Collector of Lost Things (31 page)

He stared at me, incredulous. Once more I was struck by the mixture of expressions that seemed to flit, ever-restless, on his face. One moment impatient, then curious, as if these feelings rose to the surface beyond his control.

‘I take it this is an amusing joke you have devised, to pass the time?’

‘You will see for yourself.’

‘I shall.’

‘It is feeding again. You might try it with some strips of fish.’

‘If I have the time.’

Why was this man so constantly infuriating? ‘You seem uninterested, Mr French,’ I asked, with a politeness I certainly didn’t feel.

‘I slept badly last night,’ he said, an edge to his voice suggesting I ought to take note. The image I’d had of him, pressing his ear against his cabin wall, perhaps had a degree of accuracy.

We had moored at various Esquimaux settlements along the coast, where French would trade the Sheffield steel plates, hooks and needles for freshly prepared animal hides. At this one, it appeared as though we were keenly expected. Laid out in one of the sheds were many bundles of sealskin, bound in hide strips, as well as reindeer skins and musk oxen, whose hides hung off each side of the trestle table, touching the floor, and were so deep with dark black hair that I could easily bury my hand and wrist in it. There were also various artefacts carved out of walrus bone—brooches, pipes and letter openers. A couple of wolf skins were held up to us, grey as smoke and darkened along the spine, and a small pelt that was of pure white which was said to be from an arctic fox.

‘No bear?’ French asked, disappointed.

In broken English the local man described a late blizzard when three bears had come to the village. He went to the side of the shack and pretended to peer round the corner, acting afraid.

‘You must shoot them, man,’ French said, with great dismissiveness. ‘My captain wants bearskins, you understand? He’ll pay for the white bear.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the man replied. ‘Shoot bear.
Skyde isbjørn.
’

‘Any bear?’ Sykes called, standing on a rock near the shore.

‘No, sir,’ French said. ‘Ask this fellow why, if you can be bothered.’

‘Do we have a coward?’ Sykes said.

‘Yes,’ French replied, before turning back to the man. ‘A coward, my captain says.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the man agreed. ‘We shoot
isbjørn.
’

I wasn’t keen on this general mockery. It contradicted the easily seen evidence that this was, in fact, a great haul. Sykes came to the shed, refusing to look at the Esquimaux, but addressing French directly. ‘We’ll have the men start ferrying, and we’ll fill up with water from the stream over there. I’ve drunk from this place before. It’s certainly good water, crisp and straight from the ice.’ He looked at me as if I was a separate problem for his consideration. ‘How are the preparations of the skins?’ he asked French.

‘Very fine.’

‘Who does them?’

French shrugged. ‘One of the old hags, I believe.’

‘Any nicks?’ the captain asked.

‘They are very fine, as I said.’

‘Have the men bring over the birds we have. I have decided they must be skinned here.’

‘Right, well, in that case I shall return to the ship. This fellow stinks.’

‘What are you in such a hurry for?’ Sykes asked.

‘You are well aware of my thoughts on the Esquimaux. Riddled with lice, and that’s just the start.’

The captain looked at me, smiling softly. ‘No bears!’ he scoffed. ‘We shall be here a while, if you wish to entertain yourself.’ He looked out across the bay. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘The petrels are flying. We’ll have bad weather ahead.’ With that he turned, a captain without a ship, but pacing a deck nonetheless.

I had come ashore not to partake in the trading, but to be as far away from it as possible. From the deck that morning I had spied the great slab of bare rock that rose behind the settlement and known that it promised all the solitude and escape I needed. I hadn’t seen Clara. Not at breakfast, nor as the men finished at the bilge pump, bent the sails and made the whaleboats ready for the trip to shore. I had waited until the last minute, hoping the commotion on deck would bring her from her cabin. But to no avail. Holding her during the night, calling her Celeste, then her disappearing before dawn, it made me quietly anxious. As I climbed behind the settlement, up a small path that led steeply to the crag, I wondered why I had insisted on calling her Celeste. I felt I had let a djinn from the bottle. For ten years my feelings for Celeste had been secret. A secret obsession. To call her by her true name was a shattering of the spell. And dreams are best not spoken of.

