The three officers interrupted from time to time with questions while the teetering Best made his report. When his description of the team’s laborious sledge trip to King William Land threatened to stretch on too long, Sir John hurried the man to the events of the last two days.
“Yes, sir. Well, after that first night of lightning and thunder at the cairn and then finding them… tracks, marks… in the snow, we tried to sleep a couple of hours but didn’t really succeed, and then Lieutenant Gore and I set off to the south with light rations while Mr. Des Voeux took the sledge and what was left of the tent and poor Hartnell, who was still out cold then, and we said our ‘until tomorrows’ and the lieutenant and I headed south and Mr. Des Voeux and his people headed out to the sea ice again.”
“You were armed,” said Sir John.
“Aye, Sir John,” said Best. “Lieutenant Gore had a pistol. I had one of the two shotguns. Mr. Des Voeux kept the other shotgun with his party and Private Pilkington carried the musket.”
“Tell us why Lieutenant Gore divided the party,” commanded Sir John.
Best seemed confused by the question for a moment but then brightened. “Oh, he told us he was following your orders, sir. With the food at the cairn camp destroyed by lightning and the tent damaged, most of the party needed to get back to sea camp. Lieutenant Gore and me went on to cache that second message container somewhere south along the coast and to see if there was any open water. There wasn’t any, sir. Open water, I mean. Not a hint. Not a fu—… not a single reflection of dark sky to suggest water.”
“How far did the two of you go, Best?” asked Fitzjames.
“Lieutenant Gore figured we’d traveled about four miles south across that snow and frozen gravel when we reached a big inlet, sir… rather like the bay at Beechey where we wintered a year ago. But you know what four miles is like in the fog and wind and with ice, sirs, even on land around here. We probably hiked ten miles at least to cover the four. The inlet was frozen solid. Solid as the pack ice here. Not even that usual bit of open water you get between shore and ice in any inlet during the summer up here. So we crossed the mouth of her, sirs, and then went another quarter of a mile or so out along a promontory there where Lieutenant Gore and me built another cairn — not as tall or fancy as Captain Ross’s, I’m sure, but solid, and high enough that anyone would see it right away. That land is so flat that a man is always the tallest thing on it. So we piled the rocks about eye-high and set in that second message, same as the first the lieutenant told me, in its fancy brass cylinder.”
“Did you turn back then?” asked Captain Crozier.
“No, sir,” said Best. “I admit I was worn out. So was Lieutenant Gore. The walking had been hard all that day, even the sastrugi were hard to kick our way through, but it’d been foggy so we only got glimpses of the coast along there from time to time when the fog lifted, so even though it was already afternoon by the time we finished building the cairn and leaving the message, Lieutenant Gore, he had us walk about six or seven more miles south along the coast. Sometimes we could see, most of the time we couldn’t. But we could hear.”
“Hear what, man?” asked Franklin.
“Something following us, Sir John. Something big. And breathing. Sometimes woofin’ a bit… you know, sirs, like them white bears do, like they’re coughing?”
“You identified it as a bear?” asked Fitzjames. “You said that you were the largest things visible on land. Certainly if a bear was following you, you could see it when the fog lifted.”
“Aye, sir,” said Best, frowning so deeply that it appeared he might start crying. ‘I mean, no, sir. We couldn’t identify it as no bear, sir. We could have, normal like. We should have. But we didn’t and couldn’t. Sometimes we’d hear it coughin’ right behind us — fifteen feet away in the fog — and I’d level the shotgun and Lieutenant Gore would prime his pistol, and we’d wait, sort of holding our breath, but when the fog lifted we could see a hundred feet and nothing was there.”
“It must have been an aural phenomenon,” said Sir John.
“Aye, sir,” agreed Best, his tone suggesting that he did not understand Sir John’s comment.
“The shore ice making noise,” said Sir John. “Perhaps the wind.”
“Oh, aye, yes, sir, Sir John,” said Best. “Only there weren’t no wind. But the ice… could’ve been that, m’lord. Always could be that.” His tone explained that it could not have been.
Shifting as if he was feeling irritation, Sir John said, “You said at the outlet that Lieutenant Gore died… was killed… after you rejoined the other six men on the ice. Please proceed to that point in the narrative.”
“Yes, sir. Well, it must’ve been close to midnight when we reached as far south as we could go. The sun was gone from the sky ahead of us but the sky had that gold glow… you know how it is around midnight up here, Sir John. The fog had lifted well enough for a short while that when we climbed a little rocky nub of a hill… not a hill, really, but a high spit maybe fifteen feet above the rest of the flat, frozen gravel there… we could see the shore twisting away farther to the south to the blurry horizon with glimpses of bergs poking up from over the horizon from where they’d piled up along the shoreline. No water. Everything frozen solid all the way down. So we turned around and started walking back. We didn’t have no tent, no sleeping bags, just cold food to chew on. I broke a good tooth on it. We were both very thirsty, Sir John. We didn’t have a stove to melt snow or ice, and we’d started with only a little bit of water in a bottle that Lieutenant Gore kept under his coats and waistcoat.
“So we walked through the night — through the hour or two of sort of twilight that passes for night here, sirs, and then on for more hours — and I fell asleep walking half a dozen times and would’ve walked in circles until I dropped, but Lieutenant Gore would grab me by the arm and shake me a bit and lead me the right way. We passed the new cairn and then crossed the inlet, and sometime around six bells, when the sun was full up high again, we reached the spot where we’d camped the night before near the first cairn, Sir James Ross’s cairn I mean — actually it’d been two nights before, during the first lightning storm — and we just kept trudging on, following the sledge tracks out to the heaped shore bergs and then out onto the sea ice.”
“You said ‘during the first lightning storm,’” interrupted Crozier. “Were there more? We had several here while you were gone, but the worst seemed to be to the south.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” said Best. “Every few hours, even with the fog so heavy, the thunder would start rumblin’ again and then our hair would start flying about, trying to lift off our heads, and anything metal we had — belt buckles, the shotgun, Lieutenant Gore’s pistol — would start glowing blue, and we’d find a place to hunker down in the gravel and we’d just lie there trying to disappear into the ground while the world exploded around us like cannon fire at Trafalgar, sirs.”
“Were you at Trafalgar, Seaman Best?” Sir John asked icily.
Best blinked. “No, sir. Of course not, sir. I’m only twenty-five, m’lord.”
“I was at Trafalgar, Seaman Best,” Sir John said stiffly. “As signals officer on HMS Bellerophon, where thirty-three of the forty officers were killed in that single engagement. Please restrain from using metaphors or similes from beyond your experience for the remainder of your report.”