question whether or not the whaleboat would ride the storm. Bennett finally decided that it would be impossible to reach the land—stretching out in a long, dark blur to the southwest—that night, and that the boat must run before the wind if he was to keep her afloat. The number two cutter, with Ferriss in command, was a bad sailer, and had fallen astern. She was already out of hailing distance; but Bennett, who was at the whaleboat's tiller, in the instant's glance that he dared to shoot behind him saw with satisfaction that Ferriss had followed his example.
The whaleboat and the number two cutter were the only boats now left to the expedition. The third boat had been abandoned long before they had reached open water.
An hour later Adler, the sailing-master, who had been bailing, and who sat facing Bennett, looked back through the storm; then, turning to Bennett, said:
"Beg pardon, sir, I think they are signalling us."
Bennett did not answer, but, with his hand gripping the tiller, kept his face to the front, his glance alternating between the heaving prow of the boat and the huge gray billows hissing with froth careering rapidly alongside. To pause for a moment, to vary by ever so little from the course of the storm, might mean the drowning of them all. After a few moments Adler spoke again, touching his cap.
"I'm sure I see a signal, sir."
"No, you don't," answered Bennett.
"Beg pardon, I'm quite sure I do."
Bennett leaned toward him, the cast in his eyes twinkling with a wicked light, the furrow between the eyebrows deepening. "I tell you, you don't see any signal; do you understand? You don't see any signal until I choose to have you."
The night was bitter hard for the occupants of the whaleboat. In their weakened condition they were in no shape to fight a polar hurricane in an open boat.
For three weeks they had not known the meaning of full rations. During the first days after the line of march over the ice had been abruptly changed to the west in the hope of reaching open water, only three-quarter rations had been issued, and now for the last two days half rations had been their portion. The gnawing of hunger had begun. Every man was perceptibly weaker. Matters were getting desperate.
But by seven o'clock the next morning the storm had blown itself out. To Bennett's inexpressible relief the cutter hove in view. Shaping their course to landward once more, the boats kept company, and by the middle of the afternoon Bennett and the crew of the whaleboat successfully landed upon a bleak, desolate, and wind-scourged coast. But in some way, never afterward sufficiently explained, the cutter under Ferriss's command was crushed in the floating ice within one hundred yards of the shore. The men and stores were landed—the water being shallow enough for wading—but the boat was a hopeless wreck.
"I believe it's Cape Shelaski," said Bennett to Ferriss when camp had been made and their maps consulted. "But if it is, it's charted thirty-five minutes too far to the west."
Before breaking camp the next morning Bennett left this record under a cairn of rocks upon the highest point of the cape, further marking the spot by one of the boat's flags:
The Freja Arctic Exploring Expedition landed at this point October 28, 1891. Our ship was nipped and sunk in 76 deg. 10 min. north latitude on the l2th of July last. I then attempted a southerly march to Wrangel Island, but found such a course impracticable on account of northerly drift of ice. On the lst of October I accordingly struck off to the westward to find open water at the limit of the ice, being compelled to abandon one boat and two sledges on the way. A second boat was crushed beyond repair in drifting ice while attempting a landing at this place. Our one remaining boat being too small to accommodate the members of the expedition, circumstances oblige me to begin an overland march toward Kolyuchin Bay, following the line of the coast. We expect either to winter among the Chuckch settlements mentioned by Nordenskjold as existing upon the eastern shores of Kolyuchin Bay or to fall in with the relief ships or the steam whalers en route. By issuing half rations I have enough provisions for eighteen days, and have saved all records, observations, papers, instruments, etc. Enclosed is the muster roll of the expedition. No scurvy as yet and no deaths. Our sick are William Hawes, carpenter, arctic fever, serious; David McPherson, seaman, ulceration of left foot, serious. The general condition of the rest of the men is fair, though much weakened by exposure and lack of food.
(Signed) WARD BENNETT, Commanding.
