Ilatsiak - 42

David watched as the snow beneath the sled runners passed underneath, the only features were the footprints of the dogs pulling up ahead. The snow itself now seemed to be covered with death. Grey, cold, damp death.
David sat rocking gently with the motion of the sled as it made its way over the wind blown snow hummocks, his mind a blank, almost in a stupor, then the dogs made a sudden change in pace. Realising they must have detected something, David shook himself alert. Raising in a single fluid movement as he halted the dog sled, he slowly came to his feet and stood, and looked at the scene just slightly above him on the little island ahead of the dogs. It might have been a sleeping camp, but he knew it wasn’t. People had already been here and now he understood what it was that they had tried to keep from him. It was about what they had found. It was about the death of the men from the ships. However, this place didn’t match the stories he had heard. Even with the snow cover, David saw there were no ridges behind the tents, no little ponds where ducks had been killed. In the stories he had heard, there was a low stone wall built by the shipmen, where they had hid as they shot ducks or geese landing on the ponds. This place was clearly an island like Toonoonee, but this was not Toonoonee. This place was too far to the east. David had never heard stories of the ship people coming here to this place so far to the east. He began to get excited. Perhaps the people here could explain why Goodsir and the others had been walking southward.
On the sandy knoll a little back from shore he could see their two large tents, one beside the other. The three uprights on one were still standing, but it appeared that the ridge pole on the other had been taken down, leaving only the two uprights remaining, frozen into the ground with the tent draped over them. The center part of the tent was flapping in the light wind that continued to blow, left over from the previous day’s storm. On the wide open top of the island, only about 30 feet perhaps above the sea surface, the tents’ inhabitants had found nothing to offer protection from the wind when they had been set up.
This year, for some reason, spring had been a time of contradictions. Nothing seemed to have gone the way one might have expected it should. His Inuit friends and family had complained bitterly that it was fate, that perhaps taboos had been broken, but whatever it was it couldn’t be helped and one must just make do. Perhaps a shaman would come soon and tell them what to do, but in the meantime, food was scarce, the weather was either too wet, too cold, too foggy and always miserable.
As the sled got closer to the shore, David began to dread what he would find. He had seen no one outside the tents nor any activity of any kind. He slowly moved up the little slope into the campsite. The low mounds in the snow hid nothing. In places the snow cover was not complete and the dark cloth of navy overcoats could be seen. A couple of men were lying dead, unburied in the stark white snow. Opening the flap on the only standing tent revealed about five others, in their sleeping sacks, also dead. David looked down on them. In a gruesome way, they were seemingly asleep. They seemed mostly crew members from from the Terror, but all were people he had known these past four years, but ghastly replicas of the men they had once been. Their faces were grizzled, thin, their lips black from once bleeding gums and hemorrhaging. Two slept contorted, twisted together in awful shapes, as if they had died in a wrestling match. The others just lay there as if they hadn’t noticed anything going on. Had they died first? Their clothes were perhaps the biggest shock, all tattered and makeshift and ill-fitting. They seemed to have been making do with borrowed items which did not fit. Why? How could this be? David had never ceased to be amazed at the vaste quantity of clothing the expedition carried on the ships. What had happened to it all? Why were these men wearing old blanket cloth, all dirty and ragged, wrapped around their legs and over their boots? Everything he saw just brought up more questions and no answers.
David let the tent flap drop. Outside, he was swept by a cold feeling of horror. It was too much to believe that all this had happened, especially without him knowing about it. How had the dream of the Northwest Passage had come to this? He felt himself stagger backwards, his foot catch on a hard-packed snowdrift, and then fall down, landing roughly on his side. His eyes opened to another sight, a face mostly eaten away, probably by a wandering fox. Scrambling to his feet, David slipped, crawled, then ran to his sled. Giving the runner a good nudge with his soft sealskin booted foot, he murmmered a low command to the dogs and with the crack of the whip turned them and returned eastwards again along his tracks, but he may as well have been sledding to nowhere. What he had seen was worse, far worse than the stories people had been telling each other when they thought he wasn’t listening. How had they all died? Why? When last he had heard about the crews, he remembered Pocock saying that things had been deteriorating, true, even fighting and arguing with the officers, but he had not mentioned anything to compare with all this death. Of course that had been almost a year ago and much had obviously changed since then. The situation at the campsite was beyond him. Had both crews all died? If not, where had the others gone? David tried to remember how many bodies he had seen, but it was impossible to even quess with many covered with snow. Maybe there were thirty or fifty, perhaps more.