The Navigator of New York (52 page)

Unlike during the polar night, I did not dream, not while walking or while lying down, though I slept while walking. My mind slept while my body kept on moving through sheer habit. I would wake up to the sound of my own footsteps. I thought often of Kristine, wondered what she had thought when she read the letter in which I told her that I loved her. I thought of Aunt Daphne. Remembering how I had waited to hear of Dr. Cook when he was overdue on the South Pole expedition, I knew all too well what both of them were going through.

“Morning.” With that word from Dr. Cook, each day began. Not until the next morning, when he woke me with that word again, would I hear his voice. The rest of us no longer spoke at all.

On April 19, 1908, Dr. Cook told us that we were two days from the pole.

“We are almost there,” said Dr. Cook, smiling, as if his most recent observations and instrument readings had pleasantly surprised him, as if he had thought we were far from the pole but, having noticed and corrected some miscalculation, suddenly realized that we were “almost there.”

He had used this phrase before to keep us from growing too despondent, only to repeat it or qualify it days later, telling us that by “almost there,” he had meant we were “at most a week away.”

“We are two days away, possibly less,” he said when he noticed my scepticism. He told the Eskimos, and soon they were talking excitedly.

“We will get there late today,” he casually said the next morning.

As we set out, our three sleds behind his, I searched the terrain ahead of us, expecting it to change abruptly, expecting to enter some sort of polar zone, some clearly demarcated area at the heart of which would lie what was unmistakably “the pole.” I drew my sled up beside his.

“We are at the 89th parallel,” said Dr. Cook, as if to provide me with the sense of distinctiveness I was looking for.

We did not get there that day, or the next.

“Today for certain,” said Dr. Cook. “For certain, Devlin.”

The dogs, who sensed our excitement, began to bark and, without urging from us, ran faster than they ever had before. I could not help regarding the pole as the end and not the halfway point of our journey, as if there would be fixed shelters there and food in great abundance.

We crossed an unusually flat stretch of ice, and thinking this might be the pole, I looked expectantly at Dr. Cook. He smiled and shook his head.

We had proceeded at this frantic pace for perhaps three hours when Dr. Cook reined in his dogs, dug out his compass and his sextant and, staring at the compass, began to walk in long strides.

Now he walked more slowly, still staring at the compass. There was
no sound but the crunching of the ice beneath his snowshoes. He stopped, pocketed his compass and looked up at the sky.

He pointed as though at something in the distance, though all things, to my eyes, looked the same.

“Devlin, I want you to walk in a straight line,” he said, “and stop when I tell you to.”

I walked, barely able to resist the urge to fall to my knees, to lie down on my side and go to sleep. I walked for what seemed like a very long time, suspecting that I was no longer in earshot of the others, and that, if I turned around, I would not see them.

“STOP,” I faintly heard Dr. Cook shout. I stopped, turned and looked back to see him a hundred yards away, staring at his compass. He looked up at me. Even at that distance, I could see that he was smiling.

“YOU ARE THERE,” he shouted.

I looked about me, searching for some clue as to what he meant. “YOU ARE AT THE POLE,” he shouted. “YOU ARE THE FIRST.”

The meaning of his words had only begun to register on me when he started to run towards me. Ahwelah and Etukishuk urged their dogs forward, while the other dogs, with their unmanned sleds, followed close behind.

Dr. Cook jumped up and down, windmilling his arms, spinning in a circle.

It was April 22, 1908, a clear, cold day.

I could not believe that Dr. Cook had bestowed upon me the honour of preceding him and the others to the pole.

“The pole, Devlin. The pole, the pole,” he shouted as he ran towards me. I felt that I should run to meet him, but I could not bring myself to leave the spot.

Dr. Cook and the sleds reached me all at once. The dogs tipped back their heads and, almost in unison, began to howl. Dr. Cook threw his arms around my waist and somehow found the strength to lift me in the air. “THE POLE,” he screamed. “THE POLE AT LAST.
WE’RE HERE, DEVLIN. WE’RE HERE, BOYS. WE’RE HERE.”

