The Ice Child by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

them somewhere in the drifting gray mist. “Hunters,” he said to himself.
    By next day the fog had cleared. The ships sighted each other, and they ran in a fine show up the Greenland coast. They saw the first ice, all they ever hoped to see, bergs floating in open water. The ice masters of each ship were out in navigation; Crozier was up on deck for hours.
    On June 30 they crossed sixty-six degrees north.
    A small case was brought up from Crozier’s cabin, and the first of the cylinders unpacked. Gus saw it tossed into the sea, a little copper rod that soon faded away.
    By July 4 they were in Disko. It was bedlam in port. Everything from the transport ships was unloaded and reloaded again onto Erebus and Terror . The ten bullocks that they had brought from Stromness were taken out of the hold of the Baretto , led blinking onto the dock, and slaughtered before the ships. Gus went down with a contingent of men and helped butcher the meat, stripping out the bone and tendons and parceling it up for freezing in the hold. As soon as they left port and headed west, the ships would become natural refrigerators.
    Gus didn’t mind the guts and bone and blood. He was well used to it from the whalers, where they flensed the carcasses on deck and stood knee-deep in warm fat and flesh. It never entered his mind to question the necessity, and he held the bullocks’ ropes and beat them about the head to stun them when they pulled against the tethers. There was nothing to it. Life was meat. Meat was survival. That was the only equation that mattered.
    When it was all done, the ships were weighed low down in the water, groaning with foodstuffs and coal and barrels. The weather turned fair; the sun beat down on them. Word went around the ships that the ice was far open to the west; it was very warm, the sea would be warmer than usual, the passage easier than anticipated. The bergs that floated in the Baffin Sea were testimony enough. All the Passage lay waiting for them, its gates unguarded in the Arctic summer. In less than eight weeks, they said, they would be in Alaska.
    They sailed from Greenland on July 12.
    The atmosphere in the Terror was unlike anything that Gus had known in the hard business of whaling. There was a recital on the open deck one night; there was singing; there was a service and prayers. There was even a little dancing. They felt the sharp stream of the ice-laden wind, like a small painful blow to the chest when first breathed in. And the seas were bright, and the icebergs beautiful, and the sails dazzling, and they felt they were God’s ships in God’s ocean, on the highest mission, with God’s mercy and blessing. They were the most fortunate of men.
    And the only thing that spoiled Gus’s sailing in these few summer days was the sight of Crozier himself.
    The officer stood late in the day, every day, looking forward from the very edge of the bow. And on the very day that they entered Lancaster Sound, and hailed the whaler Enterprise as they passed, Gus saw a strange expression on Crozier’s face.
    He hid it well as he came down and passed the boy.
    Crozier even smiled then, and nodded toward him, making a show of pulling at his cuffs and wrapping his coat closer around him. He went below, and Gus watched him, worried for the first time, more worried than he had ever been on any ship.
    For the look in the captain’s eye had not been confidence in God’s mercy and grace, nor pleasure in the ship, nor excitement at the conquests they were about to make.
    It was less complicated than any of that.
    It was fear.

Six
    The phone rang in the early hours of the morning.
    Jo struggled up from sleep. “Hello?”
    “Jo, it’s Gina.”
    “God, Gina. What time is it?”
    “Nearly one.”
    “Where are you?”
    “At work. Listen …”
    Jo rubbed her hand over her face. “What the hell are you doing at work at this time?”
    “You call this late?” Gina replied. “You want to work on a real newspaper.” Jo made