The Terror

homes projecting out from the cliffs that would have grassy roofs come summer.

The people here were called Oleekataliks, which he thought meant “Men with Capes,” although the outer skins they wore on their shoulders looked more to him like Englishmen’s woolen comforters than real capes. The head man was about Taliriktug’s age and was handsome enough, although he had no teeth left, which made him look older than his years. The man was named Ikpakhuak, which Asiajuk told him meant “the Dirty One,” although as far as Taliriktug could see and smell, Ikpakhuak was no dirtier than the rest of them and cleaner than some.

Ikpakhuak’s much-younger wife was named Higilak, which Asiajuk smirkingly explained meant “the Ice House.” But Higilak’s manner was not in any way cold toward the strangers; she helped her husband welcome Taliriktug’s band with warmth and an outpouring of hot food and gifts.

He realized that he would never understand these people.

Ikpakhuak and Higilak and their family served them umingmak, musk ox steak, as their feast meal, which Taliriktug enjoyed well enough but which Silna, Asiajuk, Nauja, and the rest of his band had to choke down, since they were Netsilik, “People of the Seal.” After all the meeting ceremonies and meals were over, he managed through his interpreted signs to move the conversation to the kabloona gifts.

Ikpakhuak acknowledged that the People of the Cape had such treasures, but before showing his guests, he asked that Silna and Taliriktug show everyone in the village their magic. The Oleekataliks had not met any sixam ieua in the lifetimes of most of the villagers – although Ikpakhuak had known Silna’s father, Aja, decades ago – and Ikpakhuak politely asked if Silna and Taliriktug would fly around the village a little bit and perhaps turn themselves into seals, not bears, please.

Silna explained – through her string-signs interpreted by Asiajuk – that the two spirit-governors-of-the-sky chose not to do that, but that they would both show the hospitable Oleekataliks where the Tuunbaqs had taken their tongues, and that her kabloona sixam ieua husband would give them the rare treat of seeing his scars… scars inflicted in a terrible battle with evil spirits years ago.

This completely satisfied Ikpakhuak and his people.

After this dog-and-pony cum scar show was over, Taliriktug managed to get Asiajuk to bring the subject back to the kabloona gifts.

Ikpakhuak instantly nodded, clapped his hands, and sent boys to gather the treasures. They were handed around the circle.

There were various pieces of wood, one of them split from a well-handled marlin’s spike.

There were gold buttons bearing the Naval anchor motif of the Discovery Service.

There was a fragment of a lovingly embroidered man’s undervest.

There was a gold watch, the chain it may have hung from, and a handful of coins. The initials on the back of the watch, CF^DV – Charles Des Voeux.

There was a silver pencil case with the initals EC on the inside.

There was a gold-medal citation once presented to Sir John Franklin from the Admiralty.

There were silver forks and spoons bearing the crests of Franklin ’s various officers.

There was a small china plate with the name SIR JOHN FRANKLIN written out on it in colored enamel.

There was a surgeon’s knife.

There was a mahogany portable lap writing desk that the man now holding it recognized because it had been his own.

Did we really haul all this shit hundreds of miles in our boats? thought Crozier. And before that, thousands of miles from England? What were we thinking? He felt that he might throw up and had to close his eyes until the nausea passed.

Silence touched his wrist. She had sensed the tilt and shift in him. He looked into her eyes to assure her that he was still there, although he wasn’t. Not really. Not completely.

They paddled along the coast to the west, toward the mouth of Back’s River.

Ikpakhuak’s Oleekataliks had been vague, even evasive, about where they had found their kabloona treasures – some said they were from a place called Keenuna, which sounded like one of a series of islets in the strait just south of King William Island – but the majority of hunters said they had come across the riches west of Taloyoak at a place called Kugluktuk, which Asiajuk translated as “Place of Falling Waters.”

To Crozier, it sounded like the first small waterfall he’d read about that Back had said was just upriver from the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River.

They spent a week searching there. Asiajuk and his wife and three of the hunters stayed with the umiak at the mouth of the river, but Crozier and Silence with their children, the still-curious hunter Inupijuk, and the other hunters paddled their qayaqs upriver the three miles or so to the first low falls.

He found some barrel staves there. A leather boot sole with holes where screws had been driven through. Buried in the sand and mud of the riverbank, he uncovered an eight-foot length of curved and once-polished oak that might have been from the gunwale of one of the cutters. (It would have been pure treasure to the Oleekataliks.) Nothing else.

They were leaving in defeat, paddling downstream to the coast, when they came upon an older man, his three wives, and their four runny-nosed children. Their tent and caribou skins were on the wives’ backs and they had come to the river, so the man said, to fish. He had never seen a kabloona before, much less two sixam ieua spirit-governors without tongues and was very frightened, but one of the hunters with Crozier calmed his fears. The old man was named Puhtoorak and was a member of the Qikiqtarqjuaq band of the Real People.

