Death in a High Latitude, page 15
While I was looking after Ruth, Keller found the second Hamburg man. With us he had been thrown out of the helicopter but he had not been lucky. Instead of being thrown into snow he had been hurled against a rock and his neck broken.
With all the crew accounted for we took stock of the position. ‘I don’t know how long we were lying in the snow before we recovered ourselves, but I don’t think it can have been long,’ Keller said. ‘Say ten minutes to a quarter of an hour – if it had been much longer I should think we’d have suffered from frostbite, your hand, anyway. My watch is still going, and I looked at it when we started our search. That was just on forty minutes ago. So it will be roughly an hour since the crash. The people at Gould Bay will be worried to be out of radio communication with the helicopter, but radio doesn’t always work well in these high latitudes, and they won’t necessarily expect disaster. If the crash happened about an hour ago we’d been up for about three quarters of an hour. We gave no estimated time of return because we were going to search, but they’ll expect us back within four hours or so. That’s about two hours from now. When we don’t come back they’ll begin to get very worried indeed, but they will think we’ve probably made an emergency landing somewhere, with our radio out of action. The big transport plane is not an ideal search aircraft, but I should think it almost certain that they’ll go up to have a look for us. And they’ll radio for another helicopter. It will be at least a day before it can be flown out, but the big plane should have spotted us by then. It can’t land anywhere near us, of course, but they can send down some help by parachute. It seems to me our best course is to stay by the wreckage and hope to be rescued.’
‘I agree, but I don’t know how long we should stay here. At this time of year there is virtually no darkness, so as soon as the fog clears we’ve a chance of being spotted. But the fog that wrecked us may wreck our chances. I think we should stay here for twenty-four hours and if we’ve seen no aircraft by then we shall have to reconsider things. The first job is to see what we can find in the wreckage in the way of food and shelter.’
The helicopter had been well supplied with a day’s food for seven people, and in addition carried emergency ration packs that would last the three of us for several weeks. The problem was whether we could find any of it. To my relief Ruth was fit enough to join the search, and it was she who discovered a big carton of ration packs half-buried in the snow of the gully where she had fallen. That solved the immediate problem of food. There were rations for twelve men for forty-eight hours, including two dozen cans of self-heating soup.
The helicopter had not caught fire in the crash, so her stores were more or less intact, though scattered over a wide area of snow-covered broken ground. The pilot’s cabin had taken the full force of the crash and the instruments were shattered – compass, navigating instruments, radio, all useless. However, my wrist compass seemed to be undamaged, and Keller had a pocket compass. The two more or less agreed with one another, so we assumed that they were probably all right.
We were wearing our small automatic pistols, and several of the rifles that had been on board seemed usable. There was also a box of ammunition, and although the box was broken the cartridges packed inside were unharmed. So we were well off for firearms, though what we needed more was a spade. We had nothing in the way of a tent, and shelter of some sort was imperative. Both Keller and I had served in the army and been on survival courses, although mine, many years ago, had been no farther north than Scotland. Keller, however, had been on a course in northern Norway and he thought that he could build a snow house if we had a spade. We didn’t, but I remembered the broken rotor blade which had fallen across me and I thought that this might serve. It was not ideal because it was too long but it could be used after a fashion, and while Keller got to work trying to make rough blocks of snow Ruth and I searched the wreckage for smaller pieces of metal. We found several, all of which made better digging tools than my original rotor blade. Keller showed us what to do and a circular snow house began to take shape. The walls rose quite satisfactorily, but the snow was too soft for good building blocks and after two or three attempts at a roof it was obvious that we were not going to win. Bits and pieces of wreckage solved the problem. We used them to make a framework for the roof of our house, and then covered and packed the frame with snow – important for insulation to conserve the heat of our bodies inside the house.
The work kept us warm and when our house was finished we were rather proud of it. We had not thought about food while getting on with our building work, but with the house usable we felt ravenously hungry. We were also thirsty, but although we had food we had no water, and for the moment no means of melting snow. The helicopter had carried a small tank of water, but that had gone in the crash. We had matches and I thought that we might get a fire going from burnable wreckage; the fuel tanks had burst and the fuel spilled out, though there were dregs left to ignite what could be burned. But we didn’t want to use what was burnable in case we needed a fire to attract the attention of rescuers. For our first meal we had to try to quench thirst with soup, and afterwards by taking mouthfuls of snow. We could survive on snow, but it is a poor substitute for drinking water. We filled the empty soup cans with snow and put them between our legs in the hope that the heat from our bodies would melt the stuff. We got a miserable amount of greyish water from our soup cans in the end, and it was a slow job, one of the problems being that our admirable cold-weather clothing was so well insulated that little body heat got through it. This was invaluable for keeping warm, but an obstacle to snow melting.
There were some lifejackets in the emergency equipment carried by the helicopter. We laid these over the trodden snow that formed the floor of our hut and they made it quite comfortable to sit or lie on.
