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The fifteen-minute walk they’d enjoyed from the dinghy to the ridge morphed into a three-quarters-of-an-hour hike back. Until they reached the open water and saw the four-man boat as they’d left it, he’d imagined the ice had already split and their ride had drifted away, leaving them stranded. It was an unfounded fear. The ice still held and the Hvalur Batur was only a quarter mile distant. Any stranding would have been short-lived.
It was easier for Arn to crawl into the boat, dragging his bum leg, than to step across the gunwale of the little craft.
“This is no way for a sailor to put to sea,” he said stoically.
Ivar retorted, “I’ve seen you drunk-crawl up a ratline on a bet, Arn Bjørnson, so what’s your complaint?”
Bell took to the oars, finding battling a Beaufort scale wind a little more difficult than rowing Marion around the lake in Central Park on a lazy summer afternoon. Very quickly, he felt his body temperature rising at the same time his face was freezing. His lungs were near struggling by the time he positioned the dinghy under the hanging ropes of the Batur’s davits. Ivar secured the lines to the lift points while, above them, crewmen waited to haul them up to the deck. With the weather deteriorating further, the men worked swiftly and professionally.
Ivar helped Arn out of the boat once they were safely aboard. One of the Petrs was there to help him to a cabin while Bell made his way up to the bridge, where Captain Fyrie stood at the helm, one eye on the weather off to starboard, the other on the ice floe directly ahead. Despite its drafty nature, the bridge felt blessedly warm. Bell helped himself to some coffee from a glass-lined metal thermos.
“How did it go?” Fyrie asked.
Bell sipped at the steaming mug, and said, “I can scratch facing down a charging polar bear from the list of things I’ve never done.”
The captain didn’t so much as glance in Bell’s direction when he said, “That’s just another rite of passage in the Arctic.”
A big gust of wind hit the ship just then, followed almost immediately by a particularly strong swell. The whaler rose up and then dropped into the trough. For a second, they lost their view of the ice floe, but they distinctly heard what happened when the wave passed below it. The crack was as loud as thunder would be from directly overhead, a single deafening sound that hit like a physical assault. When the ship rose up again, the floe ahead of them had been cleaved in two exactly where the thermite had weakened the ridge.
“Congratulations, Mr. Bell, on a job well done.” This time, Fyrie cracked a smile.
An hour later, the wind had shuffled the ice enough for the captain to thread his ship between the shattered floes and find an area of open water beyond. After nearly half a day drifting with the pack, Fyrie was again able to turn the Hvalur Batur eastward and pour on the steam for the scheduled rendezvous with the Coloradan miners.
22
Fyrie didn’t leave the bridge again over the next two days, pushing the ship and crew—and mostly himself—to make up lost time. Bell had impressed upon Fyrie how important it was to reach Brewster and the others by the first of April. He didn’t think the miners would mutiny if the ship wasn’t there on time, and he certainly didn’t fear a physical retribution from Brewster should they be late reaching Novaya Zemlya. The consequences were more personal. What he’d done was give Brewster his word that if he could meet an impossible deadline, Bell would too. And for a man like Isaac Bell, not keeping his word was as dishonorable an act as he could think of.
The weather never improved, which was a blessing because it meant the pack ice continued to break up and they’d have to detour less and less.
On the morning of April first, the ship ran into icy cold fog. Somewhere ahead, there was an area where the sea’s surface was warmer than the air, and the only way that was possible this far north was if they were approaching land. Fyrie slowed the ship and set a watchman up on the mast with a signal bell. By noon, the fog had thinned, and out of the mist rose the massif of Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago consisting mainly of two islands stretching almost six hundred miles in length and separated by a mile-wide channel. By chance they had reached their target abreast of the strait.
The islands were an extension of the Urals chain, so a mountainous spine ran long the centerline. To the north, a thick permanent snowpack hid all but the tallest of the mile-high peaks, while to the south the hilly tundra was emerging from under its winter mantle of snow. It was a bleak, ugly place not fit for human habitation. Bell could well understand how its mineral riches had gone unnoticed for so long. Had Brewster not been stranded here in the first place, who knows how long it would have been before the archipelago was properly surveyed.
“You said a hundred miles due north of the Matochkin Strait?” Fyrie asked. His eyes were bleary and his once-broad shoulders were stooped with exhaustion.
“Yes,” Bell replied. “They’re on the other side of the islands. We need to transit the strait to the Kara Sea and then head north. Brewster said there’s a sheltered bay in the shadow of Bednaya Mountain where he’ll meet us.”
“Good thing the channel’s already ice-free,” Arn said. He had just come up from the galley with sandwiches of canned meat on freshly baked bread still warm from the oven and another thermos of sweet coffee. He still walked with a limp, but the bear attack had done no lasting damage. He saw the fatigue in every line and crease etched on his captain’s face. “Why don’t you let me steer for a bit, Captain. The way’s clear, and you look like you can use some sleep.”
Fyrie didn’t protest. He wolfed down a sandwich and, like before, settled on the floor at the rear of the bridge under a couple of blankets next to a coal-burning stove. He promptly fell into a death-like sleep. Bell ate his lunch a little more leisurely as Arn steered the ship into the narrow strait. At one point, they passed a colony of disinterested walruses sunning themselves on a pebbly beach. Some of the big males had tusks at least three feet long and easily tipped the scales at four thousand pounds.
Dinner that night was a thick and creamy fish stew, and several extra pots of it were left to warm on the stove. They were nearing the rendezvous. Once again, Fyrie was on the bridge, though a crewman named Gunnar manned the helm. Bell stood a little behind the captain’s elevated chair. The sun was hidden by the mountains and glaciers of the northern island of the archipelago. The shadows were long and fixed. The skies were clouding up, and a constant wind rattled the bridge windows and buffeted the ship.
The little vessel was just a speck compared to the ominous mountains and icy glaciers rolling by on her port side. Bell felt a vulnerability in the face of such raw Nature. For the first time, he came to appreciate the task Joshua Hayes Brewster had set for himself.
As if reading his mind, Captain Fyrie said, “Your friend is either fearless or crazy to come here.”
“A little of both, I think,” Bell replied. “I had no idea how barren and desolate a place could be. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
“The most forlorn coast of Iceland looks like paradise compared to this heap,” Fyrie remarked. “I can’t imagine spending the winter here. It had to have been hell.”
A half hour later, the ship chugged into a bay just as Brewster had described. Looming out of an ice field was the naked flank of Bednaya Mountain, a black craggy tor that rose like a shark’s fin. The bay was ringed by a rocky beach, but beyond it stretching to the foothills was a bog humped with moss hillocks and riven with frozen ponds and streams. During the summer, it would melt into a soggy morass that would be as impenetrable as any tract on earth.
As they drew deeper into the bay, Bell noted smoke coming from where a river would discharge into the sea once winter relinquished its grip on the landscape. He pointed out the spot to Fyrie, who nodded and adjusted course accordingly.
In the lee of the mountains, the wind became less intense but still tore at the ocean’s surface, rendering it into a churning dark mass capped with occasional splashes of white foam. A lone bird glided for a moment just beyond the whaler’s windscreen before peeling off, lost in the scudding clouds.
Not knowing the depth of the bay, Fyrie ordered a crewman to the rail with a sounding weight attached to a line marked out in meters. The door to the bridge wing had to remain open for his calls to be heard. When they were two hundred yards from the coast, the bott
