The men scrambled to do so, their long hair writhing like snakes under the edges of their Welsh wigs or caps and above their many-wrapped comforters. The storm increased in ferocity and the noise was deafening. The hail pounding them in the backs through canvas and blankets felt like huge fists battering them black and blue. Goodsir actually moaned aloud during the pummeling, more from fear than from pain, although the constant blows constituted the most painful beating he had suffered since his public school days.
“Holy fucking Christ!” cried Thomas Hartnell as both hail and lightning grew worse. The men with any brains were under their Hudson’s Bay Company blankets now rather than in them, trying to use them as a buffer against the hail. The tent canvas threatened to suffocate all of them, and the thin canvas beneath them did nothing to keep the cold from flowing up and into them, taking their collective breath away.
“How can there be a lightning storm when it is so cold?” shouted Goodsir to Gore, who was lying next to him in the huddle of terrified men.
“It happens,” the lieutenant shouted back. “If we decide to move from the ships to land camp, we’ll have to bring one God-awful heap of lightning rods with us.”
This was the first time that Goodsir had heard any hint of abandoning the ships.
Lightning struck the boulder they’d been huddled near during their abbreviated supper not ten feet from the tent, ricocheted over their canvas-covered heads to a second boulder no more than three feet from them, and every man huddled lower, trying to claw through the canvas beneath himself in an attempt to burrow into the rock.
“Good God, Lieutenant Gore,” cried John Morfin, whose head was closest to the collapsed opening of the tent, “there’s something moving around out there in the middle of all this.”
All the men were accounted for. Gore shouted, “A bear? Walking around in this?”
“Too large to be a bear, Lieutenant,” shouted Morfin. “It’s…” Then the lightning struck the boulder again, another blast struck close enough to cause the tent fabric to leap in the air from the static discharge, and everyone cowered flatter, pressed their faces to cold canvas, and abandoned speech in favor of prayer.
The attack — Goodsir could only think of it as an attack, as if from Greek gods furious at their hubris for wintering in Boreas’s realm — went on for almost an hour, until the last of the thunder moved past and the flashes became intermittent and then moved on to the southeast.
Gore was the first to emerge, but even the lieutenant whom Goodsir knew to be almost without fear did not rise to his feet for a full minute or more after the barrage ceased. Others crawled out on their knees and stayed there, staring around as if in stupefaction or supplication. The sky to the east was a latticework of air-to-air and air-to-ground discharges, the thunder still rolled across the flat island with enough violence to exert a physical pressure on their skins and to make them cover their ears, but the hail had ceased. The smashed white spheres were piled two feet high all around them as far as they could see. After a minute Gore got to his feet and began looking around. The others then also rose, stiffly, moving slowly, testing their limbs, heavily bruised, Goodsir judged, if his own pain was any measure of their common abuse by the heavens. The midnight twilight was dimmed enough by the thick clouds to the south that it almost seemed as if real darkness was falling.
“Look at this,” called Charles Best.
Goodsir and the others gathered near the sledge. The tins of food and other material had been unpacked and stacked near the cooking area before their aborted supper, and somehow the lightning had contrived to strike the low pyramid of stacked cans while missing the sledge itself. All of Goldner’s canned food had been blasted apart as surely as if a cannonball had struck the stack — a perfect roll in a game of cosmic ninepins. Charred metal and still-steaming inedible vegetables and rotten meat were scattered in a twenty-yard radius. Near the surgeon’s left foot was a charred, twisted, and blackened receptacle with the legend COOKING APPARATUS (I) visible on its side. It was part of their travel mess kit and had been sitting on one of their spirit stoves when they had run for shelter. The metal bottle holding a pint of pyroligneous ether fuel next to it had exploded, sending shrapnel flying in all directions but evidently just barely passing over their heads as they huddled in the tent. If the lightning had ignited the stack of fuel bottles sitting in their wooden box next to the two shotguns and shells a few feet away on the sledge, the explosion and flames would have consumed them all.
Goodsir had the urge to laugh but didn’t do so out of fear he might weep at the same time. None of the men spoke for a moment.
Finally John Morfin, who had climbed the low ridge of hailpummeled ice above their campsite, cried, “Lieutenant, you need to see this.”
They climbed up to look toward where he was staring.
Along the backside of this low ice ridge, coming from the ice jumble south of them and disappearing toward the sea northwest of them, were absolutely impossible tracks. Impossible because they were larger than any tracks of any living animal on earth. For five days now, the men had seen the paw prints of the white bears in the snow, and some of those tracks were absurdly large — some twelve inches long — but these indistinct tracks were more than half again larger than that. Some appeared to be as long as a man’s arm. And they were new — there was no doubt whatsoever of that — because the indentations were not in the old snow but pressed into the thick layer of fresh hailstones.
Whatever had walked past their camp had done so during the height of the lightning and hail storm, just as Morfin had reported.
“What is this?” said Lieutenant Gore. “This can’t be. Mr. Des Voeux, be so kind as to fetch one of the shotguns and some shells from the sledge, please.”
“Aye, sir.”
Even before the mate came back with the shotgun, Morfin, Marine Private Pilkington, Best, Ferrier, and Goodsir began trudging after Gore as the lieutenant followed the impossible tracks northwest.
“These are too large, sir,” said the Marine. He had been included in the party, Goodsir knew, because he was one of the few men aboard either ship who had ever hunted game larger than a grouse.
“I know that, Private,” said Gore. He accepted the shotgun from Second Mate Des Voeux and calmly loaded a shell as the seven men strode through the heaps of hail toward the dark clouds beyond the iceberg-guarded shoreline.
“Maybe they’re not paw prints, but something… an arctic hare or something hopping through the slush, making the prints with its entire body,” said Des Voeux.
“Yes,” said Gore absently. “Perhaps so, Charles.”
But they were paw prints of some kind. Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir knew that. Every man walking near him knew that. Goodsir, who had never hunted anything larger than a rabbit or partridge, could tell that this wasn’t the track of some small thing throwing its body left, then right but rather the footprints of something walking first on four legs and then — if the tracks were to be believed — almost a hundred yards on two legs. At that point they were the tracks of a walking man, if a man had feet the length of his forearms and could cover almost five feet between strides while leaving no impressions of toes but rather the striations of claws.
They reached the windswept area of stones where Goodsir had thrown himself down on his knees so many hours before — the hailstones here had shattered into countless icy shards so the area remained almost bare — and here the tracks stopped.
“Spread out,” said Gore, still holding the shotgun casually under his arm as if he were taking a walk through his family’s estate in Essex. He pointed to each man and then pointed to the edge of the open area he wanted that man to check. The rocky space was not much larger than a cricket pitch.