East of Desolation

But already the children were moving forward, their faces wreathed in smiles and she was swamped in a forest of waving arms as they swarmed around her.

I left her to it and went to the water’s edge to meet the whaleboat from the Stella which was already half-way between the ship and the shore. One of the deckhands was at the tiller and Sørensen stood in the prow, a line ready in his hands. As the man in the stern cut the engine, the whaleboat started to turn, drifting in on the waves and Sørensen threw the line. I caught it quickly, one foot in the shallows, and started to haul. Sørensen joined me and a moment later we had the whaleboat around and her stern beached.

He spoke good English, a legacy of fifteen years in the Canadian and British merchant marines and he used it on every available opportunity.

‘I thought you might run into trouble when the mist came down.’

‘I put down at Argamask for an hour.’

He nodded. ‘Nothing like knowing the coast. Who’s the woman?’

‘A friend of Desforge’s or so she says.’

‘He didn’t tell me he was expecting anyone.’

‘He isn’t,’ I said simply.

‘Like that, is it?’ He frowned. ‘Desforge isn’t going to like this, Joe.’

I shrugged. ‘She’s paid me in advance for the round trip. If he doesn’t want her here she can come back with me tonight. I could drop her off at Søndre if she wants to make a connection for Europe or the States.’

‘That’s okay by me as long as you think you can handle it. I’ve got troubles enough just keeping the Stella in once piece.’

I was surprised and showed it. ‘What’s been going wrong?’

‘It’s Desforge,’ Sørensen said bitterly. ‘The man’s quite mad. I’ve never known anyone so hell-bent on self-destruction.’

‘What’s he been up to now?’

‘We were up near Hagamut the other day looking for polar bear, his latest obsession, when we met some Eskimo hunters out after seal in their kayaks. Needless to say Desforge insisted on joining them. On the way back it seems he was out in front on his own when he came across an old bull walrus on the ice.’

‘And tried to take it alone?’ I said incredulously.

‘With a harpoon and on foot.’

‘What happened?’

‘It knocked him down with its first rush and snapped the harpoon. Luckily one of the hunters from Hagamut came up fast and shot it before it could finish him off.’

‘And he wasn’t hurt?’

‘A few bruises, that’s all. He laughed the whole thing off. He can go to hell his own way as far as I’m concerned, but I’m entitled to object when he puts all our lives at risk quite needlessly. There’s been a lot of pack ice in the northern fjords this year – it really is dangerous – and yet he ordered me to take the Stella into the Kavangar Fjord because Eskimo hunters had reported traces of bear in that region. The ice was moving down so fast from the glacier that we were trapped for four hours. I thought we were never going to get out.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘He left by kayak about two hours ago with a party of hunters from Narquassit. Apparently one of them sighted a bear yesterday afternoon in an inlet about three miles up the coast. He had to pay them in advance to get them to go with him. They think he’s crazy.’

Ilana Eytan managed to disentangle herself and joined us and I made the necessary introductions.

‘Jack isn’t here at the moment,’ I told her. ‘I think that under the circumstances I’d better go looking for him. You can wait on the Stella.’

‘Why can’t I come with you?’

‘I wouldn’t if I were you. Apparently, he’s finally caught up with that bear he’s been chasing. No place for a woman, believe me.’

‘Fair enough,’ she said calmly. ‘I’ve never been exactly a devotee of Jack’s great outdoors cult.’

The deckhand was already transferring the stores from the Otter to the whaleboat and I turned to Sørensen. ‘I’ll go out to the Stella with you and I’ll take the whaleboat after you’ve unloaded her.’

He nodded and went to help with the stores. Ilana Eytan chuckled. ‘Rather you than me.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘When Jack Desforge starts beating his chest wig it’s time to run for cover. I’d remember that if I were you,’ she said and went down to the boat.

I thought about that for a while, then climbed inside the Otter, opened a compartment beneath the pilot’s seat and pulled out a gun case. It contained a Winchester hunting rifle, a beautiful weapon which Desforge had loaned me the previous week. There was a box of cartridges in the map compartment and I loaded the magazine with infinite care. After all, there’s nothing like being prepared for all eventualities and the girl was certainly right about one thing. Around Jack Desforge anything might happen and usually did.

