The Solitude of Thomas Cave by Georgina Harding Page B

focus, his identity
becoming frozen, clear and yet thick, opaque as ice. Speaking to Johanne reminds him who he is. Was. Again he sees her, gazing
vacantly now at the fire with the circle of lace forgotten on her round belly.
    'Did I tell you, Johanne, of the time I went to the Americas? We sailed across the mouth of a great river so wide that it
was like a sea, and on its shores was a jungle so dense that a man could not step into it. Captain Duke when I was talking
with him here - just the other day it seems, though it was in truth many months ago now but they have passed without time
- Captain Duke spoke of this very same river and made mention of a boy who was left there by Raleigh, not there where my ship
went but far inland along its banks. I think of him in these days because of some similarity and at the same time contrariness
in our situation. I wonder if the ship went back, if he survived to see it, if anyone ever found out what became of him.'
    It is such a small thing, one boy's fate beside the great brown river and the hugeness of the jungle. He has tried to imagine
the boy walking alone in the heavy green heat. He pictures an impossible tangle of vegetation, a rich and rotten smell, a
seething abundance of life, but he cannot see the boy there. The boy is insubstantial to him, a wisp, a wavering mirage before
the substantiality of the place.
    Just then he hears a great crack like a gunshot reverberating across the island. It is the sound of the ice cracking: whenever
the temperature dips sharply the place resounds with the writhe of the ice.
    And who is he, Thomas Cave? A man from Suffolk strayed into the empty enormity of the North. A man of experience, unlike that
boy, with a life behind him. A grown man without love or issue. A wintry stalk of a man, dried-up and hollow inside. A man
who makes the wooden heels of shoes, who used to be a sailor, who once played the violin. A man who lets a ghost draw his
thoughts, and speaks to her as if she is real as himself.
    He cries out suddenly in fear. 'Johanne, why do you come to me? Did you come with the lights? I have heard men say that there
are souls in the lights, the souls of the unborn but perhaps those of the dead also. Or do you come from my mind? Is it that
I am so astonished with the snow?'
    Is this the beginning of it, then? Is this how a man falls prey to what is in his mind, how the madness and the scurvy will
get to him? But Thomas Cave has always been a resourceful man, rational and pragmatic. He will not give way so easily.
    A man is what he does, God is his witness to his actions. A man who does nothing is nothing. So he will go out. He will hunt.
He will not let her take him.
    There are sealskins in the outer cabin, scraped and dried, frozen in a pile stiff as planks. He breaks one off and brings
it in, and when he has melted and softened it he cuts it to make a mask. He fits it around his head, cuts slits for his eyes
and a round hole for his mouth, ties it with cord. He wraps his neck and head in a woollen shawl and puts on his hat and great
coat of wolfskin over all, fits his hands into fingerless woollen gloves with clumsy skin mittens above. When he steps outside
he is scarcely human in appearance, a slow cumbersome beast with a musket on his shoulder.
    For three successive nights there has been a great white ring about the orb of the moon. The light is so bright that he casts
a neanderthal shadow on the snow. He seeks other moving forms in the stillness. For minutes at a time he watches an upstanding
rock to see if it will move, or a cask left on the beach and blanketed in snow that may at a distance be a lurking bear. He
examines shadows, scours the white ground for the patterns of prints. He believes that there are bears about. In the last
few days he thinks he has heard them snuffling about the walls of the cabin though he has not caught sight of one. But either
he imagined them or the wind must have swept away