As I climbed, I distracted myself with the spectacular view. First, the settlement receded into its sheltering cove, the turf roofs virtually disappearing among the rocks and grasses, as if they and the few people who lived there were negligible. Then the bay widened in size, filled for as far as I could observe with icebergs, a great fleet at anchor, their sides as white as sails set for ocean journeys. In their middle, the dark wooden shape of the
Amethyst
appeared spidery and fragile, a nest of twigs among the swans.

The sounds of dogs yapping behind the settlement came and went. I watched the whaleboats busily ferrying water and supplies back and forth between ship and shore, soundless at this distance. I thought of my own cabin, how cosy and welcoming it had felt last night, so homely, a bed shared by a man and a woman, a bed I had never known before. Yet here, surrounded by the jagged ice, that same intimacy felt seconds away from disaster. Was she still in her cabin? What was she thinking? She had once asked me never to leave the ship again, yet I had. I felt fearful. She had asked me to pinch her. And I had obliged, willingly, not understanding why, enthralled and out of my depth.

The air grew cold and very fresh, with a gritty breeze coming off the land. Perhaps it was this wind that set sail to the bergs, pushing them out to sea. I felt strong and invigorated by the climb, and was glad I’d aimed for the summit, for when I reached it I was greeted by one of the most astounding sights of my life.

Stretching from where I stood was a glacier that curved in a vast snake of movement and ancient cracks, rising for several hundreds of feet and pierced by a chain of black mountains several miles away, shrouded in mist.

I climbed down towards it across rocks glazed with a fine and perfectly transparent coating of ice. It was difficult progress and I was afraid of slipping, but gradually the slope eased and I stepped onto the glacier. I was scared that my legs might sink into it, as if stepping upon a cloud, but the ice was as hard as granite; harder, in fact, than I could have imagined. The surface was weathered and jagged, stained dirty white and pitted with erosions. In some places a hard crystalline grit had blown and refrozen, with the texture of ground glass.

I have wondered at times why I chose to walk upon it, but I knew even at the time that it was irresistible. It was as solid as rock but made of water, frozen and ancient yet moving with the curved spine of something animal. How tremendous! Beyond its fragmented edge, the glacier became smooth. For several hundred yards I walked towards the line of black mountains—or nunataks as they are known—that snagged the fabric of this great sheet.

When I turned away from the wind, the only sounds were a distant rushing of water, impossible to place, and the small trickling of a stream that must have been very near or indeed below my feet. It is difficult now to understand how I failed to notice the wisps of cloud that had drifted above, gathering in strands. But suddenly a freezing mist settled around me, and as I tried to run back a fog descended, swamping me, arriving as if from nowhere.

The light diminished to a grey twilight and after a few rapid steps I realised I was utterly disorientated. I sat, deciding to wait. With dismay I felt the fog grow thicker and colder. I buttoned my jacket and turned up the collar, sickened by my recklessness and naivety, that I had so foolishly walked into a landscape I knew so little about. I thought about shouting, but knew I could not be heard and something, even then, prevented me from calling out for help. There was a dimension to the fog’s blankness that I felt wary of. Shadows and solid outlines appeared and vanished, as theatre wings might slide back and forth across a partially lit stage. I remembered when I had been on deck as the ship had been guided through a similar fog, with the men on watch looking for bergs and reefs, and that only I had seen the sheer cliff of ice that passed alongside the boat, before it vanished. The Arctic, I thought, it is a place for visions. So vast and empty, with air so crystal pure that distances appear foreshortened as though all exists in one perfect view. You might reach out your fingers and touch all that you see, yet a few steps away is always this: a blindness. It’s a wilderness that can encircle you, remove your perception, and dull your mind. I thought of the filigree of cracks that veined the sea ice like frozen cobwebs, then the breath of the whales, rising like the puff of smoke in a conjuror’s trick; of how the carcasses of meat hung in the rigging had frozen and clouded with ice, and the first sight of the auks appearing through the mist. There were many shrouds and partial obscurations. The seal in its breathing hole had slipped under water, never to return. It had sunk into a deep whose shadow beneath the ice was as black and impenetrable as oil. It was an animal that had drowned, but it had died like a human. A face slipping into the eternal. Water consumes. It takes away. And it lingers long in the memory.

