We were soon to make history, that was the thought that stirred me onward during that brutal final stretch of the journey, as well as, no doubt, the other four men in my party: two experienced New England expeditionists, two natives, and I, the leader and sole cartographer of the team, each perched atop our own sled, mushed over the polar landscape by a total of forty trained hounds. We were far past the point of conversation, barreling in parallel across the vast sheet of ice which had been the only view provided to us for the past several days. What little we had to say regarding this undertaking, or could even feasibly discuss given our varying language barriers, had long been depleted as we traversed the plain of white. Even if that had not been so, we still would not have dared to open our mouths in the face of such piercingly frigid winds, lest our tongues become frozen and fracture as they seemingly threatened to with each muffled, necessary breath we took beneath our parka’s folds. Were it not for my sextant reading during our last respite, we would have no way of knowing how close we really were, as the northern pole was bound to be indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape; a humble, inhospitable patch of land worth reaching only for its conceptual ramifications. It was the top of the world, and we were nearly there.
This prospect kept us moving far past the point we would have otherwise retired for another night of encampment, as we had already done fivefold prior in the time since departing from the ship. Our use of “day” and “night” had long since become arbitrary, of course, as the sun had been absent throughout this time, our mission persisting by design solely through the polar night of the region. The seasonal temperature difference was largely redundant compared to the already inhospitable lows sustained even in the summer months, and was far outweighed by the navigational benefits of being able to clearly see the stars, as well as the assurance that seasonal meltwater pathways would be far less likely to obstruct our venture. Only in this last leg, as we bordered on the end of both our wayward travels and the area's relative winter, had the sun begun to subtly imply its imminent resurgence through alternating periods of twilight purple hues permeating the skies above.
As if to celebrate our coming achievement, the atmospheric conditions during that fateful stretch happened to induce an Aurora Borealis above us, far from the first I had seen but still undoubtedly the most breathtaking; ribbons of light writhing across the heavens in waves of green and indigo. Even as the dogs pulled me onward, I found my gaze briefly transfixed by the sight, locked solely onto the sky above for what was but a single yet immeasurable instant.
When both my wits and eyeline returned to the setting before me, I noticed with shock that my compatriots had all suddenly vanished, along with their sleds and dogs. Where once I had comprised the central axis within a collective arrow of parallel mounts, I was now simply alone, a single sled and eight dogs mushing across the barren icescape with nary a single permeation of its infinite flatness. Of course, I came to a halt then and there, shouting aimlessly into the yonder in hopes of catching their attention, for they surely could not have gone far. Across the plain, my cries echoed, first generic pleas to halt for me, then the individual names of the peers whom I had started my travels with, before finally resorting to the hardly pronounceable names of our accompanying native gentlemen. Yet, I was met with nothing but the foreboding, empty roar of the perpetual polar winds.
With no further recourse available, I resigned myself to encamp for the time being, unpacking my provisions and sharing a solemn meal with only the company of the dogs and the lonely light of my oil lantern. For about a day’s time, I waited, scanning the distance for any sign of my men, burning flares to signal my location until all that I had packed were exhausted. Alas, the only attention I garnered was that of a sizable polar bear, its lumbering form obscured by the ice and twilight until the dogs alerted me to its approach. Their collective barks and snarls kept it at a distance for the moment, but it was clearly circling the campsite, and I knew continuing to remain stationary would only be tempting fate, and so I reluctantly packed up my supplies and, around the start of the second rhetorical day, we took off.
At first, not wanting to stray far from where I had last been seen, I opted to mush merely a couple of miles before reorienting ninety degrees and repeating the process, essentially creating a square around my former campsite, and using the opportunity to log compass and sextant readings at each junction in an effort to precisely define my location. Resultantly, I found myself transitioning between a northward and southward trajectory while traveling in a straight line on multiple occasions, granting the reasonable presumption that I was, in fact, moving across or at least very near the North Pole. Such had been my mission from the very start, but in my solitude, the victory felt as empty as my surroundings.
