He said it at dinner; and as he said it, David Wilson glanced at my wan face with a smile of pleased malice: for I was left out.
I remember well: the aurora that night was in the sky, and at its edge floated a moon surrounded by a ring, with two mock-moons. But all shone very vaguely and far, and a fog, which had already lasted some days, made the ship’s bows indistinct to me, as I paced the bridge on my watch, two hours after Clark’s announcement.
For a long time all was very still, save for the occasional whine of a dog. I was alone, and it grew toward the end of my watch, when Maitland would succeed me. My slow tread tolled like a passing-bell, and the mountainous ice lay vague and white around me, its sheeted ghastliness not less dreadfully silent than eternity itself.
Presently, several of the dogs began barking together, left off, and began again.
I said to myself; “There is a bear about somewhere.”
And after some five minutes I saw—I thought that I saw—it. The fog had, if anything thickened; and it was now very near the end of my watch.
It had entered the ship, I concluded, by the boards which slanted from an opening in the port bulwarks down to the ice. Once before, in November, a bear, having smelled the dogs, had ventured on board at midnight: but then there had resulted a perfect hubbub among the dogs. Now, even in the midst of my excitement, I wondered at their quietness, though some whimpered—with fear, I thought. I saw the creature steal forward from the hatchway toward the kennels a-port; and I ran noiselessly, and seized the watch-gun which stood always loaded by the companionway.
By this time, the form had passed the kennels, reached the bows, and now was making toward me on the starboard side. I took aim. Never, I thought, had I seen so huge a bear—though I made allowance for the magnifying effect of the fog.
My finger was on the trigger: and at that moment a deathly shivering sickness took me, the wrangling voices shouted at me, with “Shoot!” “Shoot not!” “Shoot!” Ah well, that latter shout was irresistible. I drew the trigger. The report hooted through the Polar night.
The creature dropped; both Wilson and Clark were up at once: and we three hurried to the spot.
But the very first near glance showed a singular kind of bear. Wilson put his hand to the head, and a lax skin came away at his touch. … It was Aubrey Maitland who was underneath it, and I had shot him dead.
For the past few days he had been cleaning skins, among them the skin of the bear from which I had saved him at Taimur. Now, Maitland was a born pantomimist, continually inventing practical jokes; and perhaps to startle me with a false alarm in the very skin of the old Bruin which had so nearly done for him, he had thrown it round him on finishing its cleaning, and so, in mere wanton fun, had crept on deck at the hour of his watch. The head of the bearskin, and the fog, must have prevented him from seeing me taking aim.
This tragedy made me ill for weeks. I saw that the hand of Fate was upon me. When I rose from bed, poor Maitland was lying in the ice behind the great camel-shaped hummock near us.
By the end of January we had drifted to 80° 55′; and it was then that Clark, in the presence of Wilson, asked me if I would make the fourth man, in the place of poor Maitland, for the dash in the spring. As I said “Yes, I am willing,” David Wilson spat with a disgusted emphasis. A minute later he sighed, with “Ah, poor Maitland …” and drew in his breath with a tut! tut!
God knows, I had an impulse to spring then and there at his throat, and strangle him: but I curbed myself.
There remained now hardly a month before the dash, and all hands set to work with a will, measuring the dogs, making harness and sealskin shoes for them, overhauling sledges and kayaks, and cutting every possible ounce of weight. But we were not destined, after all, to set out that year. About the 20th February, the ice began to pack, and the ship was subjected to an appalling pressure. We found it necessary to make trumpets of our hands to shout into one another’s ears, for the whole ice-continent was crashing, popping, thundering everywhere in terrific upheaval. Expecting every moment to see the Boreal crushed to splinters, we had to set about unpacking provisions, and placing sledges, kayaks, dogs and everything in a position for instant flight. It lasted five days, and was accompanied by a tempest from the north, which, by the end of February, had driven us back south into latitude 79° 40′. Clark, of course, then abandoned the thought of the Pole for that summer.
And immediately afterwards we made a startling discovery: our stock of reindeer-moss was found to be somehow ridiculously small. Egan, our second mate, was blamed; but that did not help matters: the sad fact remained. Clark was advised to kill one or two of the deer, but he pig-headedly refused: and by the beginning of summer they were all dead.
Well, our northward drift recommenced. Toward the middle of February we saw a mirage of the coming sun above the horizon; there were flights of Arctic petrels and snow-buntings; and spring was with us. In an ice-pack of big hummocks and narrow lanes we made good progress all the summer.
When the last of the deer died, my heart sank; and when the dogs killed two of their number, and a bear crushed a third, I was fully expecting what actually came; it was this: Clark announced that he could now take only two companions with him in the spring: and they were