I remembered her whispering
thank you
to me, during the night.
Thank you, for saving me.
I had held her, tightly, afraid that she might slip away from me again. I had held her wrists, not able to let her go.

Please,
she had murmured,
not so tight. You are hurting me.

In the fog, a distinct new sound emerged: a scraping noise, intermittent. I tensed, knowing the sound was that of an animal, a large animal. The fear left me dry-mouthed. I crouched, silently, staring into the cloud, trying to discern any silhouette that might appear. The scraping continued for a few seconds, then stopped. I tried to hold my breath, sure now that it was a bear, a great white bear.

An outline began to emerge. I thought of Captain Bray’s warning of how, after shaking hands with the polar bear, the scent of the mother would be on me, unable to be washed off, rendering me visible to a vengeful offspring. I took an involuntary step back, trying desperately to conceal myself as the ghostly shape moved, in the forlorn hope it might not come my way. I smelt the scent of musk and, at the same time, the animal stopped to face me. The fog thickened briefly, then without warning it parted. I saw, standing, not the outline of a bear, but a man, dressed in a thick coat, looking straight at me. I gasped, thinking it must be Huntsman, fearing what this meant, as the man walked rapidly towards me. The briskness of his stride was familiar. So was the way that he spoke, in a matter-of-fact and concise manner.

‘You are lost, Mr Saxby,’ Talbot said.

My relief was overwhelming. ‘Oh, thank God it’s you,’ I replied.

Surprisingly, he smiled, quite warmly. He stood close and, in no immediate hurry, offered me some pipe tobacco. ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘the fog came swiftly.’

We smoked our pipes together, regarding the cloud that surrounded us. ‘This is a strange place,’ he said. ‘They say hell is flames, but I disagree. It is this—it is frozen.’ He squinted at me, knowingly, and again gave me that unexpectedly warm smile. He slapped me hard on the back. ‘What possessed you to venture onto the glacier?’

What indeed, I thought. Curiosity? Surely, but it was more than that. I had been drawn to it. Drawn by a force that was stronger than my will to resist.

‘I think you understand,’ I said.

He regarded me, narrowing his eyes, a look I had seen when he weighed up one of his team, deciding on an order to be given. ‘No. I don’t understand,’ he replied. ‘Come on, man, let’s get you out of here.’

‘I thought you were a bear,’ I told him. He laughed, telling me it had been said before. ‘Your jacket,’ I added, following a few steps behind him, ‘your jacket stinks like a bear.’

‘It does?’ he replied, amused, smelling his own lapel. ‘I think you are right, Mr Saxby.’

‘When you were coming through the fog, I listened to the scraping sound you made—I thought you were some terrible animal, wounded and hungry, scenting me out. I realise now, it is merely the way you limp, Mr Talbot—perhaps as a result of frostbite?’

He stopped, fixing me with a questioning glance. He looked at his boots for explanation. ‘I have no
limp
, Mr Saxby. I was merely leaving scuff marks, so we might find our way off this infernal slab of ice.’ He kicked his boot against the surface. ‘See? Scuff, scuff.’

The men had made a fire on the shore and were cooking reindeer steaks upon a griddle, much as the Danish whalers had cooked the whale meat earlier in the voyage. As I walked between the houses a dog ran past, wagging its tail with excited greeting. Then a child approached and—for no apparent reason—passed into my hand a pebble she had found on the shore. The stone was warm, from her touch, and it felt smooth and soothing as I closed my palm around it. With this simple gift, I welcomed all that I saw: the fringe of humanity that clung to this wilderness. I was hungry for the cooked reindeer, I wanted the company of the men, I wanted to be in a place that I recognised and understood.

‘Mr Saxby,’ Talbot said, breaking the silence he had adopted on approaching the settlement. ‘I might have been a bear, you understand that?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, grateful, and humbled.

Along the shore, the seven bodies of the great auks had been skinned and laid out across a flat rock. An elderly Esquimaux woman was rinsing the last of them in the bloodied water that lapped against the shingle. I looked at the pelts, reminded of their first drowning in the gulley on Eldey. The poor animals had been drowned a second time. The woman’s hands looked leather-thick and greasy with the business of skinning. As she walked away, she spat on the stones, shook her head and uttered something. It sounded like
Djævelen fugle,
which I have since learnt is Danish. It means
birds of the devil.