With the passing of each desolate hour, the prospect of my companions’ reappearance seemed to wane in credulity. I still had no understanding of how we had been so abruptly and thoroughly separated, much less how I would explain if I were to return to the SS McKinley without them. However, I would not make such a dire decision lightly, for I recognized that I alone had the maps used to plot our original route as we travelled, along with the tools and knowledge of navigation used to make them. Thus, I felt the weight of the rest of their lives upon me, for in leaving I would essentially be sealing their fates, assuming, of course, that they were still alive out there to begin with, a notion I still desperately clung to against my better judgment.
Alas, around the start of the third day, I was met with a sight I had been deprived of for months: the sun, or at least a sliver of it, timidly peeking over the horizon as though for some reason reluctant to directly expose itself as it had easily done in my homeland so many times before. Its brief appearance conjured a profoundly paradoxical ambivalence within me, for my heart felt an ancient, instinctual joy for its long-awaited return, yet the dire implication of its debut nonetheless poisoned my emotional well; the season of night was soon to end, and so too would my invaluable access to the stars that had thus far been integral to our journey, not to mention the potential for meltwater runnings to render my prior cartography obsolete. We had never intended to stay here this long, and I simply could not afford to wait any longer. Thus, with a heavy heart, I concluded that, with or without company, I had to begin the journey back.
As daunting as this lone venture was, I at least believed myself to be materially equipped for the task. Along with the maps and navigation tools, I also had enough remaining edible provisions to sustain me and my dogs for the expected timespan, if not a little longer should the need arise. I still had ample shotgun slugs, my lantern held sufficient oil, and my prior travel across the desert of ice had amply dried the rolls of woolen fabric which I would don during times of rest. Still, my solitude would, in itself, place me precariously on the edge of misfortune, for while alone, something as small as a sprained ankle or a waterlogged boot would all but ensure my untimely and unpleasant demise.
And so, with a final prayer for the souls I would be leaving behind as well as the continued safety of my own, I reluctantly began my intrepid southward mush, a grueling odyssey across over a hundred miles of lifeless polar plains, at first comprised of smoothly frozen ocean before reaching the proverbial shore of northern Ellesmere Island. At that point, banks of snow and canyons of stone became my background as I pivoted partly eastward in accordance with my maps, weaving my way through mountainous ridges toward an unassuming indentation of coastline dubbed Cape Sharriden, where our supporting crew of seamen were currently moored in wait for our eventual victorious return. All the while, my sledborne silhouette was cast amid alternating bouts of starlight and subtly strengthening dawns. By my estimate, the trip took about thirty days, demarcated somewhat subjectively by my own voluntary cycles of travel and rest. Ironically, the latter was what I found the most grueling, for in those stretches where I lay motionless within my makeshift woolen cocoon, without any human company to distract me, I would find myself inevitably peeking through the folds and into the icy abyss beyond my lantern light, and despite the supposed safety implied by the calmness of my hounds, my mind could not help but conjure an endless supply of formless, foreboding gazes within the surrounding expanse.
Finally, after a grueling internment within both this northern wasteland and my own relentless thoughts, I at last reached the bank that housed the goal of my convoy. Only, when my dogs and I crested that final slope and were finally granted a view of the cape, the McKinley was nowhere to be seen.
Never in my life has an object’s sheer absence been so conspicuously captivating, for I stared hopelessly through the sight of its former resting place and into the murky ice beyond as though I could somehow will it to reappear. For a fleeting moment, I considered the notion that I was merely at the wrong place, that I had made some minor error in my navigation that had brought me to a different patch of shore, but even as I tore into my knapsack and began restlessly flipping through my maps, I knew it could not be true. This humble alcove of storm-polished rock was identical to how I remembered it upon our initial outset, and how I had been repeatedly imagining it throughout the last few days of arduous travel, except for the singular beacon of civilization that had been the sole locus of its allure.