I hugged him, then joined him in his celebratory dance. Etukishuk and Ahwelah did the same.

We had reached the pole on our first try—the pole for which Peary and all the others had tried so many times without success.

It was like standing at the origin of ice.

There was no time in this place where all meridians met. I fancied it would be possible to cross from one side of the globe to the other with one step, to forever alternate between midnight and midday.

Here, at the pole, each year would have but one day and one night. South lay in every direction. There was no north.

“Ours at last,” Dr. Cook said as he looked around at this place that I realized we would never see again. “I cannot bring myself to realize it. The prize of three centuries, yet it all seems so simple, so commonplace.”

“Ours at last,” I said.

“Congratulations, Devlin,” Dr. Cook said, looking at me from beneath the fur fringe of his hood.

“Congratulations, sir,” I said.

It was the first time I had ever addressed him as anything. Many sons called their fathers “sir.” I was surprised I had not thought of it before.

“She would be so proud of you,” he said.

“Of both of us, sir,” I said. After a long pause, during which the smile faded from his face, he nodded, then turned away. He fell to his knees and covered his face with his mitts, remaining in that position for so long that our two guides fell to
their
knees beside him.

I knelt beside Dr. Cook. He put one arm around my shoulders, the other around Etukishuk, who put his arm around Ahwelah. There we knelt, the four of us, as though we were posing for a photograph in that place of perpetual twilight where no other living thing had ever been.

We pointlessly planted a flag and buried by it in the snow a tin containing a piece of paper on which Dr. Cook had written our
names and the date of our arrival, “claiming” the spot as if the next person to make it to the pole would see that we had been there first. It would have made as much sense to mark a spot in the middle of the open sea with that tin and flag. Yet it seemed necessary.

W
E TURNED BACK
.

We were for so long trapped in our tent by storms that without realizing it, we had drifted far west, far into the Crown Prince Gustav Sea. There was open water everywhere, no route to Axel Heiberg Island, where we had buried the nearest of our caches of food. We had no choice but to go south with the ice. Dr. Cook hoped that we might reach Lancaster Sound and catch a Scottish whaling ship at Port Leopold, to which we were closer than we were to Greenland. But by September, we were near the shore of Baffin Bay, without food, fuel or ammunition.

Every so often, I became convinced that one of the others was missing, only to look around to find that there were still three of them, ahead, beside, behind me. At other times, I was certain that if I looked up from the ice, I would find myself alone, having strayed from or been abandoned by the others while I slept.

Strangest of all was the feeling I sometimes had that a fifth man was walking with us. Once, I was sure I saw him, trudging side by side with Dr. Cook. Sometimes he walked with Ahwelah or Etukishuk, head bowed as their heads were, though his hood was smooth and pointed, cowl-like. I wondered if the others saw him, too, but was afraid to ask, afraid to hear that they saw him at
my
side.

Death it must be, I thought, a hallucination that, to the others, would be a sign that, for me, the end was near. Yet it was them he was walking with, not me. To confirm this, I looked, when I could not see
him, to the left and right, and glanced behind me, relieved that as yet he had not chosen me as his companion.

But I awoke once from my walking sleep to see the other three in front of me, and at my side, visible at what might have been a deferential distance, a form at which I dared not look, keeping time with me inaudibly, the only one of us without a sled. As it seemed the others had done, I ignored him, hoping he would vanish. I dozed, but when I awoke again, this unknown fifth presence was still there, having stayed longer with me, it seemed, than he had with any of the others, as if death had appraised the four of us and chosen me, the youngest and the weakest.

When it seemed certain that he would not leave me, I decided to face him down, address him, convince him that my time had not yet come. The instant I raised my head, he raised his, each of us turning to face the other.

What had been a cowl was now a shawl framing the face of a woman who, though younger than me and looking nothing like “Amelia, the wicked one,” I knew to be my mother. Hers was not the face of an expeditionary. It was not ravaged by the elements or by privation. It was pale, almost translucent, and the eyes were blue. It was otherwise featureless.

