Bitter Passage

by Colin Mills

The shotgun boomed and bucked, and the bear swung around as the ball struck it with a wet slap like raw meat thrown on stone.

“But is history not a procession of the living over the bodies of the fallen?

“Is that how it works, then? Follow instructions to win a prize? It seems less a demonstration of piety than a transaction.”

“God’s is the last judgment,” said Adams. “Perhaps. But while we live, we answer to other men. I concern myself with only one judgment at a time.”

We walk into oblivion, Adams thought. Never have I seen so much of nothing.

Just keep going into the nothingness, Adams thought. We whittle down our existence a little more with each step away from what we know. Perhaps if we keep walking, we will simply wink out and disappear.

Some of the men laid down on their bunks and hoped never again to wake. They just close their eyes and die. But do you know”—he stopped, then spoke in wonder, as if relating a great discovery—“the more one desires it, the more difficult it becomes.”

An act of self-defence. If the Esquimaux woman were ever to report the incident, her word would not be taken over that of a Royal Navy officer. He was appalled at the finality of it, that a man could die so needlessly and there would be so little to say about it.

“You always assume the worst in men.” Robinson’s ire rose again. “And you insist upon assuming the best. This is at the heart of what separates us.”

Three wolves paced back and forth on the stony ground a mile off, eyes fixed on the men. To Robinson they seemed like spies, not bold enough to mount an assault but slinking harbingers of some larger and darker menace.

“I think a man’s resolve crumbles in stages,” he said. “Like a castle in the sand washed away by the incoming tide. Once swept away, it loses all cohesion and cannot be reconstituted.”

Stake your claim. The boldest lies always receive the least scrutiny.”

“I think,” he said, “that man is the hound chasing the carriage, barking and howling, wanting this strange and exotic thing. We lust after it. Die for it. But we have not the slightest notion of what we shall do with it when we catch it.”

“I think the Arctic is like an abyss,” he said. “A man ventures into it, and it draws more of his kind in his wake. The Passage is no great undertaking, no path to salvation. Purgatory is not a place of purifying fire; it is a place of ice and cold, a kingdom of wind and bones and monsters and dead things.”

That is when I understood—beauty’s temporary nature is what makes it exquisite. We desire it so, for we know it will not last.”

“Sir John, it was all lies,” Adams said. “The Arctic has an ocean, but not one a ship can sail across. It has a sun that burns the skin and the eyes but offers no warmth. It has wild beasts that will eat a man but provide precious little food. It has so many dead men but so few graves.”

Once uttered, a lie can harden and become as durable as clay fired in a kiln. A man need only laugh and spin a yarn for a falsehood to become fact. It takes so little effort to make it true.”

“I would not know how to describe it, sir.” He took another drink. Tears were on his cheeks. “I would need to invent a new language entirely.”

Robinson had told him his faith was a strength. He now suspected it sustained and blinded him in equal measure.