The Ice Master
“He knew his ship like Old Jim over there knows every quart-inch of his bar. The ship bent to his will, but he was a light-eyed fella, with a laugh like a nine-tails. You had to be to hack it, I guess.
Now, make no bones, O’Rourke was the hardest man I ever knew. Balls of granite. I followed him to the ends of the Earth, but I would have followed him into war… And that far North, it is a war, of sorts. A war against the wild. We were sailors, not soldiers.
When you think you are cold, cold enough, God finds a way. A way in for the wind through a tear in your great coat, over your scarf, round and down the cuff of your sealskin mitts. God finds a way. Just as we found a way through the ice. In the end. We did, and by Hell were we gladsome to see another damned shade of land besides white. Because, laddie, I’ve seen all the damned whites your mind’s eye can summon. Bone white. Ice white. Death white. You didn’t know it, but there’s a whole rainbow of merciless, ruthless pale up there. And it was all out to get you, you hear me, it was all out to get us, the ice. Creaking, groaning like we were wounding it somehow. While we’re carving a slice through, it’s trying to trap us, squeeze us, choke us…
Maybe I’m just reading it that way. I always thought nature was going out of its way, but maybe, maybe… man’s only just strong enough. Enough to not get done in by it. The Earth, God’s creation, it’s not trying to kill us… It just kills. It just found a way of wearing O’Rourke down to an icicle, stabbed into the deck of his own ship, eyes wide and glazed, catching flakes in his pupils. I won’t ever forget it: the ice master, O’Rourke, and all the others, just standing there as if holding for their portraits. Or leaves, trapped in a frozen pond. But spring will never come to set them free.
I won’t let myself forget it. Try as I might, laddie…I won’t.”
