Free Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow Page B

nudged the tiny heart in its breast. Father watched it done and then tried it himself. He held an auk in one hand and with his thumb gently squeezed the beating breast. Its head slumped and it was dead. The Esquimos loved the auklet and customarily pickled it in sealskins.
    On the way back to camp Father and Mathew Henson discussed what the men under Peary always discussed—who would have the honor of actually going to the Pole with him. Before the embarkation from New York the Commander had made it quite clear to everyone that he and he alone was to discover the Pole: their glory would be in support. I’ve spent my life planning for that moment, Peary said, and I’m going to have it for myself. This seemed to Father a reasonable point of view. He had the diffidence of the amateur before the professional. But it was Mathew Henson’s view that someone besides Esquimos would have to go to the top with the Commander, and he thought, with all due respect, it would be himself. Actually Father believed Henson had a good case. Henson had been with Peary on his previous expeditions and he was an astute and formidable Arctic explorer in his own right.He knew how to drive the dogs almost as well as an Esquimo, he knew how to repair sledges, build camps, he had great physical strength and boasted many skills. But Father found himself unaccountably resenting Henson’s presumption and he asked the Negro how he knew he would be chosen. They had breasted a ridge along the trail and stood resting the dogs for a moment as they looked over a great white plain of snow. At that moment the sun broke through the overcast and the entire earth flashed like a mirror. Well, sir, Mathew Henson said with a smile, I just know.
    The next day the expedition set out due north across the polar ice. They were arranged in separate parties consisting of a white man or two, a group of Esquimo boys, a pack of dogs and four or five sledges. Each party except Peary’s was to serve for a week as pioneer or trailbreaker to the rest of the expedition. Eventually, each of them was to peel off and head back to land, leaving Peary and his boys to make the last hundred miles or so in fresh, relatively rested condition. That was the system. The big work was in breaking trail. This was hazardous and backbreaking labor. Ridges of ice had to be hacked away with a pickax, heavy sledges had to be hauled and pushed up ice inclines and then held against precipitous descents. Each sled carried over six hundred pounds of tools and provisions. When it broke, it had to be unloaded and repaired by lashing the broken parts together—work that required an ungloved hand. There were leads of water that had to be crossed or waited out. The ice floes came together with great cracks, like the sound of cannon, and rumbledunderfoot like the voice of the ocean itself. Inexplicable fogs blocked out the sun. Sometimes there was nothing to do but crawl across thin sheets of forming ice; no one wanted to be caught on a drifting ice floe. The weather was a constant torment, the wind blowing so sharply at fifty or sixty degrees below zero that the air itself seemed to have changed its physical nature, being now unassimilable crystals in one’s lungs. Each breath left its solid residue in the beard or on the frozen edges of the fur hoods. Everyone wore the prescribed soft sealskin shoes, the bear fur trousers and the hooded caribou jackets, but even these indigenous materials turned brittle in the frost. The sun now stood above the horizon twenty-four hours a day. At the end of a day’s travel, perhaps fifteen miles of arduous effort, the pioneer group would make camp, build igloos for the pursuing expedition, feed the dogs, untangle their iced-up traces, light the alcohol cooker to brew tea, and fall to a meal of frozen pemmican and crackers. Slowly through the month of March the Peary expedition made its way due north. One by one a party would turn back, its obligations now to beat the