After food and pleasantries had been exchanged, the old man asked what they were doing so far from the God-Walking People’s northern lands, and when one of the hunters explained that they were looking for living or dead kabloona who might have come this way – or their treasures – Puhtoorak said that he hadn’t heard of kabloona on this river but mentioned between large bites of their gift of seal meat, “Last winter I saw a big kabloona boat – as large as an iceberg – with three sticks coming up out of it, stuck in the ice just off Utjulik. I think there were dead kabloona in its stomach. Some of our younger men went into the thing – they had to use their star-shit stone axes to chop a hole in its side – but they left all the wood and metal treasures where they were because they said the three-sticks house was haunted.”

Crozier looked at Silence. Did I understand him correctly?

Yes. She nodded. Kanneyuk began to cry, and Silna parted her summer parka and gave the baby her breast.

Crozier stood on a cliff and looked out at the ship in the ice. It was HMS Terror.

It had taken them eight days of travel from the mouth of the Back River west to this part of the coast of Utjulik. Through the God-Walking People hunters who understood his signs, Crozier had offered bribes to Puhtoorak if the old man would agree to bring his family with him and come along to show them the way to the kabloona boat with the three sticks rising from its roof, but the old Qikiqtarqjuaq wanted nothing more to do with the haunted kabloona three-stick house. Even though he had not gone in with the young men last winter, he had seen that the thing was tainted with piifixaaq – the kind of unhealthy ghost-spirits that haunted a bad place.

Utjulik was an Inuit name for what Crozier had known from maps as the west coast of the Adelaide Peninsula. The open-water leads had ended not very far west of the inlet leading south to Back’s River – the narrowing strait there was solid ice pack – so they’d had to beach and hide the qayaqs and Asiajuk’s umiak and continue on with the six dogs pulling the heavily solid thirteen-foot kamatik. Using the kind of inland dead reckoning that Crozier knew he would never master, Silence led them the twenty-five miles or so straight across the interior neck of the peninsula to the area of the west coast where Puhtoorak had said he’d seen the ship… even, he confessed, stood on its deck.

Asiajuk had not wanted to leave his comfortable boat when it came time to head cross-country. If Silna, one of the God-Walking People’s most revered spirit- governors, had not signed her sincere request that he join them – a request from a sixam ieua was a command to even the surliest of shamans – Asiajuk would have ordered his hunters to take him home. As it was, he rode in style under furs in the kamatik and even helped from time to time by throwing pebbles at the straining dogs and shouting, “Haw! Haw! Haw!” when he wanted them to go left and “Gee! Gee! Gee!” when he wanted them to go right. Crozier wondered if the old shaman was rediscovering the youthful pleasures of sledge travel by dog team.

Now it was late afternoon of their eighth day and they were looking down at HMS Terror. Even Asiajuk seemed intimidated and subdued.

Puhtoorak’s best description of the precise location had been that the three-stick house “was frozen in the ice near an island about five miles due west” of a certain point and that he and his hunting party “then had to walk about three miles north across smooth ice to reach the ship after crossing several islands on their walk from the point. They could see the ship from a cliff at the north end of the large island.”

Of course, Puhtoorak had not used the term “miles” nor “ship” nor even “point.” What the old man had said was that the three-stick kabloona house with an umiak’s hull was a certain number of hours’ walk west of tikerqat, which means “Two Fingers,” which the Real People called two narrow points along this stretch of the Utjulik coastline, and then somewhere close to the north end of a large island there.

Crozier and his band of ten people – the hunter from the south, Inupijuk, was sticking with them to the bitter end – had walked due west across rough ice from the Two Fingers and crossed two small islands before reaching a much larger one. They found a cliff dropping almost a hundred feet to the ice pack at the north end of that large island.

Two or three miles out in the ice, the three masts of HMS Terror rose at a raked angle toward the low clouds.

Crozier wished he had his old telescope, but he didn’t need it to identify the masts of his old command.

Puhtoorak had been right – the ice for this last part of the walk was much smoother than the jumbled shore and pack ice between the mainland and the islands. Crozier’s captain’s eye saw why: there lay a string of smaller islands to the east and north, creating a sort of natural seawall sheltering this fifteen- or twenty-nautical- square-mile patch of sea from the prevailing winds out of the northwest.

How Terror could have ended up here, almost two hundred miles south of where she had been frozen fast near Erebus for almost three years, was beyond Crozier’s powers of speculation.

He would not have to speculate much longer.

The Real People, including the God-Walking People, who lived in the shadow of a living monster year in and year out, approached the ship with obvious anxiety. All of Puhtoorak’s talk of haunting ghosts and bad spirits had worked its effect on them – even on Asiajuk, Nauja, and the hunters who’d not been there to hear the old man.