'Linn! Linn darling!'
There was no reply. She lay doubled over, arms outflung over the grinning corpse.
I have no clear recollection of my movements after that. All I knew was that I had one thought — to get her out! Get her out of this death-house! Get her to warmth! Get her to help!
And then, the over-riding thought, like the punch of the heavy bullet itself — she's dead, she's dead, she's beyond help!
The light of day on my eyes at the entrance to the tunnel brought me to my senses. I found myself carrying Linn over my right shoulder. The torch was in my left hand. Her arms were hanging and she was limp. I had no memory of testing to see whether she was breathing. My mind was as dark as the rock passage I had just left behind.
Get her to the fire! Get her warm! See where the bullet went in…
The fire was barely smouldering. I put Linn down on the rounded pebbles of the beach. I cast about, grabbing anything that looked dry enough to burn. The penguins near the water's edge started to squawk. Four elephant seals remained as dormant as giant hibernating slugs.
I returned with an armful of wood, threw it on the fire. The sight of Linn's face drove me. It was a hideous putty-blue. There was a trace of pink spume at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were half-open, unseeing.
I couldn't spot any blood. But there wouldn't be yet, through all her thick clothing. The only sign of violence was a small tear from the Luger bullet above her left breast.
I darted to the cliff side and plucked and tore handfuls of the rough tussocky grass for a couch. I arranged it, then laid her gently on it. The fire began picking up.
I plucked at the strings of her parka to examine the wound. My fingers were so stiff and shaking that I could not untie them. I stopped, looking for something to cut with. Like an evil dream the thought came to me; I had no knife, nothing. Wegger had allowed us nothing.
Then I saw his own knife at my waistband. I had no recollection at all of putting it there.
The sight of it pulled me together. There was no point in senselessly slashing her clothing. If she were alive, she would need every scrap of protection she could get.
I took a big grip on myself and set my fingers to untying the parka. Underneath, her jersey was water-damp but unstained by blood. There was only that hideous marker on the left breast. At the sight of it, my hands seemed to lose co-ordination. I pulled at her sweater and my hand struck something hard, metallic. I managed to get her sweater up a little further.
Then I saw the tiny transmitter lodged in the strap of her brassiere. It had a ragged rent in its inner corner.
Two long blue-red bullet welts radiated from it across and up her chest.
One, about six inches long, travelled vertically in the direction of her shoulder-blade.
The second, an ugly blue-black score, had laid open the flesh across her breastbone and then disappeared in an angry ragged hole on her right side. Blood was pouring from both wounds.
I leant down with racing pulses, plucked away the transmitter, and put my ear against her heart.
She was alive!
Then I realized with a stab of unbelievable relief what had happened: Wegger's heavy 9mm Parabellum slug had smashed into the transmitter and splintered. One ragged fragment had shot upwards, making the long superficial wound to her shoulder-blade; the other had ricocheted sideways into her right side, entering her chest against the swell of her breast. That was the dangerous wound.
For the first time I became aware of my own wound when I felt blood dripping from the vicinity of my ear and saw it splashing against her chest. I felt my neck cautiously. The tip of Wegger's knife had torn the lobe of my right ear and then travelled back as far as my hairline. It did not seem more than a flesh wound although it was throbbing painfully. I tried to staunch the blood with my handkerchief.
I sat like that on my haunches, looking into Linn's pain-filled face. Out of reaction, the muscles of my legs and arms started to kick uncontrollably and I began to shake all over like a case of DTs. I crouched close to the fire to warm myself, getting Linn too as near the heat as I could. Cold meant death; the cold would get into her wound and kill her.
I knew I had somehow to stop the bleeding. The flesh wound was pumping freely but it was the other — which was showing also signs of heavy bruising which I feared. I wondered whether, from the pink froth at her lips, the fragment of bullet had entered her right lung. I tested her breathing. There was not the wheezing there would have been from a lung wound. Then, to my relief, I found that the froth was coming from a gash where she had bitten her lip in agony as the bullet had hit her.
I had nothing with which to tend or bandage her wounds. The only thing I had was my woollen shirt, which was wet. Stripping myself of it, drying and tearing it for makeshift bandages; drying my other clothes one by one and replacing Linn's with them so that she was warm and dry; and getting her own things themselves dry was an operation as freezingly breath-catching as diving into the sea itself. When it was all done and she was as comfortable as I could make her, I took stock of my situation.
The afternoon was far gone. The cave's entrance, which faced east, was now almost in full shadow. The penguin colony had been swelled by other individuals which had swum up to the beach. They stood chattering and making tentative sallies towards the fire. The elephant seals were still quiescent. The wind had dropped and I was surprised to see that there were no more whitecaps out to sea. It had the makings of a rare calm evening.
It didn't need a doctor to tell me Linn was a hospital case. The fragment of bullet would have to be removed from her chest. That meant an operating theatre. The nearest hospital was over 2000 kilometres away, on the Cape mainland.
Had the GARP network heard our signals? If it had, how could I communicate further? Marion Island had powerful radio weather transmitters but I had no boat to get there. Nor had the weather station a boat. The channel is so dangerous that all boats are banned.
I ruled out Marion Island.
I found Linn's smashed-transmitter. If it had worked previously, it did so no longer. Its intricate circuitry had been wrecked by the bullet.
The only method I could visualize of getting Linn out was by helicopter. A helicopter-carrying destroyer would take five days to reach Prince Edward from its Cape base. How — if the authorities were immediately made aware of her plight — would I keep Linn alive until then?
She had to have food. I had to have food.
Previous Prince Edward Island survivors — including Wegger — had kept themselves going on elephant seals; their meat for sustenance, their blubber for fuel, their hides for boots and even to patch boats. They were the readiest source of food in addition to birds, birds' eggs and the native vegetable, Kerguelen cabbage.
I eyed the group of elephant seals on the beach in front of me and made up my mind immediately. I'd never killed an elephant seal, but I knew how it was done. I hurried to the sleeping group and picked up a large stone. It was over in a moment. I was glad that the brute hadn't opened his saucer-like limpid eyes before the stone crashed home on his protruding snout. I dragged the carcase back to the fire and set to work with Wegger's knife, first slicing off the thick layer of blubber and setting it aside for burning.
Then I realized that I had nothing to cook with.
There was the litter of broken pots and tins inside the cave entrance. Most of the stuff was so rusty as to be useless. The big sealers' pots were designed for whole carcasses and moreover had holes rusted through them. I earmarked a couple of beer-cans for blubber lamps. I sloshed over to the spring to wash them out and have a drink of water myself. My foot touched something else solid in the water. It was a 15cm shell-case, brass, unrusted. British? German? I picked it out of the water — it would make an ideal cooking-vessel. There was no time to puzzle how it came there. I hurried back to the fire.