• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN •

DR. COOK CALLED ME TO THE DAKOTA DRAWING ROOM ONE DAY to tell me that he had been asked by the Peary Arctic Club to lead a “relief expedition” for Peary. It was by then almost thirty months since Peary had set off from Philadelphia with two other Americans—and more than a year since I had arrived in New York.

“The club tells me, ‘Peary is lost somewhere in the Arctic. We need the benefit of your judgment,’ an admission that Peary himself would never make and, if he is found alive, will rebuke his backers for making, even if my intervention saves his life. I feel that as a fellow explorer, I cannot refuse their request. As you know, I have been north only once since the expedition on which Francis Stead was lost. The prospect of going again appeals to me.”

Dr. Cook said that aside from the unwritten code among explorers that obliged him to do all he was able to bring about Peary’s rescue, two other considerations inclined him to accede to the Arctic club’s request. One was that Peary was unaware that, in his absence, his mother and his infant daughter had passed away.

The other consideration was that Jo Peary and her daughter, Marie, were also missing in the North, unheard from since departing Godhavn, Greenland, on August 24 of last year. Mrs. Peary had left Maine with her surviving child when she received a letter from Peary that was meant to reassure her that he was healthy, but had just the opposite effect. She told the Peary Arctic Club that she was going to “fetch” her husband back. It was uncertain if she and her daughter were now with Peary. Mrs. Peary had planned to go as far north as safety and comfort would allow; if by then she had still not found Peary, she would stay put and wait for his return.

“Therefore I must break the vow I made to have no more to do with Peary,” Dr. Cook said.

“When will you leave?” I said.

“Very soon. As this expedition will be a short one and will take place in the summer, I was able to convince Bridgman to let you come along with me. I assume that you would like to.” He smiled at me, then laughed when he saw how pleased I was by this surprise. Before I had time to stammer out an acceptance of his invitation, he began to tell me what needed to be done before we left.

“Suppose you don’t come back?” I overheard Mrs. Cook say to her husband one morning when she went to see him in his office.

The question kept running through my mind.

But I looked forward to the coming expedition with far more excitement than dread. Death, to me, was my mother’s death, and Francis Stead’s. My own did not really seem possible. Was I a fool to be subjecting myself to the certain suffering of a polar expedition, even one that it was expected we would return from before winter set in? I did not feel like one. I felt fortunate, as though I had been chosen at random to receive some honour I did not deserve.

Dr. Cook and I took the Intercolonial Railroad to North Sydney, Nova Scotia, where we boarded the Erik. Already on board were several young men whose fathers were members of the Peary Arctic Club. Paying guests whose fees covered roughly half the cost of the expedition, most of them would be dropped off in Labrador and southern Greenland, where they would spend their time trophy hunting until the ship returned. They had their own compartment, a bunkhouse whose cramped dimensions they complained about incessantly, especially when they learned that I, who was younger than most of them and had no social standing, would be sharing Dr. Cook’s less Spartan quarters.

Dr. Cook put an end to their complaining by telling them “my story.” Soon, all of them believed that this would be my one and only visit to the Arctic, a visit I was undertaking to satisfy a lifelong yearning to set eyes on the land where my father disappeared and from which his body had never been recovered. Now the other young men regarded me with a mixture of sympathy and awe. They kept their distance from me, as if they wanted neither to intrude upon my pilgrimage nor to allow my presumably solemn mood to dampen theirs.

Dr. Cook and I shared the captain’s cabin at the aft of the ship, a grandly named, sparsely furnished, low-ceilinged room not much larger than the pantry at 670 Bushwick. A bunk was built for me along the wall opposite the one to which Dr. Cook’s bed was attached. The bunk was like a large dresser drawer whose sides would keep me from spilling out onto the floor in rough weather. Everything in the cabin was tied or bolted down. An oak desk and a chair without arms were bolted to the floor. You had to squeeze into the chair, which was permanently drawn up to what for someone had been an ideal distance from the desk but was for Dr. Cook a touch too far, so that he had to sit on the edge of the chair as he wrote or read.

Dr. Cook had brought along hundreds of books, which he crammed into what little shelf space there was in the cabin; all the shelves had detachable wooden bars across them to keep the books from falling out. “You will have a lot of spare time,” he said. “More than most people ever have. It will give you a chance to read these books. No one who hasn’t read them can claim to be educated.” He had read them all, he said, and was working his way through them for a second time, more slowly. If not for these books, he said, he might not have survived the thirteen months he spent aboard the ice-trapped Belgica as it drifted back and forth across the Antarctic Ocean. I scanned the spines of the books: Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Pascal, Hobbes, Sterne, Fielding, Melville, Darwin, Tolstoy. At college, Dr. Cook had studied only medicine and other sciences. He was otherwise self-educated, having figured out for himself which books were worth his time, and having made his way through them without guidance of any kind.

