Empire of Ice and Stone by Buddy Levy

Author:Buddy Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

27

FERRYING

Captain Bartlett took off his snow goggles, wiping the condensed ice from the lenses, and squinted at the open lead before him. The dogs barked and backed away, frightened. Kataktovik was coming back from a foray to find a better place to cross; he appeared just a dark fleck against a universe of white. He arrived shaking his head. Nothing better in that direction. Bartlett had spent an hour scouting in the opposite direction and found no narrower place either. They’d have to cross here.

It had been like this in the days since shooting the bear: lead after lead, unloading and crossing and ferrying and reloading again. They’d march forward for a time, and then come to another lead. It was tedious, tiring, and slow. And the winds and snow had kept on, so that as Bartlett surveyed their gear, “everything was white; boxes, bags, sleeping-robes, all the objects, in fact, were blended into the one dead tone.” But they had to get it all across. The present lead was wider than Bartlett would have liked, but there was some young ice jutting outward toward the other side, with tongues of drifted snow forming a sort of bridge, and Bartlett had an idea. He remembered a technique for crossing leads he’d seen as a boy working with Newfoundland whalers. First, he tied a rope around Kataktovik’s waist so he could pull him out if he fell in. Then he took tent poles from the sled and, because Kataktovik was lighter, had him walk as far out on the young ice with the poles as he could. Kataktovik lay the tent poles across, spanning the open water. Slowly and carefully, Kataktovik got down on his belly and crawled, slithering across the tent poles and snow bridge to the other side.

Bartlett had unloaded most of the sled, leaving just a small load. Two ropes were tied at either end. Kataktovik held a rope tied to the stern, and he eased the partially loaded sled across, unloaded it, and Bartlett hauled it back empty. He placed more items in it and they repeated the process, again and again, until all the stores and gear were safely on Kataktovik’s side. All but one dog made it across on their own. The last, Kaiser, had a habit of running off, so Bartlett tethered his collar to the sled, and Kataktovik pulled him over.

Bartlett went last. He lay facedown on the sled and told Kataktovik to sling the rope over his shoulders and run as fast as he could. Kataktovik sprinted and the sled sped over the ice, the runners breaking through, water splashing Bartlett in the face. With the sound of cracking ice and the sled runners submerging, Bartlett feared he might go under, but Kataktovik ran hard, looking over his shoulder until the captain was jostling along on rough ice on the other side.

The procedure, including the time they’d spent looking for a better place to cross, had taken a couple of hours. Bartlett

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