Death in a High Latitude, page 16
*
When should we start? Almost every reasonable consideration suggested that it would be wiser to wait for rescuers than to march off into the wilderness on our own. But twenty-four hours had passed since the crash without any sign of an air search. It seemed unlikely that a skilled crew anxious to get a plane into the sky would have been held up for a night and a day. I write ‘a night’ but it must be remembered that there was virtually no darkness. The helicopter had become overdue when there were still hours of light available for a search, and we had all expected that our position would have been located during the night.
Assume that for some reason the transport plane could not take off – the base party would have radioed for assistance, and air help could have come from Greenland, northern Canada or the United States. We were a long way from civilisation, but in terms of flying time we were not in any sense out of reach. Had the radio failed? For experienced operators with first-class equipment that seemed improbable, but it was possible in these extreme northern latitudes. If there had been a radio failure they would not have been worried by losing contact with the helicopter, but the helicopter would still have become physically overdue, and radio or no radio we should have expected an air search.
Prolonged silence would create anxiety for the whole of our expedition, but how long would it be before my people in London and Keller’s in Germany became sufficiently anxious to send help? We had no firm dates, no precise objective; we were hunting for Dr Braunschweig and might go almost anywhere. Search parties certainly would be sent to look for us, but not, we felt, for several days.
After the best part of two hours of discussion Keller summed up, ‘I think we should stay where we are until noon tomorrow. If there is no sign of a plane by then we must assume that something has happened which means that it’s no use going on waiting here. Let us make noon tomorrow zero hour. If we have to act then, I think Peter’s suggestion of making for the coast is the best thing we can do.’
‘The main thing now is to try to get some sleep,’ I said. ‘We must have someone on watch – let us take three hour shifts. And the watchkeeper must have a rifle and look out for polar bears as well as aeroplanes. We don’t want one of those brutes investigating our hut.’
It was getting on for seven o’clock. None of us wanted food, but food was important, so we had some more of the self-heating soup and a few of our iron-ration biscuits. We gave Ruth the first watch, which meant that she could turn in around eleven and sleep through until five. Keller took the second watch, from eleven to two, and I went on from two to five. It was almost light when I turned out, a slight dusk rapidly becoming day. I walked up and down for a bit to get some circulation going, and then took post on a rock a few yards from our ice hut.
From the rock I had a view that covered almost the whole sky, and all approaches to the hut. We took the danger from polar bears seriously and I kept my rifle handy. Nothing moved. The sky was cloudless, and I could have seen the tiniest speck of an aircraft many miles away. I checked our bonfire – several soup tins of fuel were ready to light, and I had matches in my pocket. The fire remained unlighted. It was too cold to sit still, so I patrolled the hillside round our hut, my ears alert for sound, my eyes lifting every few seconds from ground to sky. I wished I knew more about polar bears. The one that had so nearly killed Ruth was in good condition, so there must have been food even in this inhospitable land. I reflected that probably he got most of his food from the sea, and this was a comforting thought, for it suggested that the coast could not be very far away. On the other hand if bears needed the coast for food we should have to be particularly on our guard if we reached the shoreline.
My watch ended at five, and Ruth took over. I turned in for a couple of hours and dozed a little, but I was too restless to sleep. So was Keller. He got up when I came back to the hut, saying that he had had quite a good night, and would keep Ruth company. Soon after seven he was back with breakfast – a mug of ration coffee, which he had made by lighting a small fire, and a slice of corned beef on ration biscuit. After breakfast we didn’t set any more formal watches because we were all up, but we did maintain our polar bear guard by making sure that one of us always had a rifle.
We were giving the party at Gould Bay until noon, but that did not mean that we sat around doing nothing. Our survival might depend on taking the right things from the wreck: we had to carry everything we took, so we dared not take too much. The ice wilderness we had to cross was rough and broken, and to be overloaded was to invite disaster. A particular problem was that we had no rucksacks – we had not contemplated an expedition on foot. We had canvas shoulderbags, and there were some sacks in the wreckage of the helicopter, but we had no convenient means of carrying loaded sacks. We considered trying to make a sledge from the broken blades of the rotor, but decided against it. The ground was too rough for sledge-hauling. Our backs would have to do for everything.
We took iron rations for ten days, deciding that if necessary we could make them last a fortnight: if in a fortnight we had got nowhere, we should have to survive on what we could find, or – more probably – resign ourselves to death. We took four soup cans of fuel. If we came across any driftwood, a quarter of a can would be enough to start a fire, but if we could find nothing burnable the fuel would be so much deadweight, for we had no sort of cooking stove.
For clothes we had nothing but what we stood in, all Arctic kit of the highest quality, and as far as clothing went we could scarcely have been better equipped. Shelter was another matter – we had no tent, and nothing that could be used to make one. But we had contrived to build our snow-and-ice hut, and what we had done once could be done again. The problem here was what to use for digging – to carry shafts of broken metal from the wreckage would add to weight, and also be cumbersome. In the end we were lucky. Searching farther down the hillside we came across the remains of the helicopter’s toolkit, including a short trenching spade, and a sturdy machete, carried for what reason I know not, but a godsend to us. Keller and I both had pocket knives, but the machete would be enormously valuable for roughly shaping blocks of ice for building, or for cutting up driftwood, if we found any.