It wasn’t until we’d eaten that the horror of things really struck us. We’d been kept going by having work to do, and collecting what seemed useful from the wreck. Now we had time to think. There were four more deaths, two pilots and two policemen, to be added to the sickening roll of human suffering brought about in some way by an obscure theory of Arctic climatology. For most of that night, never dark enough to hide the wreckage of the helicopter, we scarcely bothered about our own situation: we thought only of the sudden ending to four good and useful lives, and of the suffering it must bring to four more human families. I felt a particularly savage responsibility. These men had died because of my thinking – suppose I was wrong? Suppose there was nothing to find in this Arctic wilderness – that Dr Braunschweig and his boat were on their way to the South Seas for some reason that none of us had guessed at. Suppose . . .
But this was morbid futility. Like soldiers these men had died carrying out their duty, and if my thinking was wrong it had been wrong in good faith. And I hadn’t sent men to their deaths without going with them – it was blind chance, or some strange dispensation of Providence, that Keller, Ruth and I were not lying with them on the snow-covered hillside. If I went on giving way to self-pity it was more than likely that our joining the dead would merely be delayed. We had to have some plan of action, to save ourselves and, if possible, to carry on the fight.
Ruth and Keller slept or dozed through some of that awful night, which was why I was left to my own miserable thoughts. Around six in the morning I opened three more cans of our self-heating soup, the only means we had of getting a hot drink. It went down well, and I was thankful to have companions to talk to again.
‘What do you think we ought to do now?’ Ruth asked.
‘It’s hard, but I’m sure the right thing is to do nothing for a bit,’ I said. ‘Our best hope is that they’ll send up the big plane to look for us. The helicopter is at least twelve hours overdue by now, and they’ll realise that there must have been a disaster. I don’t know how visible the wreckage is, but we can collect materials for a fire, and light it the moment we see or hear a plane. That had better be the next job. Do either of you want any more breakfast? There seems quite a good variety of biscuits and tinned meats, also some honey and jam.’
Ruth said she didn’t think she could eat anything but Keller and I decided that we should all eat to keep up our strength, and we persuaded Ruth to join us at least to the extent of consuming a biscuit spread with honey. After breakfast we got to work, collecting everything burnable from the wreck, and salvaging the broken bottom of a fuel tank which still had several gallons in it. We brought the fuel to our bonfire, but kept it in the broken tank until we were ready to light it.
The fog had gone with the night, and it was a clear morning. From our height on the peak that had wrecked the helicopter we could see over most of the landscape. There was another fairly high peak a mile or so to the west and there were distant mountains to the east and south, but northwards the land seemed to fall away in a ragged series of crevasses. ‘We’re fairly well placed for being spotted,’ Keller said. ‘Our peak and the one near it must stand out for miles.’
That was comforting, but no sight or sound of an aircraft came to justify our hopes. The hours dragged on, and at midday I thought we should do what we could to attract attention. ‘Let’s take some of the stuff from our bonfire and make a smaller pile,’ I suggested. ‘The filling from some of the lifejackets should make a good smoke. A column of smoke will be visible to an aeroplane for much farther than we could see the speck of a plane in the sky.’
We used about a quarter of our burnable material, poured a few pints of fuel on it, and set it alight with a match thoughtfully provided with our emergency rations, although both Keller and I carried matches of our own. The fire blazed up well, and there was a satisfactory pillar of black smoke from the lifejackets. We filled our empty soup tins with ice and snow, and put them by the edge of the blaze to melt. When we had a fair quantity of water I boiled some of it in a couple of tins to make coffee from a packet in our rations. It had a curious taste, but it was hot, and a change from soup.
We scanned the skies anxiously while our fire burned, but saw nothing. We were tempted to keep the fire going by putting on more of our precious burnable stuff, arguing that it would be silly to waste the fire if a few more minutes might lead to our being seen. Self-discipline prevailed, however, and we let the fire sink into ashes without attempting to prolong it. We were bitterly disappointed, and a lot more worried than we allowed ourselves to show.
Worry, and every other thought, were shattered by a sudden scream from Ruth. She had gone about fifty yards along a narrow side-gully running to the left of our snow hut for a piece of necessary privacy and we could not see her, but her scream told us where she was. It was not a shout of elation on seeing an aeroplane, it was a cry of panic. Keller and I rushed towards her, some instinct prompting me to grab one of the rifles we had collected from the wreck as I jumped up.
It was as well. As we rounded a slight bend in the gully we saw Ruth cowering against a snow-covered rock, with a huge polar bear standing over her, one of its great forepaws raised about to strike. Keller, who was brought up to use a pistol, fired from the hip. At almost the same moment I sent two rounds from the rifle into the beast’s head. In our sickening anxiety all action seemed to be delayed, like a cinema film in slow motion. It looked as if nothing had happened. The bear still towered over Ruth, the huge menacing paw stayed suspended. But its force, thank God, had gone. The animal swayed a little, then slowly keeled over, falling not more than a foot or so to one side of where Ruth was huddled against the rock. It was a miracle that it did not fall on top of her – goodness knows how much it weighed.
Keller pumped a few more pistol shots into the huge body to make sure of things, while I put my arms round Ruth and helped her to her feet. She clung to me, breathing in short quick gasps, then straightened the hood of her anorak and said, ‘What a sight I must look! Oh, Peter, thank God you came – and thank you both for being so quick. It came absolutely from nowhere. I was just tidying myself up when I saw it standing over me. Oh, Peter, do you think there are any more of them?’
