In the Distance

The hole, a broken star on the ice, was the only interruption on the white plain merging into the white sky. No wind, no life, no sound.

A pair of hands came out of the water and groped for the edges of the angular hole. It took the searching fingers some time to climb up the thick inner walls of the opening, which resembled the cliffs of a miniature cañon, and find their way to the surface. Having reached over the edge, they hooked into the snow and pulled. A head emerged. The swimmer opened his eyes and looked ahead at the even, horizonless expanse. His long white hair and beard were threaded with straw-tinted strands. Nothing in him revealed agitation. If he was out of breath, the vapor of his exhalations was invisible in the uncolored background. He rested his elbows and chest on the shallow snow and turned around.

About a dozen chafed, bearded men in furs and oilskins looked at him from the deck of a schooner caught in the ice a few hundred feet away. One of them yelled something that reached him as an indistinct murmur. Laughs. The swimmer blew off a drop hanging from the tip of his nose. Against the rich, detailed reality of that exhalation (and the snow crunching under his elbows and the water lapping on the edge of the hole), the faint sounds from the boat seemed to be leaking from a dream. Ignoring the muffled cries from the crew and still holding on to the edge, he turned from the ship and faced, once again, the white void. His hands were the only living things he could see.

He pulled himself out of the hole, picked up the hatchet he had used to break the ice, and paused, naked, squinting at the bright, sunless sky. He looked like an old, strong Christ.

After wiping his brow with the back of his hand, he bent over and got his rifle. Only then did his colossal proportions, which the blank vastness had concealed, become apparent. The rifle seemed no larger than a toy carbine in his hand, and although he was holding it by the muzzle, the butt did not touch the ground. With the rifle as a measure, the hatchet over his shoulder revealed itself to be a full-fledged ax. He was as large as he could possibly be while still remaining human.

The naked man stared at the footprints he had left on his way to his ice bath and then followed them back to the ship.

A week earlier, against the advice of most of his crew and some out spoken passengers, the young and inexperienced captain of the Impeccable had steered into a strait where drifting slabs of ice, cemented by a snowstorm followed by a severe cold spell, had trapped the ship. Since it was early April and the storm had merely interrupted the thaw that had set in a few weeks before, the worst consequences of the situation were a strict rationing of provisions, a bored and annoyed crew, a few disgruntled prospectors, a deeply worried officer from the San Francisco Cooling Company, and the shattering of Captain Whistler’s reputation. If spring would release the ship, it would also jeopardize its mission—the schooner was to pick up salmon and furs from Alaska, and then, hired by the Cooling Company, ice for San Francisco, the Sandwich Islands, and perhaps even China and Japan. Aside from the crew, the majority of the men on board were prospectors who had paid for their passage with their labor, blasting and hammering off big blocks from glaciers that were then carted back to the ship and stored in its hay-covered hold, poorly insulated with hides and tarps. Sailing back south through warming waters would decrease the bulk of their cargo. Someone had pointed out how peculiar it was to find an ice ship iced in. No one had laughed, and it was not mentioned again.

The naked swimmer would have been even taller had he not been so bowlegged. Stepping only on the outer edges of his soles, as if walking on sharp stones, leaning forward and swinging his shoulders for balance, he slowly made his way to the ship, the rifle slung across his back and the ax in his left hand, and in three agile moves, climbed the hull, reached the railing, and jumped on board.

The men, now silent, pretended to look away, but could not help staring at him from the corners of their eyes. Although his blanket was where he had left it, a few steps away, he remained in his place, looking out beyond the bulwarks, above everyone’s head, as if he were alone and the water on his body were not slowly freezing. He was the only white-haired man on the boat. Withered yet muscular, his frame had achieved a strangely robust emaciation. Finally, he wrapped himself in his homespun, which covered his head in a monkish way, walked to the hatch, and disappeared below deck.

“So you say that wet duck is the Hawk?” one of the prospectors said and then spat overboard and laughed.

If the first laugh, when the tall swimmer was still out on the ice, had been a collective roar, this time it was a meek rumble. Only a few men shyly chuckled along while the majority pretended not to have heard the prospector’s remark or seen him spit.

“Come on, Munro,” one of his companions pleaded, gently pulling him by the arm.

“Why, he even walks like a duck,” Munro insisted, shaking his friend’s hand off. “Quack, quack, yellow duck! Quack, quack, yellow duck!” he chanted, waddling around, imitating the swimmer’s peculiar gait.

Now only two of his companions snickered under their breath. The rest kept as far from the joker as possible. A few prospectors gathered by the dying fire some men had tried to keep going in the stern—initially Captain Whistler had forbidden fire on board, but once it seemed they would be stranded in the ice for a while, the humiliated skipper had little authority to enforce the ban. The older men were members of a party returning to the mines they had been compelled to abandon in September, when dirt started to turn into stone. The youngest one, the only man on board without a beard, couldn’t have been more than fifteen. He planned to join another group of prospectors hoping to strike it rich farther up north. Alaska was new, and the rumors wild.

From the opposite end of the ship came excited cries. Munro was now holding a scrawny man by the neck and a bottle with his free hand.

“Mr. Bartlett here has kindly offered a round for everyone on board,” announced Munro. Bartlett grimaced in pain. “From his own cellar.”

Munro took a swig, released his victim, and passed the bottle around.

“Is it true?” the boy asked, turning back to his companions. “The stories. What they say about the Hawk. Are they true?”