But during the night, their first night on land, Bennett resolved upon a desperate expedient. Not only the boat was to be abandoned, but also the sledges, and not only the sledges, but every article of weight not absolutely necessary to the existence of the party. Two weeks before, the sun had set not to rise again for six months. Winter was upon them and darkness. The Enemy was drawing near. The great remorseless grip of the Ice was closing. It was no time for half-measures and hesitation; now it was life or death.
The sense of their peril, the nearness of the Enemy, strung Bennett's nerves taut as harp-strings. His will hardened to the flinty hardness of the ice itself. His strength of mind and of body seemed suddenly to quadruple itself. His determination was that of the battering-ram, blind, deaf, resistless. The ugly set of his face became all the more ugly, the contorted eyes flashing, the great jaw all but simian. He appeared physically larger. It was no longer a man; it was a giant, an ogre, a colossal jotun hurling ice-blocks, fighting out a battle unspeakable, in the dawn of the world, in chaos and in darkness.
The impedimenta of the expedition were broken up into packs that each man carried upon his shoulders. From now on everything that hindered the rapidity of their movements must be left behind. Six dogs (all that remained of the pack of eighteen) still accompanied them.
Bennett had hoped and had counted upon his men for an average daily march of sixteen miles, but the winter gales driving down from the northeast beat them back; the ice and snow that covered the land were no less uneven than the hummocks of the pack. All game had migrated far to the southward.
Every day the men grew weaker and weaker; their provisions dwindled. Again and again one or another of them, worn out beyond human endurance, would go to sleep while marching and would fall to the ground.
Upon the third day of this overland march one of the dogs suddenly collapsed upon the ground, exhausted and dying. Bennett had ordered such of the dogs that gave out cut up and their meat added to the store of the party's provisions. Ferriss and Muck Tu had started to pick up the dead dog when the other dogs, famished and savage, sprang upon their fallen mate. The two men struck and kicked, all to no purpose; the dogs turned upon them snarling and snapping. They, too, demanded to live; they, too, wanted to be fed. It was a hideous business. There in that half-night of the polar circle, lost and forgotten on a primordial shore, back into the stone age once more, men and animals fought one another for the privilege of eating a dead dog.
But their life was not all inhuman; Bennett at least could rise even above humanity, though his men must perforce be dragged so far below it. At the end of the first week Hawes, the carpenter, died. When they awoke in the morning he was found motionless and stiff in his sleeping-bag. Some sort of grave was dug, the poor racked body lowered into it, and before it was filled with snow and broken ice Bennett, standing quietly in the midst of the bare-headed group, opened his prayer-book and began with the tremendous words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life—"
It was the beginning of the end. A week later the actual starvation began. Slower and slower moved the expedition on its daily march, faltering, staggering, blinded and buffeted by the incessant northeast winds, cruel, merciless, keen as knife-blades. Hope long since was dead; resolve wore thin under friction of disaster; like a rat, hunger gnawed at them hour after hour; the cold was one unending agony. Still Bennett was unbroken, still he urged them forward. For so long as they could move he would drive them on.
Toward four o'clock on the afternoon of one particularly hard day, word was passed forward to Bennett at the head of the line that something was wrong in the rear.
"It's Adler; he's down again and can't get up; asks you to leave him."
Bennett halted the line and went back some little distance to find Adler lying prone upon his back, his eyes half closed, breathing short and fast. He shook him roughly by the shoulder.
"Up with you!"
Adler opened his eyes and shook his head.
"I—I'm done for this time, sir; just leave me here—please."
"H'up!" shouted Bennett; "you're not done for; I know better."
"Really, sir, I—I can't."
"H'up!"
"If you would only please—for God's sake, sir. It's more than I'm made for."
Bennett kicked him in the side.
"H'up with you!"
Adler struggled to his feet again, Bennett aiding him.
"Now, then, can you go five yards?"
"I think—I don't know—perhaps—"
"Go them, then."