I know little of the habits of polar bears, but it seemed likely that where there was one there might be others. ‘I don’t know, but we should be all right with the rifles handy,’ I said. ‘And we’ll make one rule now – no one goes away from the camp, even for a few yards, without a rifle guard.’
*
The adventure with the bear at least took our minds off our own plight, but anxieties soon came back. As the day dragged into evening we speculated endlessly on what might be happening. ‘It seems extraordinary that they haven’t sent the aeroplane to look for us,’ Keller said. ‘Of course, we don’t know what conditions are like at Gould Bay – there may be dense fog, or heavy snow, or something else to make it impossible for the plane to take off.’
‘Yes, and they’ve no idea where to look for us. We must have been miles off course. Both the pilot and co-pilot put in a lot of time studying the map, and if they’d expected high ground we’d never have hit the mountain. Either the map is wrong, or we weren’t anywhere near where we thought we were. Visibility was practically nil, and in this part of the world it’s easy for compasses to go haywire.’
There could be plenty of reasons for the failure to find us, though apart from giving us something to think about there wasn’t really much point in speculating on them. We should have to decide for ourselves what we were going to do.
‘I think we should stay here for one more night, and if nothing has happened by morning we should try to find our own way out,’ I said. ‘We’re not badly equipped. We have good clothing, we have rations for some time, and we have weapons. We can take a few soup cans of fuel with us to have some means of doing a bit of cooking, though we must take care to keep a reserve for making a flare. If we can cook, we can get fresh meat from the bear – I believe Eskimos set great store by bear meat. The problem is to decide where we should try to make for.’
‘How far do you reckon we are from the base at Gould Bay?’ Keller asked.
‘Frankly, I haven’t the least idea. We may be a hundred miles, or we may have flown round in circles in the fog and be within twenty or thirty. There are some navigation tables in the helicopter, but I’ve been able to find only one sextant, and that is smashed to bits.’
‘Probably there was only one. It would be carried mainly for emergencies since almost all navigation nowadays is by radio.’
‘And the radio is beyond repair . . . We must go back to first principles and see if we can get even the roughest estimate of where we are. At least the charts are more or less undamaged.’
I fetched the charts from what was left of the pilots’ cabin and we spread them out on a flat topped rock. They were good for the coast, but rather non-committal inland. High ground was shown, and some peak heights indicated, but it was impossible to relate heights shown on the map to the broken landscape round us. What was clear was that there should have been no peaks as high as that which had wrecked us within many miles of the route we were supposed to be flying from Gould Bay to the northern end of the Robeson Channel. We were so far north that it was difficult to work out bearings. Keller’s prismatic compass and my little wrist compass agreed with each other, more or less, but how their readings related to true north it was impossible to guess. The sun, still visible, was the best help here. Lacking a sextant we could do no more than estimate an angle for the sun, but our watches were still going, and taking a mean of the three of them we made a guess at G.M.T. From the navigation tables Ruth calculated where the sun should be at our estimated time, and this gave us a reasonable guess at the cardinal points of the compass.
Having satisfied ourselves where to look east or west we went back to the chart. The Robeson Channel runs roughly from north-east to south-west and what we thought of as the northern end was more properly the north-eastern end. We assumed that we were north of the channel itself – flying blind in fog we might have crossed the strait and be somewhere in northern Greenland instead of on Ellesmere Island, but that would have taken us even farther astray than we thought probable. We had to make some assumptions and we assumed that we were still north of the Robeson Channel.
‘Presumably we’re somewhere north of Gould Bay, but whether to the east or west of it is anybody’s guess,’ Keller said.
‘Yes. And I think it would be madness to try to get back there – we’ve no idea how far it is, nor which way to walk.’ I was poring over the map. ‘Our best bet is to try to find the coast,’ I went on. ‘As long as we keep going south with a bit of east in it we’re bound to reach the coast, and maybe we can identify something on the chart and work out where we are. The sea is a lot kindlier than this awful wilderness, and on the coast we can hope to find some driftwood to make a fire, for cooking, or signalling. We might get another bear, or we might manage to harpoon a fish – there’s hope of life on the coast that there isn’t here.’
Keller and Ruth agreed. ‘If we can find out roughly where we are, we’ve only got to follow the coast in one direction or another to get back to Gould Bay,’ Keller said.
‘In theory, yes, but it’s steep-to in many places, and more or less impossible to walk along for any distance,’ I said. ‘But even if it means climbing cliffs and making detours inland, we shall know what we’re doing. Everything points to trying to find the coast.
‘There’s another thing. We came here on a mission to try to locate Dr Braunschweig and to prevent whatever devilment is afoot concerning him. We may be in poor shape for an expeditionary force, but we’re alive, and I feel that we should do what we can. If our earlier reasoning was anywhere near right, we may not be very far from wherever he was going in Apfel. Time is running out for him even more than it is for us. Once on the coast we may get an idea of where to look. We owe it to our dead companions to do what we can.’