The Erik was an enormous black sealing ship from Newfoundland, recently salvaged from a wreck, whose hull was now reinforced with squares of oak planking fourteen inches thick. It was hoped it would hold up against whatever ice we would encounter. The chunky ship, with its distinctive, overlarge sealer’s bowsprit jutting out a third of the ship’s length from the nose, looked like a teapot with a straight, elongated spout.

Attached to her aft masts, a hundred feet above the deck, and a good thirty feet above the height of most crow’s-nests, were two barrels in which would be stationed “ice spotters” who would have to scan the sea ahead of us through billowing black smoke from the stack in front of them.

We left North Sydney on July 14, crossed the Gulf of St. Lawrence, followed the northwest coast of Newfoundland to the Straits of Belle Isle. On July 21, we rounded Cape Ray Light, on the south coast of Labrador, and, after putting some of the hunters ashore, set out for Greenland’s Cape Farewell, across the ice-strewn Sea of Labrador.

On the south coast of Greenland, we put in at Godhavn, where the rest of the hunters went ashore and the Danish governor told Dr. Cook he had no news of Peary. Some Eskimos there said that Peary and his ship, the Windward, were lost, but Mrs. Peary and her little girl were safe at Upernavik.

To reach Upernavik, we had to cross the Umanak Fiord. As there was almost no chance that we would encounter ice of any thickness in the fiord, the ice pilots came down from their masts. At my request, Dr. Cook convinced Captain Blakeney to let us climb up and stand in the barrels. Only because the water was so calm would he allow it, he said, though my impression was that he would have taken any request of Dr. Cook’s as an order. A Canadian, he had been hired on short notice, having spent the past ten years painting houses, a vocation he discovered when he was fired from the navy.

Dr. Cook and I ascended the mast ladders together, Dr. Cook waiting for me when I lagged behind. On his instructions, I stared at the rungs and at my hands to keep from getting dizzy. Even though there was no wind, the ship rolled some from side to side on a tidal swell that on deck I had barely noticed—rolled more and more, it seemed, the higher up we went, the cross spars creaking from the weight of the furled sails, my mast swaying like the tree it once was until it seemed certain it would snap off beneath my feet and fall with me still climbing it, still riding on the rungs.

“Is your mast moving?” I shouted across to Dr. Cook, who was twenty feet away from me, though he might as well have been a mile away for all the good he could do me if I got into trouble.

He smiled reassuringly at me through the web of rigging. “Don’t look down until we’re in the barrels,” he said. “I’ll climb into mine first to show you how it’s done.”

We had to climb above the barrels and lower ourselves down into them, for they had no gate or door. I watched as Dr. Cook did it with an agility that I hoped was not essential to the task. He shinnied around the mast, so that for a short while there was nothing under him to impede his fall but vines of rope. Then, with the rungs now on the far side of the mast, he climbed down into the barrel with such ease that I realized he must have done it many times before.

“Your turn,” he said. The hardest part was switching sides. I did not shinny around the mast as he had, but kept my left hand and foot on the ends of the rungs as I felt around the mast with my right hand and foot. If not for having long legs, I would have had to do it Dr. Cook’s way or climb back down the ladder in defeat. My right foot found the rung first, then my right hand.

“You’re almost there,” Dr. Cook said. “Let go on the left.” I did, and was soon clinging with both hands to one side of the rung and, more ominously, standing with both feet, with all my weight, on one side of it. I quickly shifted my hand and foot to the other side and climbed down into the barrel, where my legs gave way beneath me and I found myself sitting down, panting for breath, heart pounding as I looked up at the sky.

“Devlin,” Dr. Cook shouted. “Devlin, are you all right?”

“Yes,” I shouted, then I realized how absurd I must seem to him, shouting unseen from inside the barrel. I struggled to my feet. He would have seen first one hand then the other grip the edge of the barrel, then the slow emergence of my head as I peered out above the edge to find that I was standing with my back to him. I turned around, expecting to see on his face some mix of sympathy and consternation, but was relieved to see there instead a grin of fond amusement. “It’s easier my way,” he said, and we both burst out laughing.