She smiled. “You have nothing to fear from me,” she said.

I must have dozed again, though I remember only waking up to find that she was gone. I was too exhausted to dwell on this vision. I kept walking, and from then on saw her only in my mind, her face in its all-but-featureless perfection, smiling at me. I remembered her voice, which had seemed so close it might have been my own, assuring me that I had no need to be afraid.

We went westward to Cape Sparbo, where we decided to spend the polar night in a kind of cave. A centuries-old hubblestone house in the recess of a massive rise of rock, it had a sod-and-whalebone roof. Ahwelah said that his ancestors had built it. We found a ship’s hatch cover and a number of planks, and from these we made harpoons with which we hunted. We lined the house with the skins of
muskox and polar bears. Luckily, game was easy to come by. Even when one of their number had just been killed in their midst, the rest of the muskoxen had to be shooed away from the den.

Dr. Cook convinced me to join him in the habit that he had first taken up on the
Belgica
expedition. We lay outside on the ground at night when the wind was calm. I looked up at the sky through the blowhole in my sleeping bag, from which the vapour of my breath spouted at intervals. Once, I saw Etukishuk and Ahwelah peering out at us from the doorway of the house, clearly wondering if we had lost our minds. All I did as I lay there wide awake was watch the stars.

Sometimes, when the moon was full and especially bright, we went out walking with no practical purpose in mind, which also unnerved the Eskimos, who would scrutinize us all over when we returned, assuming that we had about our persons something we had gone out to retrieve.

I soon stopped thinking of the pole, finding it difficult to think of anything. Even in my dreams, my frostbitten fingers burned. In dreams, heaven was warm and balmy and the other place was cold.

The weather became so bad that we could not go outdoors. If it had come during the polar day, such a storm would have caused a white-out. But at night, we could not even see the snow.

Because the house faced south and the wind blew from the east, no snow came inside when the door was open. Able only to hear the frenzied sifting of the snow, I reached out my hand and drew it back, soaking wet, red with cold. At times, it sounded like the whole house was submerged. The world outside existed only as sound.

For weeks, there was little to do but sleep and, for Dr. Cook and me, read and write. The few books we had with us I read over and over. The wind, because it drowned out all other sounds, became a kind of silence, a roaring monotone that made conversation impossible. We communicated with our hands, pointing, making gestures, drawing pictures in the air.

Eventually, I could neither read nor write, nor even find the energy to eat.

One day when I awoke, it seemed as though the wind had begun to drop. I listened closely. The sound was muffled, as though my hands were covering my ears. I watched as Dr. Cook went to the “porch,” which was really just a crawlspace between the ground and an overhang of hubblestone. He pulled away the frame of fur-draped whalebone that served as our door, and I saw that the opening was blocked by hard-packed snow. He punched it and made but a tiny dent. Etukishuk crawled out of his sleeping bag and gave him his harpoon. Dr. Cook pushed it as far into the snow as he could, but he could not make an airhole.

The remote, muffled sound of the wind was the measure of just how deeply buried we were. Too deep to dig out. Dr. Cook was exhausted by his few minutes of exertion. Like me, Ahwelah had remained in his sleeping bag, watching their frenetic struggle with disinterest. There was nothing for us to do, Dr. Cook said, but get back in our bags and conserve our small supply of air by moving no more than we absolutely had to.

A day later, we were still conscious, so I knew that some air was getting in through the snow, though there was no telling how much longer it would last. I wondered if the whalebone roof would hold. I used my watch, which I feared would not resume its ticking each time I rewound it, to keep track of the days.

The sound of the wind grew ever more faint, until I began to wonder if it was doing so because the snow in which we were entombed was getting deeper or because I was becoming less and less able to attend to sound.

The four of us lived in a perpetual state of drowsiness, unable to resist the urge to sleep, to close our eyes, always waking up with a start, wondering if we were still alive or if we now inhabited some other world.

I assumed that the end would come when I could no longer hear the wind, so I strained to hear it, as if the sound was air, a precious trickle of it seeping in—as if as long as we could hear it, we could breathe.