The diesel engine gave the whaleboat a top speed of six or seven knots and I made good time after leaving the Stella, but a couple of miles further on the pack ice became more of a problem and every so often I had to cut the engines and stand on the stern seat to sort out a clear route through the maze of channels.

It was hard going for a while and reasonably hazardous because the ice kept lifting with the movement of the water, broken edges snapping together like the jaws of a steel trap. Twice I was almost caught and each time got clear only by boosting power at exactly the right moment. When I finally broke through into comparatively clear water and cut the engine, I was sweating and my hands trembled slightly – and yet I’d enjoyed every minute of it. I lit a fresh cigarette and sat down in the stern for a short rest.

The wind that lifted off the water was cold, but the sun shone brightly in that eternal blue sky and the coastal scenery with the mountains and the ice-cap in the distance was incredibly beautiful – as spectacular as I’d seen anywhere.

Suddenly everything seemed to come together, the sea and the wind, the sun, the sky, the mountains and the ice-cap, fusing into a breathless moment of perfection in which the world seemed to stop. I floated there, hardly daring to breathe, waiting for a sign, if you like, but of what, I hadn’t the remotest idea and then gradually it all came flooding back, the touch of the wind on my face, the pack ice grinding upon itself, the harsh taste of the cigarette as the smoke caught at the back of my throat. One thing at least I had learned, perhaps hadn’t faced up to before. There were other reasons for my presence on this wild and lovely coast than those I had given Ilana Eytan.

I started the engine again and moved on, and ten minutes later saw a tracer of blue smoke drifting into the air above a spine of rock that walled off the beach. I found the hunting party on the other side crouched round a fire of blazing driftwood, their kayaks drawn up on the beach. Desforge squatted with his back to me, a tin cup in one hand, a bottle in the other. At the sound of the whaleboat’s engine he turned and, recognising me, let out a great roar of delight.

‘Joe, baby, what’s the good news?’

He came down the beach as I ran the whaleboat in through the broken ice and as always when we met, there was a slight edge of unreality to the whole thing for me; a sort of surprise to find that he actually existed in real life. The immense figure, the mane of brown hair and the face – that wonderful, craggy, used-up face that looked as if it had experienced everything life had to offer and had not been defeated. The face known the world over to millions of people even in the present version which included an untidy fringe of iron-grey beard and gave him – perhaps intentionally – an uncanny resemblance to Ernest Hemingway who I knew had always been a personal idol of his.

But how was one supposed to feel when confronted by a living legend? He’d made his first film at the age of sixteen in 1930, the year I was born. By 1939 he was almost rivalling Gable in popularity and a tour as a rear gunner in a B.17 bomber when America entered the second world war made him a bigger draw than ever when he returned to make films during the forties and fifties.

But over the past few years one seemed to hear more and more about his personal life. As his film appearances decreased, he seemed to spend most of his time roaming the world in the Stella and the scandals increased by a sort of inverse ratio that still kept his name constantly before the public. A saloon brawl in London, a punch-up with Italian police in Rome, an unsavoury court case in the States involving a fifteen-year-old whose mother said he’d promised to marry the girl and still wanted him to.

These and a score of similar affairs had given him a sort of legendary notoriety that still made him an object of public veneration wherever he went and yet I knew from the things he had told me – usually after a bout of heavy drinking – that his career was virtually in ruins and that except for a part in a low budget French film, he hadn’t worked in two years.

‘You’re just in time for the kill,’ he said. ‘These boys have finally managed to find a bear for me.’

I slung the Winchester over my shoulder and jumped to the sand. ‘A small one I hope.’

He frowned and nodded at the Winchester. ‘What in the hell do you want with that thing?’

‘Protection,’ I said. ‘With you and your damned bear around I’m going to need all I can get.’

There was a clump of harpoons standing in the wet sand beside the kayaks and he pulled one loose and brandished it fiercely.

‘This is all you need; all any man needs. It’s the only way – the only way with any truth or meaning.’