The barrel came up to my chest. I leaned my arms on the edge of it and looked sideways, down the inland length of the fiord. It ended in an illusory vanishing point, a black blur where opposing cliffs that were fifty miles apart seemed to converge like railway tracks. There was a faint, cooling breeze. The sun shone dimly through a gauze of high white cloud.

I could see far inland—beyond the hills on which nothing grew but grass that in June had pushed up through the snow and would do so again in September when the snow returned, beyond a summer-softened glacier whose leading edge had crumbled into icebergs months ago—all the way to where the ice had brought up for good ten thousand years ago.

Dr. Cook pointed. “McCormick Bay is about six hundred miles northwest of here.” The site of Redcliffe House.

There was almost no chance, he had told me before we left, that Peary had made it even that far north. Nor, in that case, was it likely that we would.

“Do you think they can hear us down there?” I said. We both looked down at the few crew members who were on the deck.

Dr. Cook shook his head. “Our voices carry whichever way we’re facing,” he said, which at the moment was straight ahead. I nodded.

He looked almost continuously at me as I regarded the landscape, glancing away briefly to note the cause of my stupefaction, then back at me again, so anxious was he to see the effect on me of every wonder we encountered, every fiord, vista, glacier and iceberg. Whenever I looked at him, he laughed, then surveyed the view with a fond expression, as if mine had helped him to remember how he had felt when he first saw such things.

“Someday we will get there together,” he said, looking at the northern horizon as though imagining someplace beyond it—the pole, the ultimate Arctic, where the essence of everything that lay about us now would be revealed. I could not conceive of a place in comparison with which the one he had brought me to would seem deficient.

“We will get there first,” he said. I had never heard such fervour, such longing, not even in the voices of preachers when they spoke of heaven. It was as if only those who got “there” first would see it as it really was. By our having been there, it would, for all who might come after us, be transformed.

We saw the calving of a rare late-summer iceberg, a calving caused not by melting, but by the freezing that was already taking place at night. During the summer melting, water ran into fissures and, upon freezing, expanded. Over and over this happened, the fissures growing wider each night, other fissures forming from the first ones, forking out like lightning through the ice. It sounded as though explosives deep within the ice were detonating at intervals, with each blast, though muffled, followed by a general agitation, a faint vibration in the air and in the ground that loosened rocks and slabs of stone on the steeper cliffs like minor avalanches, most of which petered out before they reached the water, though sometimes we heard a single, satisfying “fump,” as if a rock had landed edgewise without a splash.

These fissures, Dr. Cook said, would result in icebergs next spring, or the one after that, or a spring ten years from now, when the depending weight of ice was such that whatever was holding it in place would break at last.

“We may see one or two break loose,” said Dr. Cook. They would be too small, he said, to make it as far south as St. John’s like the spring icebergs. But they would be bigger than any icebergs I had ever seen before.

I was surprised that the surface of the glacier, the walls of the fissures and crevasses, were so discoloured, grey-brown mixed in with white and green. I had expected ice as pristine as that which drifted past Newfoundland each spring. The ice I spoke of, Dr. Cook said, was so white because its outer layers had melted while it was drifting towards Newfoundland. Here, the ice bore on its surface sand that was blown onto it by summer storms, silt left behind by streams that flowed across it from the coastal mountains. Not to mention guano from a dozen kinds of birds, each of whose flocks numbered in the tens of thousands.

Simple exposure to the air, along with cycles of melting and freezing, caused chemical changes similar to rusting, he said. It was really only on the coast that the old ice looked like this. Farther inland, farther north, where nothing ever melted and the mountains that rose up from the ice were covered in snow and devoid of topsoil, the ice was almost perfect. But the only truly perfect ice was the ice of the polar seas.

The sub-surface ice explosions continued night after night, the sound channelled into echoes by the fiord. It might have been an exchange of artillery fire between two distant armies that preferred to fight at night. The explosions sent ripples across the water, just large enough to make the ship bob at anchor, the waves lapping against the hull as if a slight breeze was blowing.

As the nights grew colder, the explosions became more frequent, the artillery bombardment more intense, as if the armies were headed our way, one retreating, one advancing. A decrease in the frequency of the explosions, Dr. Cook said, would mean that less melting was taking place by day; that summer was nearly over and it was time for us to leave, unless we planned to winter here with Peary.

As if the retreating army had decided it would make a final stand, there came from within the glacier one night a constant volley of explosions. In the morning, Dr. Cook pointed out a massive section of ice that he believed was ready to give way.