We decided to take a lifejacket apiece. We could walk wearing them, if we fell through the ice somewhere they might save our lives, and if we didn’t use them as lifejackets they could be opened out to form makeshift beds. We packed such charts as we had into our canvas bags.
We gave much thought to weapons. If we contrived to find Apfel we might expect a hostile reception from Dr Braunschweig’s captors. We might be outnumbered and we should have to play that as it came, using our wits rather than weight of armament. Weight was the operative consideration. Pistols we should have to carry, but did we need rifles? On the whole we thought not, but there was the problem of possible encounters with polar bears – against a massive bear a rifle was a more reliable weapon than a pistol. In the end we decided to take one rifle and sixty rounds –sixty because it divided conveniently into carrying twenty rounds apiece.
We had a sad duty to perform as we made our preparations for departure. We had hoped that rescuers would be able to recover the bodies of our companions so that they could be taken home for burial, and while we still believed that a rescue party would ultimately come we could no longer be certain. We could not simply leave our companions as they lay, but it was hard to know what best to do about them. The frozen ground made it impossible to dig graves, and while we feared that bears might ravage the hillside once we had gone we could see no way of protecting the bodies. In the end we laid them side by side, said a brief prayer, and covered them with snow. At the head of the mound of snow we built a cairn of small rocks and stones, and in the cairn we placed a tin containing the names of the dead and a brief record of what had happened, written on pages from our notebooks. We left the record in English and German.
‘Zero hour,’ Keller said.
X
Our March
WE WERE THANKFUL to be doing something. Our way – it was simply a line of sight across the broken wilderness –began by going downhill. Then we had to turn a shoulder and had a mile or so of more or less level ground ahead of us to the next ridge. As we rounded the shoulder the peak that had wrecked us went out of sight. Keller began humming Lili Marlene, and I put improvised words to it,
‘Best foot foremost,
Marching to the Pole,
Only got to get there,
Then we’ll be . . .’
‘Tired,’ Ruth put in.
‘Won’t do. Doesn’t rhyme,’ I said.
‘We will be, though!’
‘What do you mean by “Best foot foremost”?’ Keller asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s English of a sort. It means something like, “Go on doing your best”.’
‘Well, at least that’s what we are doing.’
We might be doing our best, but it wasn’t easy. What looked from the slope of the shoulder like a flattish expanse of snow-covered ground became harder going with every yard. It was criss-crossed with small crevasses, and the snow was mostly powdery and soft. We sank up to our knees in the better places, and frequently up to our thighs. Once Ruth seemed to disappear altogether. I was terrified that she had fallen into a crevasse, but it was merely a deep bank of snow. Even so, she took some getting out. We took over four hours to cover what could not have been more than a couple of miles.
That brought us to the next ridge, and when we reached the slope the going became rather better because the snow did not lie so thickly, and was merely ankle-deep over rock or scree. We topped the ridge in growing excitement, hoping to see the sea, but the prospect ahead was the same apparently everlasting wilderness, a long flat valley rising slowly to another ridge. We had been walking now for some six hours, and needed a rest. None of us felt like floundering on, and the ridge we occupied seemed as good a place as any for the night. We climbed down a little way to an outcrop of bare rock, and found a cluster of rocks that made a sort of roofless shelter. It did not seem worth trying to build a snow house for one night, so we made ourselves as comfortable as we could among the rocks. That was not very comfortable, but it was a change from walking, and the faithful lifejackets made good cushions, though they were woefully short as mattresses. We could not make a fire because there was nothing to burn but we divided two cans of the invaluable self-heating soup among the three of us. For the rest we had ration-biscuits and one thin slice of corned beef apiece.
We set watches as before, Ruth taking the first, Keller next, and then me. No one got much sleep because it was too cold. There was nothing, not even a bear, to hasten the slow passing of that miserable night. We thought back to our igloo by the wreckage of the helicopter as a palace of comfort, where we had not only shelter but a whole pile of lifejackets to snuggle into. At five a.m. we had had enough of the rocks, and after a breakfast that was precisely the same as our supper set off on our march again.
Although we had been marching only for half a day we had established a routine that seemed to have gone on for ever. We walked in single file about five yards apart, with Ruth always in the middle and Keller and I taking it in turns to break trail. We each led for half an hour, and then changed over. The man at the back carried the rifle. We ought to have been roped in that rough and dangerous country, but although we’d searched the wreckage carefully we couldn’t find any rope. We did come across a small reel of telephone wire, and we brought this with us, thinking that perhaps it might come in for fishing line.
It was Keller’s turn to lead when we set off, and within ten minutes we met a crisis. Like Ruth the day before, Keller just disappeared, but this time it was not in deep snow but into a crevasse. Ruth stopped at the edge and in a moment I was beside her. We peered down, but could see nothing, the black walls merging into total darkness a few feet down. I called, and to our infinite relief heard Keller answer, ‘OK, I think. But I don’t know how to get back.’
