Fatal Passage by Ken McGoogan

Author:Ken McGoogan [Ken McGoogan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781554689194
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

On August 15, 1853, in a cold, drizzling rain, John Rae sailed into Repulse Bay. The last few days had produced a lot of thick fog and little excitement. In Roe’s Welcome Sound, the party had come upon 300 walruses lying on rocks a few miles from shore. The men had wounded a number of these agile creatures, and Rae had managed to actually kill one, “an immensely large fellow” whose fat would provide enough lamp oil for the entire winter.

Repulse Bay looked more bleak and dreary, more forbidding, than Rae remembered. For mid-August, it also wore a more wintry and Arctic aspect than he had expected to face so early. Thick masses of ice clogged the shoreline, and immense snowdrifts filled every ravine and every steep bank with a southern exposure. A mass of ice and snow several feet deep covered his old landing place. Proceeding slowly up the North Pole River, Rae located a new, more amenable landing spot and moored the boat.

Jumping ashore, awash in memories, Rae went directly to Fort Hope, the dwelling he had constructed in 1846. He found the stone walls exactly as he had left them. The little mud oven, although exposed to the weather, was still in perfect condition. Some Inuit had used it to cache meat. In the moss, he found the path where every night before going to bed, he had paced back and forth to warm his feet. Around the stone house, in the hard-packed mud, he found footprints tracing the outlines of his men’s British-made shoes, the marks as clear and fresh as if they had been made seven days rather than seven years before.

Everything looked so familiar and yet so different. Rae completed his reconnaisance with mixed feelings—the winter he had spent here had not been easy—then returned to the river. He found the boat moored, the tents pitched, and the cargo partly unloaded. This gratified him enormously, “my fellows being all so well up in their work that they did not require my superintendence.”

During his preliminary inspection, the eagle-eyed Rae had detected no signs of recent visits by Inuit hunters. He was disappointed. From them, he hoped to acquire sled dogs. Without dogs, the expedition would be reduced to man-hauling, which he knew to be brutal work. What is more, the absence of hunters suggested that perhaps the caribou had adopted a different migration route. Rae had brought enough food to last three months. Would he be able to find enough game to provide for the other six? Finally, Rae had noticed that little of his favourite fuel—the heather-like plant Andromeda tetragona—had blossomed in this unusually cold season. Would his men be able to gather enough to last the winter?

Rae allowed himself two weeks to answer these questions.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.