Captain Blakeney kept the Erik far from where it was even remotely possible that any ice would fall, this degree of caution being necessary because the berg, if it was big enough, would displace enough water to send out a series of waves that might damage or even swamp the ship.

It sounded as if massive trees were being slowly bent until they broke, a forest of them creaking, splintering, snapping. The snapping increased to Gatling-gun speed, geysers of ice chips erupting one after the other along a jagged line that traced out the shape of what would be one side of the iceberg. Huge chunks of ice rained down from the top, churning the water white. The staccato of snapping sped up until it became a single sound. There was a deafening severance of old ice from old ice. Then came a creaking screech, as if all that had broken so far were the branches of the tree, but now the very trunk itself had begun to give. I thought it would go on like this, breaking massively but gradually, with an excruciating reluctance. But then the whole thing plunged suddenly, silently, as if it had been hanging by a single cable that had just been cut. It seemed for an instant that it had not so much fallen as been erased from the bottom up; that there would be no splash, no sound. And then all the water that had been displaced rose up at once, as though something the size of the iceberg had been pushed up from the ocean floor to take its place. There was nothing to be heard or seen but water—water roaring, frothing up so high and wide it seemed certain that nothing so inert as ice would appear when it died down. Its height and shape persisted, fountain-like, for seconds. Then the first uprush of water fell and caused a smaller one, which had just begun when the iceberg surfaced, its great mass rolling, the water around it churning as though silent engines were propelling it from far below.

It was still rolling, yet to assume its surface shape, when we saw the series of ice-clogged waves bearing down upon the ship. They broke against the hull, which seemed to rear up beneath them like a horse. Each wave rammed the hull as if we had hit another ship head on. It was as though we were travelling against the current of a river thick with silt the size of boulders. The chunks of ice thudded against the hull with the frequency of hailstones.

When the waves subsided, the iceberg rolled again, teetering, bobbing, its rusted side showing as if it might come to rest that way. But then it performed a slow back flip and the rust went under until the iceberg’s white underbelly showed. It stopped bobbing and at the same time rode higher on the water, as though eager to show, after all that thrashing and somersaulting, that it had the knack of floating now. A minute before, the Erik had had the water to itself, but it was now sharing it with this massive, unmanned vessel, buoyed up by what might have been its reflection, its submerged portion, which glowed murkily at such a depth I was certain it had run aground.

A great cheer went up from the passengers and crew when the iceberg settled on its final form. The surface berg was just higher than the main mast and so about a hundred feet above the water, which meant the sub-surface berg drew at least eight hundred feet.

But like all late icebergs, it would be short-lived. In the sunlight, it would melt. It would spring a thousand leaks. Fresh water would run down its sides in torrents as water from the sea was doing now. It would drift as treacherous, as deceptive, as an almost sunken ship of which nothing but an unmanned wheelhouse showed above the water. As its shape shifted, so would its centre of balance, until it rolled again and some long-submerged part of it took its turn above the water.

The ship undamaged, we made our way around the berg, then started up the ice-free fiord.

No one at Upernavik knew anything about Peary.

We steamed farther north to Cape York, where we arrived at midnight on the first of August. Captain Blakeney blew the ship’s whistle three times. In no time, kayaks were putting out from shore. Many Eskimos came on board, among them three who had served as guides on the North Greenland expedition and had worked with Francis Stead. Dr. Cook introduced me to them as the son of Dr. Stead. As if they thought my purpose for coming along was to rescue my father, they told me with as much regret as if he had departed from them only yesterday that they had no idea where he was. They looked at me as if to gauge my disappointment, my grief. The oldest of them, Sipsu, spoke rapidly but softly to Dr. Cook as if he was relaying to him a message from someone else. He had told Dr. Cook that Peary was either at Etah or at Inglefield Gulf. Dr. Cook accepted their offer to accompany us to Etah and had their kayaks pulled on board.

The first thing we saw as we turned from the fiord into the narrows at Etah was the Eskimo village on the hill above the beach, a cluster of tupiks, which looked much like the wigwams I had seen in books. “The Eskimos stay here during the summer,” Dr. Cook said. “There are walrus grounds just up the coast.” People whom I mistakenly assumed were all Eskimos came running down the hill. Among them, I would soon discover, were most of the crew of the Windward.

Etah lay in a deeply recessed harbour. There was the Windward at anchor in calm waters, undamaged, sails furled, looking as though it had not moved in months. The captain, a short, compactly built Newfoundlander named Sam Bartlett, had been hoping that another ship would come bearing someone, anyone, who had the authority to release the Windward and its crew from their obligation to the Pearys and the expedition.

