CHAPTER XXXVII
“And that was on October 9th, Mr. Melville,” sobbed Nindemann. “But Ku Mark Surk wasn’t twelve miles away like the captain thought; it was over seventy miles! His chart was bad, and besides before, every day he hadn’t traveled so far as he guessed maybe. For ten whole days after that, Noros and me went south over terrible country, and we found to eat only one ptarmigan I shot with the rifle, and we ate up first our boot soles and then most of our sealskin pants and we froze and kept on going till even the sealskin pants was all gone and we had traveled over forty miles and still we had not come to Ku Mark Surk. And all the while we dragged ourselves along because we knew our shipmates could get no food in that country we had gone over and they were starving and the captain trusted Noros and me to get help for them.
“But after ten days we were freezing in only our underwear for clothes and we were so weak without food that we could not go on and when we saw at last an empty hut, we crawled inside there to die but we found in it a little rotten dried fish that looked like sawdust and tasted like it too and we ate that, thinking maybe then we could keep on again but the mouldy fish made us so sick with dysentery we could not even any more crawl, and we lay there three days expecting only to die soon, when at last some natives looked in that hut and found us! We would be dead there in that hut long ago if not for them!” Nindemann choked back a bitter sob and gripped my hand feebly. “We couldn’t make them natives understand they had to go back north for the captain and they brought us first to Ku Mark Surk and then here to Bulun. And now it is November 2nd, eleven more days even since they found us, and there is no hope for anybody any more! The captain and our shipmates must now all be dead in that snow!” And racked with sobs at the idea that somehow he had failed in the captain’s trust, Nindemann wept hysterically.
“Perhaps they found shelter in a hut,” I suggested, trying to calm him. “I’ll start back right now to look anyway.”
“No use,” repeated the quartermaster hopelessly. “For a long ways from where we left them, there ain’t no huts, only a hundred rivers going every way and for a man twice to find the same spot there is impossible. You ain’t so strong no more. You’ll only die yourself!”
I laid the weeping seaman back on his couch. Probably he was right. But so long as the faintest shred of hope existed for Captain De Long and his comrades, I must look for them.
I got the best directions I could from Noros and from Nindemann as to the route south they had traveled, where they had stopped each night, the rivers they had crossed. Taking either man with me as a guide was impossible; they could not travel. So leaving instructions for my whaleboat party that, except for Bartlett (who was to stay in Bulun to search for me if in a month I did not return), all the others on arrival there were to proceed under Lieutenant Danenhower’s charge south to Yakutsk, I got a dog sled and immediately started north. At Ku Mark Surk I met the Russian Commandant next day; he helped me with another dog team and a ten day supply of fish. With that I proceeded northward along Nindemann’s trail from Ku Mark Surk, having two native drivers and twenty-two dogs.
Through fierce November storms we pushed on down the delta, sometimes finding Nindemann’s trail, often losing it. The going was slow, the cold was intense, we were frequently stopped by gales which completely blinded us and against which the dogs refused to travel, instead lying down in the snow and howling dolefully. The river began to divide as it spread out over the flat and treeless delta. One after another I searched along innumerable streams for Nindemann’s trail but in the deepening snows found no sign as we went north. Wrapped in thick furs, I nevertheless nearly froze to death on my sledge. It was inconceivable that De Long and his companions, long without food, clothed only in scanty rags, could live through such weather. But still I searched, hopeful now at least of recovering their bodies.
Our food gave out, the Yakut drivers wanted to return to Ku Mark Surk. I enquired if there were any village on the delta itself from which we might continue our search. They said there was one. On the far northwestern corner of the delta on the Arctic shore, some thirty miles due west of where from Nindemann’s account De Long had landed on the coast, was a small village called Tomat. I looked at my chart, a copy I had long ago made at Semenovski Island of De Long’s. There was no village marked there on that chart, but knowing now the chart to be wholly unreliable, I accepted my drivers’ statements as being true and ordered them to head for Tomat to replenish our food supply, intending then to pick up De Long’s trail at the abandoned boat, and follow him southward from there till I came upon his party, whether alive or dead. But my drivers protested; we must turn about and return to Ku Mark Surk; without food, we would all perish on the desolate road to Tomat. Fiercely I turned on them in their native tongue.
“Head north!” I ordered savagely. “And when we have to, we’ll eat the dogs! And when they’re gone, by God, I’ll eat you if necessary to get north to Tomat! Keep on north!”
Cowed by my threats, and thoroughly believing that this wild stranger from the sea might well turn cannibal, the dog drivers headed northwest toward Tomat, the solitary village on that northern Arctic coast. For three days our laboring dogs dragged us through the drifts along the road to Tomat, fortunately for us following a chain of deserted huts in each of which we found refuse scraps of fish heads, entrails of reindeer, and such similar offal, the which we (both men and dogs) ate greedily to save us from starvation, and on the fourth day, so frozen that I had to be carried from my sledge into a hut, we arrived at Tomat.
Staying there only a day to thaw out, to change my dogs for fresh ones, and to replenish my food supply (in that poor village, itself facing the winter with scanty food, getting each solitary fish was harder indeed than extracting from the villagers their teeth), I started east along the Arctic coast, with my feet so badly frozen I could not walk.
By evening, marked by a pole, I found the cache De Long had left on the beach but so thick was the falling snow I could not see the first cutter offshore. Salvaging the log books and the Jeannette’s navigating outfit, I loaded them on my sledges and turned south till I came on the first hut where De Long had stopped. For a week after, amid frigid Arctic gales with the temperature far below zero, I searched along the solidly frozen Lena, visiting every hut, finishing finally in that hut on the promontory where for three days De Long had waited for the rivers to freeze so he might cross, and where Dr. Ambler had sliced off Erichsen’s toes. There beyond the frozen river, on the wind-swept further shore, for a short distance I could follow where his toiling shipmates had dragged Erichsen along on his sledge, for the deep grooves left in the soft slush a month and a half before now stood clearly out in solid ice.
But there finally I lost the trail. The deep drifts of many snows buried all tracks. Facing a myriad of wandering streams, any one of which De Long might have followed south, I searched in vain for further tracks, for the hut in which Erichsen had finally died, for the epitaph board which Nindemann told me he had left there to mark it, but not another trace of De Long or of his party could I find in the ever-thickening snow as storm succeeded storm and buried the Lena Delta in drifts so deep that my floundering dogs could scarcely drag me through them.
It was now late November, six wintry weeks since without food and without shelter, De Long had parted somewhere thereabouts in that ghastly wilderness from his two messengers. Only one of two things now was possible—either De Long and his party had somehow been found by natives who were sheltering him, quite as safe as I myself; or he had long since perished and was somewhere buried beneath the snowdrifts on the open tundra, where in the dead of winter it was hopeless to search for him. Weak and frozen myself from my desperate search, coming on top of my long exposure in the open whaleboat, it was now imperative that I get out of the delta before my frozen corpse found an unmarked grave beneath the snows alongside my missing shipmates. So sadly I ordered my worn dogs south. It took us a week to fight our way back to Ku Mark Surk at the delta head, and two days more to cover the final fearful miles along the Lena through the mountain gorges up to Bulun, where at last at the end of November I arrived, sick at heart at my failure to find my comrades, terribly sick physically from rotten food, from hunger, and with numbed limbs from which the Arctic cold had drained away every vestige of life.