The other moved forward.
"Can you go five more; answer, speak up, can you?"
Adler nodded his head.
"Go them—and another five—and another—there—that's something like a man, and let's have no more woman's drivel about dying."
"But—"
Bennett came close to him, shaking a forefinger in his face, thrusting forward his chin wickedly.
"My friend, I'll drive you like a dog, but," his fist clenched in the man's face, "I'll make you pull through."
Two hours later Adler finished the day's march at the head of the line.
The expedition began to eat its dogs. Every evening Bennett sent Muck Tu and Adler down to the shore to gather shrimps, though fifteen hundred of these shrimps hardly filled a gill measure. The party chewed reindeer-moss growing in scant patches in the snow-buried rocks, and at times made a thin, sickly infusion from the arctic willow. Again and again Bennett despatched the Esquimau and Clarke, the best shots in the party, on hunting expeditions to the southward. Invariably they returned empty-handed. Occasionally they reported old tracks of reindeer and foxes, but the winter colds had driven everything far inland. Once only Clarke shot a snow-bunting, a little bird hardly bigger than a sparrow. Still Bennett pushed forward.
One morning in the beginning of the third week, after a breakfast of two ounces of dog meat and a half cup of willow tea, Ferriss and Bennett found themselves a little apart from the others. The men were engaged in lowering the tent. Ferriss glanced behind to be assured he was out of hearing, then:
"How about McPherson?" he said in a low voice.
McPherson's foot was all but eaten to the bone by now. It was a miracle how the man had kept up thus far. But at length he had begun to fall behind; every day he straggled more and more, and the previous evening had reached camp nearly an hour after the tent had been pitched. But he was a plucky fellow, of sterner stuff than the sailing-master, Adler, and had no thought of giving up.
Bennett made no reply to Ferriss, and the chief engineer did not repeat the question. The day's march began; almost at once breast-high snowdrifts were encountered, and when these had been left behind the expedition involved itself upon the precipitate slopes of a huge talus of ice and bare, black slabs of basalt. Fully two hours were spent in clambering over this obstacle, and on its top Bennett halted to breathe the men. But when they started forward again it was found that McPherson could not keep his feet. When he had fallen, Adler and Dennison had endeavoured to lift him, but they themselves were so weak that they, too, fell. Dennison could not rise of his own efforts, and instead of helping McPherson had to be aided himself. Bennett came forward, put an arm about McPherson, and hauled him to an upright position. The man took a step forward, but his left foot immediately doubled under him, and he came to the ground again. Three times this manoeuvre was repeated; so far from marching, McPherson could not even stand.
"If I could have a day's rest—" began McPherson, unsteadily. Bennett cast a glance at Dennison, the doctor. Dennison shook his head. The foot, the entire leg below the knee, should have been amputated days ago. A month's rest even in a hospital at home would have benefited McPherson nothing.
For the fraction of a minute Bennett debated the question, then he turned to the command.
"Forward, men!"
"What—wh—" began McPherson, sitting upon the ground, looking from one face to another, bewildered, terrified. Some of the men began to move off.
"Wait—wait," exclaimed the cripple, "I—I can get along—I—" He rose to his knees, made, a great effort to regain his footing, and once more came crashing down upon the ice.
"Forward!"
"But—but—but—Oh, you're not going to leave me, sir?"
"Forward!"
"He's been my chum, sir, all through the voyage," said one of the men, touching his cap to Bennett; "I had just as soon be left with him. I'm about done myself."
Another joined in:
"I'll stay, too—I can't leave—it's—it's too terrible."
There was a moment's hesitation. Those who had begun to move on halted. The whole expedition wavered.
Bennett caught the dog-whip from Muck Tu's hand. His voice rang like the alarm of a trumpet.
"Forward!"
Once more Bennett's discipline prevailed. His iron hand shut down upon his men, more than ever resistless. Obediently they turned their faces to the southward. The march was resumed.