The mate of the Windward was Robert Bartlett, the captain’s cousin. Dr. Cook introduced me to them. They had heard of Francis Stead and offered me their condolences. They lived in Brooklyn, they said, but often spent their summers in Newfoundland. I wondered how long it would take for them to spread the word about me once the expedition ended.

The ships were moored side by side, tied fast with ropes. Where their gunwales met, a gangplank with rails of rope was put in place. Like the Erik, the Windward was a sealing ship. The two were so similar they might have been sister ships, their bowsprits like a pair of tusks.

“Where is Peary?” said Dr. Cook. Captain Bartlett pointed to one end of the rocky beach, where a tupik stood in the lee of a hill. Peary, he said, was in a bad way. He had not left the tent in more than a month. The only person who had seen him in that time was his black manservant, Matthew Henson, who even now was sitting on the ground a few feet from the entrance to the tent.

The Eskimos, saying that Peary was “asleep,” had been keeping their distance from his tent, as had the crew of the Windward, some of whom, on the first day of his confinement, had made the mistake of asking him through the tent when he planned to sail for home. Peary had calmly replied, Captain Bartlett said, that the next man to ask him that question would be shot.

As for Jo Peary, she and six-year-old Marie were in their quarters, neither of them having seen or spoken to Peary since Mrs. Peary found out that he had fathered a child by an Eskimo woman. She had learned this from the woman herself, who, when Mrs. Peary met her, was bearing Peary’s child on her back. The child, a boy, was unmistakably Peary’s, his hair as red and eyes as blue as his father’s. The woman, whom Mrs. Peary described as “a creature scarcely human,” seemed to think, she said, that simply from having borne children by the same man, the two of them were “colleagues.”

Mrs. Peary had come to Greenland expecting a six-week summer stay. She had been stranded for thirteen months at Etah, and she and Marie had already been five months away from home by the time of their arrival.

When told through their door that a ship come to rescue them was just now steaming through the narrows, Mrs. Peary had replied that she had seen it through the porthole window but was staying below because she wished to speak in private with the leader of the rescue expedition.

“Commander Peary’s mother passed away in his absence,” Dr. Cook said. “I’m sure that in spite of their disagreement, Mrs. Peary will want to tell him herself.”

The captain took Dr. Cook below deck on the Windward, saying he would wait outside the door while the doctor spoke with Mrs. Peary.

About twenty minutes later they came back up on deck, Mrs. Peary behind them, emerging for what might have been the first time since the Windward had sailed from Philadelphia, her expression that of someone well accustomed to being stared at. She was dressed as though for a chilly day at Coney Island. She wore a long serge skirt, a waist-length cloak that buttoned up the front, a flat cap with a spotted veil beneath which she had her hair, which must have been very short, tucked completely out of sight, so that it looked as though she had no hair at all. She was very thin. Her face, unframed by hair, seemed especially so, her jaw lines forming a sharply defined V whose forks ended in deep hollows beneath her ears; her neck was so slender that on the back it was furrowed down the middle.

She exuded many forms of aloofness all at once: that of a woman from the coarse company of men; that of a person of social standing from the company of people who neither had it nor understood its value; that of an expeditionary at the mercy of a crew than which there had been none worse in the history of maritime travel; that of a white woman among Eskimos, to whose level she would never sink no matter how long she was stranded with them in the Arctic. I remembered Aunt Daphne, ten years ago, looking at the photographs of Mrs. Peary that were taken on the North Greenland expedition. “What an extraordinary woman she must be,” Aunt Daphne had said.

Aloof. Extraordinary. Incongruous. It was as if Dr. Cook and Captain Bartlett had brought up with them from below a prisoner whose time to prove her usefulness had come at last.

There was nothing in her manner, or in Dr. Cook’s, to suggest how well they had once known each other. They might have been two people who had, some years ago, exchanged a few words at a dinner party. Yet they had lived at close quarters for eighteen months on the North Greenland expedition, for much of that time at Redcliffe House, to which they had been confined by storms for weeks on end with nothing dividing them but a makeshift curtain. I suspected that that curtain had been put up not just to give a husband and his wife some privacy and to separate the leader of the expedition from his subordinates, but also to separate the Pearys from their social inferiors. I did not doubt, looking at Mrs. Peary, that even throughout the long months of the Arctic night, she had managed, because of her gender and because of the difference in their social status, to maintain this distance, this air of formality, between herself and Dr. Cook. There was the suggestion, only slightly less pronounced on his part than on hers, that the moment they met below deck, Dr. Cook had ceased to be the leader of an expedition come to rescue her and had resumed his former role as her attendant.