‘We can’t see you,’ I said.
‘I can see you against the light. I’m caught on a ledge, but there’s no handhold.’
‘How far down are you?’
‘I don’t know. Not very far, I think.’
The telephone wire was our salvation. I tied a stone to the free end and called down to Keller, ‘I’m sending down a length of wire with a stone on the end. Try to catch it, and then I’ll pull it up. That will tell us roughly how far you’ve fallen, and we’ll think of some way to get you up.’
I paid out the wire slowly until there was a shout from Keller, ‘Got it!’ To my relief I had not used very much line. While I held the wire Ruth pulled up the stone, and we estimated the length of line from the stone to the reel. It was about fifteen feet. ‘Not too bad,’ I said to Ruth. But how on earth were we to get him up without a rope? A gap of fifteen feet is not really very far, but it is infinity if you have nothing to bridge it. The thin telephone wire was useless. I thought suddenly of the lifejackets. These were made in the form of breast and back buoyancy bags, with straps over the shoulders and long tapes to go round the waist, and since it may be necessary to haul an inert body out of the water the tapes were designed to be strong enough to take the weight. We took off our lifejackets and I tied the tape of Ruth’s to the tape of mine. Opened out, the combined length of the jackets and tapes was a bit longer than the telephone wire we had used, so that we could get our improvised line down to Keller.
‘Help coming,’ I called to him. ‘We’re sending down our lifejackets tied together. Get a grip where you can, and we’ll haul you up.’
I lowered the lifejackets, and the tapes linking them were long enough for Keller to grip the shoulder straps of Ruth’s jacket. Then we met problems. Without tackle, the vertical lift of a man is a formidable job, and we had to be careful not to be pulled into the crevasse ourselves, and not to risk fraying the tape on the ice edge. Our emergency lifeline took Keller’s weight all right and we raised him a few inches, but it seemed impossible that we should be able to lift him through fifteen feet. He solved the problem himself. ‘You can’t lift me,’ he called up, ‘but if you can hold me I can keep a grip with one hand and scramble up the rock, I think. Keep the line taut.’
It was a severe climb. Ruth and I kept the contrivance taut by moving back from the crevasse as Keller inched himself up. I prayed that my knots would hold. The climb seemed to go on for ever, but gradually Ruth and I moved away from the crevasse, and suddenly there came a marvellous moment when Keller’s head appeared. He got his arms over the edge and rested, panting. ‘All . . . right . . . now,’ he gasped. ‘Many . . . thanks.’
‘Hold the end of the lifejacket in case he slips,’ I said to Ruth. ‘I’ll go and help him up.’ The worst was over, but even with my help it was a struggle to climb out of the crevasse. At last Keller was sitting safely on the ground. ‘Get him some hot soup,’ I called to Ruth.
Keller was bleeding from a long scrape on his forehead, but it was not a deep wound, and although bruised and badly shaken he seemed to have escaped major damage. His jacket was torn, which was serious because its insulating value would be reduced, but his haversack was intact and he did not think he had lost anything. The soup revived him, and when he had drunk a few mouthfuls he handed the can to me. ‘Fair shares,’ he said.
‘We’re not sharing this – it’s all got to go inside you. We didn’t share your ordeal in the crevasse.’
‘You got me out of it. The two of you saved my life.’
‘Time for soup,’ I said firmly, and made him drink the rest of the canful.
With snow and a handkerchief, Ruth did what she could to clean up Keller’s grazes. I carried a small first aid box in my personal kit, and this provided some antiseptic ointment. In that icy wilderness I doubted if there was much chance of infection, but the ointment at least smelt good, and applying it made us feel that we were trying to do something.
*
Keller’s rescue had occupied two hours, and left us all exhausted. Keller gallantly made light of his injuries, but he was shaken, and in the cold his bruised joints were stiffening. He wasn’t really fit to go on, but we couldn’t stay where we were. We could try to go back to the wreckage, but the effort of struggling back the way we had come would get us nowhere. If we went on, not much more effort might get us to the coast. Ignorance made for optimism, and it always seems better to try to go on than to go back. So I took over the lead. According to our routine Keller should have carried the rifle, but I didn’t want to add an ounce to the weight he had to carry so I asked Ruth if she could manage it. She agreed at once. ‘It’s not so much the weight of the thing that bothers me, but that I don’t think the rifle should be with the man in the lead. If Keller had been carrying it we’d have lost it in the crevasse, and Heaven knows we may need it.’ We disentangled the now rather battered lifejackets from the contraption we had made of them, put them on again, and started.
With Keller’s fall vividly in my mind I walked slowly, testing every yard of doubtful surface. This was as much fatigue as caution, for none of us was in any state to go quickly. In fact, however, the going improved somewhat, the ground no longer heavily crevassed, and loose scree changing to a firmer surface. We also began to climb towards the next ridge, a slope more pronounced than in yesterday’s valley. I did not take in much of our surroundings for I kept my eyes on the ground immediately in front of me, making sure that I trod on earth or rock and not on some treacherous film of snow masking the edge of a hole. Keller marched on doggedly but his bruises made it painful work and he had to concentrate on keeping going.