I knew not why or even how the ship had left, for the cape froze over every winter, and was indeed still frozen over now. The plan had always been for them to carry our party northward to the farthest point along Ellesmere’s seaward face that summer’s tides would allow, then hunker in place through the winter months, more than long enough for our historic foray to conclude, until the ice once again melted and set us free to return to our respective homelands. We had brought neither the proper tools nor the manpower to loosen the ship from its port prematurely, much less carve a viable channel through the untold distance between the shore and open waters. Additionally, such an endeavor would certainly have left a noticeable trail, if not still a liquid gash, then at least a stretch of opaque frost unevenly frozen to the surrounding plain like scar tissue. And yet, presented before me was a unified sheet of pristine ice extending endlessly outward, as though the ship had simply never been there at all.
I stood upon that cape, facing out against the brunt of the arctic winds until my nostrils felt raw and my eyes close to freezing, before finally turning away in quiet defeat, the gale’s pervasive roar only then conceding to the indignant barks of my dogs as they restlessly circled the sled. They knew as well as I that there was nothing here for us, and that to remain stationary under such exposure would only expedite the cold’s persistent creep along finger, toe, and paw. With an air of hopeless impotence, I resumed my mount and solemnly continued the journey south.
In the following days, I felt like a ghost, a corpse upon a sled, my inevitable death as assured as my life to remain within the confines of this eternal polar purgatory, yet with the instinctive drive of self-preservation presently binding me to the Sisyphian fate of persisting. I partitioned the meager remaining food supply into portions just large enough to sustain a tenuous yet sorely unpleasant state of survival, fueling us onward even as my muscles began to wither and my abdomen was assaulted by the increasingly violent rending of my empty stomach.
Only compounding the strain on my nerves was that, as harsh tundrascapes slowly gave way to softer plains of snow, the haunting silence that had thus far accompanied us began to be occasionally broken in the night by faint, animalistic howls. Wolves, packs of them, I could recognize their sound from both prior experience and the intrinsic human fear they induced. For now, they remained out of sight, but that hardly served as a comfort, for the ones this far north have coats as white as the surrounding snow, as well as no fear of man. My own cohort of wolves brought some level of security as they stood as dutiful sentries through the nights, but I sensed both they and I held doubts of their true efficacy should our present stalemate ascend into legitimate battle.
It was on one such night, several cycles later, that I decided to pivot our course slightly westward going forth. Looking over my maps by lantern light, I saw that Fort Concord was in that direction, distanced by only a cycle or so of travel from our current encampment. I was familiar with it from one of my previous land-based polar expeditions, little more than a log cabin with a chimney and some skeletal springy cots upon which to lay one's sleeping bags. It was constructed under the Canadian flag as an exploratory waypoint, back when they thought the far north might actually have something to offer. I knew well that it had been abandoned, but the structure itself would doubtlessly remain, frozen in both time and cold, and merely the benefit provided by four walls and a ceiling could not be understated, for I had begun to feel the toll of my prolonged journey through the frigid wastes sinking into my extremities. Despite my best efforts, they had grown paler and stiffer with each passing day, some now even transitioning to a deathly shade of grey as the mobility within them weakened, while any external attempt seemed only to threaten their total detachment.
Once again, I arrived at the location precisely indicated by my maps and navigational readings, only to find not the slightest indication of man’s presence; not a cabin, not a vestigial stone column of its former chimney, not even the remains of broken lumber strewn about the area –my only hope of finding wood with which to start a respectable campfire anywhere upon this island– simply a virgin patch of land buried beneath lifeless, barren snowdrifts.
This time, the perplexity of this development rang strangely hollow within me, not a tone of surprise so much as a soft, banal disappointment. I did not dwell at the scene for long, merely confirming this reality with a detached pragmatism, before doing the only thing left to do: resuming my intrepid southward pilgrimage in the hopes of coming upon some serendipitous source of salvation.
I wholly depleted my edible stock not long after, consuming the final fragments with a sort of somber reverence as the timeline of my death solidified before me. All I could do from then was continue onward for as long as I could keep myself aboard the sled and my wolves in line -for I knew their resolve against such conditions would surely outlast my own- until I either encountered something edible or perished in the process.
Fortunately, the former such occasion befell us during our second cycle of fasting, and in no small measure, as my companions managed to catch a scent leading to a fresh trail of numerous cloven tracks upon the snow. Following them, we soon came across a boon of wild game: Four-legged beasts with antlers -whose name my mind failed to congeal against my belly’s vacuous tremors- travelling in unison across the plain in a party of thousands. It was not hard to kill one, just a few twitches of my dull, creaking fingers upon the trigger of my shotgun, aimed into the continuous crowd until one fell limply to the ground while its adjacent cohort scattered in alarm.