We watched as, with Dr. Cook, she was rowed ashore by two crew members. She and Dr. Cook walked up the beach towards the tent. About a third of the way there, Dr. Cook stopped and Mrs. Peary went on by herself.

She walked down the beach in what might have been a silent, decorous protest against all that was primitive and backward—against her circumstances, the latitude, the landscape, the natives, the structure in which, inexplicably, her husband had of late been living.

When she raised the flap of the tent and went inside, Dr. Cook sat down on a rock to wait. More than an hour later, Mrs. Peary re–emerged. Dr. Cook fell in beside her. They walked some distance, perhaps until they were sure that Peary could not overhear them, and then stopped. They spoke for a long time, face to face, Mrs. Peary with her back to the harbour. Then she turned abruptly away from Dr. Cook, as though he had said something that displeased her. He fell in beside her again, and they walked the remaining distance to the boat.

They were rowed out to the Windward, where Mrs. Peary, her face as blank as before, went below deck to her quarters. She had told Dr. Cook that the expedition had been without a medical officer for months now, the man who had filled that role, a Dr. Dedrick, having been banished from Etah by Peary, who suspected him of trying to sabotage the expedition by tampering with his caches of supplies and undermining him with the Eskimos. Dr. Dedrick was now a few miles up the coast in a smaller village, the two men engaged in a long-distance standoff, each having vowed not to be the first to go back home—Peary because he believed that in his absence, Dedrick would make his own bid for the pole, and Dedrick because he knew what a torment his presence in Greenland was to Peary (tormenting Peary having become for him the last remaining purpose of the expedition). For so long pointlessly, uselessly marooned, unable to sustain any real belief in the existence of the outside world, each man could conceive of no greater ambition than to outlast the other. Not even the presence of his wife and child could divert Peary from his pursuit of the consolation prize of beating Dedrick, though he continued to pay lip service to the notion that once the snow returned, he would resume his quest for the pole.

Minutes after being told by his wife of his mother’s death, he had started in again about Dedrick. She had told him of his mother’s death half a dozen times, and each time he wept for a while, only to return to his obsession as if he had forgotten not only what she said but the very fact that she was there.

Dr. Cook went ashore again the next day and, escorted by Matthew Henson, walked down the beach to the tent and went inside.

Hours later, when he returned, he went to Mrs. Peary’s quarters and told her that she had to do all she could to convince her husband to return home immediately, there being no chance that he would survive another winter in the Arctic. Mrs. Peary replied that she had tried a thousand times to convince her husband to leave and there was no point in trying again while he was in his present state—and that, at any rate, it fell to Dr. Cook to change her husband’s mind, since the Peary Arctic Club had sent him there to bring her husband home.

“At times,” Dr. Cook told me, “Peary thought I was Dedrick, and poor Henson had to keep him from attacking me. He submitted to a medical examination, though he seemed barely aware that it was taking place and ignored me when I asked him to report his symptoms.

“When I was finished, I told him that he would go exploring no more, and that, if he did, he would surely fail, for his body was such that to push it any further might prove fatal. I would not have been so blunt except that it seemed the best way of convincing him to leave.”

Peary, Dr. Cook said, was haggard and wasted. His skin was hard in texture and hung from his bones in baggy folds. All that were left of the eight of his toes that because of frostbite had been removed some years ago were painful stubs that refused to heal. He had paid a great price for his falling-out with Dedrick. He had eaten almost nothing in weeks, and had not been eating properly for at least a year, forgoing the fresh meat offered to him by the Eskimos in favour of canned food.

“His pallor is morbid,” Dr. Cook said. “There is an absence of expression in his eyes, as if he knows that for him, the game is up. But he would rather be misperceived as having died trying than perceived as having given up. I told him that he would never travel over ice and snow again, that without big toes the use of snowshoes was impossible. ‘Don’t tell anyone about my toes,’ he said, like a child who dreaded being teased. He really does want to keep the state of his feet a secret, especially from the Peary Arctic Club. He said he would stay in the Arctic one more year, make one last push for what he called ‘the biggest prize the world has yet to offer.’ I tried to persuade him that for him to stay another winter in the North in his condition would be madness, but he started in again on Dedrick.”

“What should we do?” I said.

“We will wait,” Dr. Cook said. “It may be that he will change his mind.”

So began our strange vigil at Etah.