“Which ones?” one of the prospectors asked back. “The one where he clubbed those brethren to death? Or the one with the black bear in the Sierra?”

“You mean the lion,” a toothless man interjected. “It was a lion. Killed it with his bare hands.”

A few steps away, a man in a tattered double-breasted coat who had been eavesdropping on their conversation said, “He was a chief once. In the Nations. That’s where he got his name.”

Gradually, the conversation caught the attention of the men on deck until most of them were gathered around the original group in the stern. They all had a story to tell.

“He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away.”

“He walks funny because they branded his feet.”

“He has an army of cliff dwellers in the cañon country waiting for his return.”

“He was betrayed by his gang and killed them all.”

The tales multiplied, and soon there were several overlapping conversations, their volume increasing together with the boldness and oddity of the deeds narrated.

“Lies!” yelled Munro, approaching the group. He was drunk. “All lies! Look at him! Didn’t you see him? The old coward. I’ll take a flock of hawks any day. Like pigeons, I’ll take them! Bang, bang, bang!” He shot all over the sky with an invisible rifle. “Anytime. Give me this, this, this gang leader, this, this, this, this chief. Anytime! All lies.”

The hatch leading below deck opened with a creak. Everyone fell silent. Laboriously, the swimmer issued from it and, like a lame colossus, took a few burdensome steps toward the crowd. He was now wearing rawhide leggings, a threadbare blouse, and several layers of indeterminate wool wraps, covered by a coat made from the skins of lynxes and coyotes, beavers and bears, caribou and snakes, foxes and prairie dogs, coatis and pumas, and other unknown beasts. Here and there dangled a snout, a paw, a tail. The hollow head of a large mountain lion hung like a hood on his back. The variety of animals that had gone into this coat, as well as the different stages of decrepitude of the hides, gave an idea both of how long the garment had been in the making and of how widely its wearer had traveled. He held a log split down the middle in each hand.

“Yes,” he said, looking at no one in particular. “Most of those things are lies.”

Everyone quickly stepped away from the invisible line drawn between Munro and the man in the fur coat. Munro’s hand hovered over his holster. He stood there with the stunned solemnity common to very drunk and very frightened men.

The massive man sighed. He seemed immensely tired.

Munro did not move. The swimmer sighed once again and suddenly, before anyone could even blink, clapped one log flat against the other with a deafening thunder. Munro dropped to the floor and curled up into a ball; the rest of the men either ducked or raised their forearms to their foreheads. As the clap swelled, echoed, and dissolved into the plain, everyone started to look around. Munro was still on the floor. Cautiously, he raised his head and got to his feet. Flushing and unable to take his eyes off his own boots, he disappeared behind his companions and then into a hidden recess of the ship.

The Titan remained holding the logs up in the air, as if they were still reverberating, and then made his way through the parting crowd to the agonizing fire. From his coat, he produced some rope yarn and tarred canvas. He threw the kindling stuff on the embers, followed by one log, and used the other to stir the coals before adding it to the flames, sending a whirlwind of sparks into the darkening sky. When the glowing vortex died down, the man warmed his hands over the fire. He shut his eyes, slightly leaning into it. He looked younger in the copper-colored light and seemed to be smiling contently—but it could also just have been the grimace that intense heat puts on everyone’s face. The men started to clear away from him with their usual combination of reverence and fear.

“Stay by the fire,” he said softly.

It was the first time he had addressed them. The men faltered and stopped in their tracks, as if weighing the equally frightening options of complying with the request and disobeying it.

“Most of those things are lies,” the man repeated. “Not all. Most. My name,” he said and sat down on a barrel. He rested his elbows on his knees and his forehead on his palms, took a deep breath, and then sat up, tired but regal. The prospectors and sailors remained in their places, heads down. Rolling a keg, the boy emerged from behind the throng. He placed it daringly close to the man and took a seat. The tall man might have nodded approvingly, but it was a fleeting and almost imperceptible gesture that could also have been a random tilt of his head.

“Håkan,” the man said, staring into the fire, pronouncing the first vowel as a u that immediately bled into an o, and then into an a, not in a succession, but in a warp or a bend, so that for a moment all three sounds were a single one. “Håkan Söderström. I never needed my last name. Never used it. And nobody could say my first name. I couldn’t speak English when I got here. People asked me my name. I answered them, Håkan,” he said, placing his palm on his chest. “They asked, Hawk can? Hawk can what? What is it you can? By the time I could speak and explain, I was the Hawk.”

Håkan seemed to be talking to the fire but did not mind others listening. The young boy was the only one sitting. Some remained in their places; others had stolen away and scattered toward the bow or gone below deck. Eventually, about half a dozen men approached the fire with casks, crates, and bundles to sit on. Håkan fell silent. Someone took out a cake of tobacco and a penknife, meticulously cut a quid from it, and, after examining the plug as if it were a gem, took it to his mouth. Meanwhile, the listeners gathered around Håkan, sitting on the edges of their improvised seats, ready to leap out, should the enormous man’s mood take a hostile turn. One of the prospectors produced sour bread and salmon; someone else had potatoes and fish oil. The food was passed around. Håkan declined. The men seemed to settle in as they ate. Nobody spoke. The sky remained indistinguishable from the ground, but both had now grayed. Finally, after rearranging the fire, Håkan started to talk. Making long pauses, and sometimes in an almost inaudible voice, he would keep speaking till sunrise, always addressing the fire, as if his words had to be burned as soon as they were uttered. Sometimes, however, he seemed to be talking to the boy.