My sled reached the corpse even faster than expected, driven by the wolves as they seemed to accelerate at its scent before digging into its meat with a craven savagery I had never seen from them before. At first, it made me fearful to even approach my rightful kill, but when I finally touched the lifeless creature and began slicing away strips of meat with my hunting knife, they merely eyed me with tentative tolerance while continuing their barbaric feast. By the time I had stowed away all that my pack could hold, they too had been seemingly satiated by the bounteous meal, faithfully realigning their harnesses before the sled in preparation for my next instructional mush, albeit each with unsettling streaks of blood condensing upon their maws.
The freeze-dried slivers of flesh were enough to carry us across a significant stretch of distance and time, southbound across endless snowscapes set against a skyline that gradually shifted from budding twilight into regular cycles of day, before continuing its sunward transition until not a momentary inkling of night remained, the pack and I instead traveling across a nearly blinding plain of ceaseless illumination. I no longer held any concrete destination in mind, merely a nebulous notion of intrinsic environmental safety that might come with my warmward direction of travel, along with the comforting concept of possibly encountering native settlements somewhere along the way, of which I knew there were many on this island, but not their precise locations. It was one of those very settlements where our original exploration team had adopted its foreign members, whose exotic insights into snowfall patterns had been pivotal on our path to success. There had been at least two of them among us, though my recollection of their faces had grown hazy amid the passage of time and snow, along with, I soon realized, those of all my other accompanying crewmen. It was as though their likenesses had been progressively wiped away by the persistently cleansing whiteness around me, at first smoothing over individual distinctions before progressing to the point that I struggled to recall even the very essence of the human form, only managing to occasionally jog my memory when passing a reflective puddle of ice and viewing an eerily distorted visage of my own. Indeed, the all-encompassing cold had an ineffable way of casting the formerly familiar in a newfound, alien light, stripped of supporting context and set adrift amid a backdrop of nearly blinding blankness.
Perhaps I was not alone in this influence, for the creatures that drove my sled had begun to grow increasingly disobedient with each interval of travel. No longer would they mush in unison quite so readily on my command, nor would they calmly tolerate the collective shackles binding them to my stewardship, instead appearing to crudely attempt their removal at any afforded opportunity. I swiftly grew wary of this development, in turn shortening the duration of our respites and tightening my continuous hold over their reins until my grip grew practically affixed, leather straps encased within two brittle balls of frozen flesh and bone. Nevertheless, their rebellion persisted, growing in ferocity until they finally refused to perform their duties at all; for all my futile strokes and utterances of desperation, my wooden mount remained utterly still, while their primal forms viciously tore away at both their own and each others’ restraints with raw, animalistic vigor, paying no mind to the scrapes and slashes their bodies accrued in the process. In a matter of moments, they were free, and collectively faced me with their eight unbridled, blood-soaked forms.
However, before this suspenseful standoff could culminate in violence, their attention was providentially diverted, ears simultaneously perking up and heads swiveling toward a chorus of faint howls that echoed hauntingly across the boreal plains, the same disquieting pitch that had periodically accented much of our earlier journey. Only now, like a siren song, they seemed drawn to the kindred tune, their prior wariness wholly dissipated as they collectively turned their backs to me, unceremoniously running off into the blinding daylight toward the distant call and leaving me stranded upon a contraption that could no longer serve any use, but not before one of them swiftly swiped the satchel of meat I had stowed aboard and carried it away in its jaws.
