This morning they had hiked inland for more than five hours. The group stayed on the slight gravel rises when they could; the wind was stronger and colder there, but the walking was easier than in the snow- and ice-filled swales. They had seen nothing that might enhance everyone’s chance of survival – not even green lichen or orange moss growing on rock. Irving knew from reading books in Terror’s Great Cabin library – including two books by Sir John Franklin himself – that hungry men could make a sort of soup from the scrapings of moss and lichen. Very hungry men.

When his reconnoitering team had stopped for their cold dinner and water and some much-needed rest while huddled down out of the wind, Irving had handed over temporary command to Captain of the Maintop Thomas Farr and gone on for a while by himself. He told himself that the men were exhausted by their extraordinary sledge pulls of the past few weeks and needed the rest, but the truth was, he needed the solitude.

Irving had told Farr that he would be back in an hour and that to make sure he did not get lost he would frequently dip down across snowy patches out of the wind, leaving his boot tracks for himself to follow back or for the others to use to find him if he was late returning. As he walked farther east, blissfully alone, he had chewed on a hard biscuit, feeling how loose his two teeth were. When he pulled the biscuit away from his mouth, there was blood on it.

As hungry as he was, Irving had little appetite these days.

He waded up through another snow field onto frozen gravel and trudged up the rise to yet another windswept low ridge, then stopped suddenly.

Black specks were moving in the broad snow-swept valley ahead of him.

Irving used his teeth to tug off his mittens and fumbled in his Male Bag for his prized possession, the beautiful brass telescope his uncle had given him upon entering the Navy. The brass eyepiece would freeze to his cheek and brow if he allowed it to touch, so it was harder getting a steady image while holding it away from his face, even holding the long glass in both hands. His arms and hands were shaking.

What he had thought to be a small herd of woolly animals turned out to be human beings.

Hodgson’s hunting party.

No. These forms were dressed in heavy fur parkas of the sort Lady Silence wore. And there were ten figures laboriously crossing the snowy valley, walking close together but not in a single-file line; George only had six men with him. And Hodgson had taken his hunting party south along the coast today, not inland.

This group had a small sledge with them. Hodgson’s hunting party had no sledge with them. There was not a sledge this small at Terror Camp.

Irving fiddled with the focus of his beloved telescope and held his breath to keep the instrument from shaking.

This sledge was being pulled by a team of at least six dogs.

These were either white rescuers wearing Esquimaux garb or actual Esquimaux.

Irving had to lower the telescope and then go to one knee on the cold gravel and lower his head for a moment. The horizon seemed to be spinning. The physical weakness he’d been holding back for weeks through sheer force of will welled up through him like concentric circles of nausea.

This changes everything, he thought.

The figures below – they still did not appear to have seen him, probably because he had crossed over the rise and would not be very visible here with his dark coat blending into the dark rock – could be hunters out from some unknown farther-north Esquimaux village that was not far away. If so, the 105 survivors of Erebus and Terror were almost certainly saved. The natives would either feed them or show them how to feed themselves up here in this lifeless land.

Or there was a chance that the Esquimaux were a war party and that the crude spears Irving had caught a glimpse of in the glass were meant for the white men they’d somehow heard had invaded their lands.

Either way, Third Lieutenant John Irving knew that it was his job to go down, encounter them, and find out.

He closed the telescope, set it carefully amid extra sweaters in his shoulder bag, and – throwing one arm high in what he hoped the savages would see as a gesture of greeting and peace – started down the long hill toward the ten humans who had suddenly stopped in their tracks.

The third and last day on the ice was by far the hardest.

Crozier had made this crossing at least twice before in the last six weeks with some of the earliest and larger sledge parties, but even with the trail less established, it had been much easier then. He’d been healthier. And he’d been infinitely less tired.

Francis Crozier was not truly aware of it, but since his recovery from his near-fatal withdrawal illness in January, his severe melancholia had made him an insomniac. As a sailor and then a captain, Crozier had always prided himself – as most captains did – on needing very little sleep and waking from the deepest sleep at any change in the ship’s condition: a slight change in the ship’s direction, the rising of wind in the sails, the sound of too many feet running on deck above him during any specific watch, any alteration in the sound of the water moving against the ship’s hull… anything.

But in recent weeks, Crozier slept less and less each night, until he’d fallen into the habit of only half dozing for an hour or two in the middle of the night, perhaps catching a nap of thirty minutes or less during the day. He told himself it was just the result of so many details to watch over and commands to give in the last days and weeks before taking to the ice, but in truth it was melancholia trying to destroy him again.

His mind was sodden much of the time. He was a smart man whose mind was stupid with the chemical by-products of constant fatigue.

Sleeping at Sea Camps One and Two had been damned near impossible for any of the men the past two nights, no matter how tired they were. There had been no need to erect tents at either camp since eight Holland tents there had been left up permanently over the past weeks, any wind or snow damage being repaired by the next party that came through.

The three-person reindeer-skin sleeping bags were many times warmer than the sewn-together Hudson’s Bay blanket bags, and these good bags had been drawn by lottery. Crozier had not even taken part in the lottery, but when, the first time he’d been on the ice, he’d come into the tent he shared with two other officers, he found that his steward, Jopson, had laid out a reindeer-skin bag tailored for him. Neither the ailing Jopson nor the men thought it right that their captain would have to share a bag with two other snoring, farting, shoving men – even other officers – and Crozier had been too tired and grateful to argue.

Nor had he told Jopson or the others that sleeping in a bag by one’s self was much chillier than his experience sleeping in three-man bags. The other men’s body heat was the only thing that kept them warm enough to sleep through the night.

But Crozier hadn’t tried to sleep through the night at either sea camp.

Every two hours he was up and walking the perimeter to make sure that the watch had changed on time. The wind came up during the night, and the men on watch huddled behind hastily erected low snow walls. Because the biting wind and blowing snow kept the men curled low behind their snow-block barriers, the thing on the ice would have been visible to them only if it actually stepped on one of the men.