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victims of the Indian chieftain, King Philip. The English settlers in this area were exterminated. But they had sprung back. And in June of this year Custer and his bluecoat cavalry were wiped out, but many more soldiers had come after them to drive the Sioux and the Cheyenne and the other hostiles farther back into the wilderness—farther back, Tyson feels, into the human past that is their true habitat. He likes Hannah and Joe very much, he admires them truly, but he takes it for granted that they are unusually advanced members of a primitive, doomed race. The child’s death is a heartbreak, yet in some parlour of the mind it gratifies the vision of racial destiny that Tyson shares with his era. The Esquimau has no resistance to the ailments of civilization, and that is telling. The native is but an episode in the advance of the Caucasian . Where did he read that? A recent editorial, perhaps in the Tribune . The tone was neither hostile nor contemptuous. It was simply the pragmatism of progress.
    Tyson’s wife and son were to have accompanied him to the funeral, but he and Emmaline had quarrelled again and he had left for the train alone. Of all the things that had kept him alive on the ice—fear of disgrace and the hope for fame (the two are really one), duty to the flag and to God, old habits of discipline, hopes of exposing Budington, hopes of punishing the crew, dreams of a bath and fresh oysters with horseradish and vinegar and her hot crusty bread, richly buttered, dripping with molasses—none seemed as important as Emmaline and little George. He had his duty to them too. Above all, he had his Love. In the breast pocket of his shirt he kept a torque of strawberry blonde hair with a circlet of the boy’s auburn hair linked through it. Only let me return and I’ll never again look complacently, or with bored aversion, on the comforts of home. On the ice he’d contemplated Home so avidly. And somehow in the fragrant, copious kitchen of his meditations he’d altered it—or his absence had. On his return as a hero he seemed to feel, naturally enough, that some kind of reward was in order, but the boy seemed a changeling, his wife a disappointing impostor. Stern-faced, stolid, thorough—not the imagined bride who’d helped keep his heart beating in that hell.
    Clearly she found him changed as well. His faith had been fractured. Because God had not been out there. He couldn’t tell her that in the Arctic an interstellar cold and darkness dipped down to touch the planet’s bare scalp. As a whaler, then a mate, then a captain, Tyson had been up there often before, but never in such a naked way. He was struck through by that cold and darkness and carried them back to the human South like an infection. The house became a chambered vault of ice. In recreating his journal for the book, he’d often referred to God’s watchful Providence on the ice, and the repeated act of writing the words had seemed to trick back some faith—though never for long. He has constructed himself around various loyalties, and his fame is built on just that, yet now it seems he’s destined to fail—to leave on the ice—his wife and small son. It’s an era when such an act can destroy you. There’s a mistress now too. But the new expedition he will lead (to initiate a white colonization of the Arctic) will remove him from the scene for now and allow him to go on convincing others that he’s still what he’s thought to be.
    What he’s thought to be is a man of his time. The ice has made him a man of our time.
    As the coloured maid admits him to the vestibule he can hear Kruger being introduced in the parlour. When Tyson finally enters, a hush falls. Kruger, in his overcoat, is kneeling in front of Tukulito, who is collapsed, dwarfed, in a deep wing chair by the hearth. Kruger holds her hand in his two hands—an almost courtly posture. Now, seeing Tyson, he rises, releasing her hand, and steps back, though not far. His fists