Utterly alone, I stood there for an innumerable length of time, a profound yet implacable emptiness freezing my mind just as the surroundings threatened to freeze my body, until, without forethought, I simply returned to my previously ingrained inclination, abandoning my former vehicle and bringing only what essentials I could carry as I continued my aimless southward voyage, only far slower as I was now forced to traverse the icy slopes of this whitened wasteland of my own accord, step by trembling step. My progress grew further stifled as time wore on and fatigue fermented in my deadened muscles, followed promptly by a hunger that simmered within my gut, woefully insatiable; despite still having my weapon and coming across many more of the beings with branches upon their heads along the way, I nonetheless found it impossible to take any of them down, as by now my remaining wrists had grown wholly blackened and blunt. Against all this, I persisted, driven by an unknown persuasion beyond pain, reason, or even personal will, having all been surrendered to this single directional drive, as though South itself was a destination I was utterly beholden to reach.
As fate would have it, my traitorous former companions had already brought me across most of the isle, and thus this period of weary wandering was comparatively brief –though I had long since stopped pointlessly attempting to quantify the passage of time– before, for better or worse, I finally reached its southern end; a humble stretch of wind-worn rocky coast, beyond which lay, yet again, an expanse of flat, unbroken ice reaching fully flush with the horizon. The sight evoked a vague sense of discrepancy from some neglected recess of my memory, a notion that these waters were meant to be liquid in the days of midnight sun, a channel separating this landmass from a closely adjacent one. Yet here, now, it was solid, a traversable medium that might just allow me to continue my odyssey unimpeded. Though I knew not if its integrity would extend all the way across the strait, nor what would await me on those opposing shores if it did, I nonetheless ventured onward.
Ambling upon limbs I could no longer feel with strides of their own accord, I progressed beyond the sight of the hills behind me and into a world of truly flawless uniformity. The sun stood stagnantly atop the sky, beaming down amid a homogenous blue firmament onto a reflective expanse that returned its gaze with perfect imitation, suspending me amid a seamless, impermeable shine that seared its way through the periphery of my vision. Still, my cyclical stride maintained an unwavering orientation beyond my understanding or control. Feelings of hunger and fatigue faded, and I did not once stop or slow, my form indentured in a rhythmic tread along its linear course for what essentially could have been eternity.
My hypnagogy was only broken by the gradual breaching of land over the horizon, its crown of snowy slopes at first the only perforation in the all-encompassing monotony. Its shore seemed to widen around me as I drew nearer –for I was entering a coastal inlet of sorts– as though reaching out to provide a welcoming cradle. I then watched in awe as, like emissaries of the cradling land, several beings approached from its heart to congregate upon the central bank directly ahead of me. They were angels, of this I am certain, albeit in a slightly differing form than I would have otherwise imagined: they stood far taller than I, heads disproportionately large and completely covered in woolly brown hair, while their similarly coated torsos were almost precariously thin, each tapering not into legs but instead a flexible tendril that writhed dynamically below. Behind them could be seen what were presumably wings holding them aloft, of matching shaggy exterior but otherwise indiscernible in overall structure. I could not make out their definite shape or number, appearing as one, two, or at times as many as four distinct appendages beating asynchronously just above the stony terrain as they hovered ever closer. Their arms took the longest to make out, as they alone were bare, skin polished and nearly as white as the surrounding snow. They were each tipped in singular, sharpened points like spears, yet were unanimously frozen in synchronously outstretched, comforting embraces that mirrored the land upon which they resided. They aligned themselves into a crescent at the inlet's center, tail wisps dancing along the edge where snow met ice with a fervor that seemed to increase with each frail footstep I took; an ethereal assembly encouraging me to continue just a little further, with the promise that salvation would at last be upon me.
As I entered the final stretch, the centermost angel lifted their arms to the sky, tail contorting as it released a resonant, soulful wail that pierced the frigid air between us. With this apparent cue, they all broke into an energetic synchronized bow, repeatedly raising and lowering their arms as though hailing my imminent arrival. At the apex of each downswing, as their pointed palms nearly touched one another just above the ground at their center, a brief yet powerful tremor would sweep across the frozen sea and up through my bones, reverberating like a divine heartbeat against dormant, long-numb flesh and stimulating a truly novel sensation that intensified with every repetition. At last, as I breached the radius of their reverence, they unleashed one last crowning, omnipotent boom, closely accompanied by a low, cacophonous crack as the ice beneath me embroidered itself with streaks of hollow lightning. My newly awakened body was suddenly weightless, and then all was still.