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them any time and that I should stop by on my
way back from the Pacific. As we sailed away, I saw him and
a few others climb into their boat. They were carrying their
rifles.

Chapter 6

    NAVIGATING THE FURY and Hecla Strait was the first time I
ever actually felt trapped in my submarine. Had I known
what we were in for ahead of time, I might have turned back.
    The strait was impassable to regular ships year-round because the ice never cleared. Never. An icebreaker was required
to get through. Arctic ice was older and thicker than Antarctic ice because it was surrounded by land and didn’t have
warmer summer currents passing through to allow a melt
between winters. Old ice met with new ice and grew thicker.
There was supposed to be less ice than before but I wouldn’t
know; this was my first time in the Arctic.
    Fury and Hecla were two ships of William Parry, the explorer who had tried to find a way through the Arctic in1822, but failed. He wintered in Igloolik. He probably met
Stephen and Nanuq’s ancestors. Cool. Parry tried but couldn’t
get through the strait so he named it after his ships. That
seemed like a good name for it because of the fury of the ice.
    The strait was a hundred miles long, fifteen miles wide
and three hundred feet deep in the eastern mouth. The ice
was five to ten feet thick. That’s what the books said and
that’s what I saw. All we had to do was submerge beneath the
ice, motor through the strait, which would take about ten
hours, and surface on the other side. That sounded easy
enough. There was just one problem: I didn’t know if the
other side was ice-free or not. What if it wasn’t and we
couldn’t find any place to surface? Then we’d have to motor
back. But we could sail on battery power only for twenty
hours. Once we ran out of power I’d have to pedal, and that
was really slow. And, except for sonar, we were blind underwater. But we couldn’t fully trust sonar because of the ice. I
couldn’t even know for sure if we were sailing in the right
direction. I had read that whales had the same problem. They
got trapped under the ice and drowned. That was awful.
    A voice inside told me not to do it. It was too dangerous.
But the only other way through the Arctic was to sail all the
way back through the Hudson Strait, then north around
Baffin Island into Lancaster Sound, which was the same distance as sailing to Nova Scotia. And Lancaster Sound might
be ice-blocked too. It was another three hundred and fifty
miles due north.
    If we were facing a solid wall of ice ten feet thick I might
have turned around. But we weren’t. There were patches of
open water. When I stood up on the portal with the binoculars and scanned the ice ahead of us, it looked like a white
and grey swamp with sharp ridges, and small patches here
and there that looked like quicksand holes. If we could just
find a few of those holes along our way we could surface,
run the engine and recharge the batteries. That would be
great. We just had to find them.
    I decided to try a two-mile stretch first. If that seemed too
difficult, I wouldn’t go any further.
    I submerged to a hundred feet, set our speed at ten knots
and sat down at the sonar panel with a notepad and pencil.
I didn’t have charts for the strait, but sonar gave a decent
outline of the floor and I traced it with a pencil on paper,
even though I knew this was a very imperfect kind of tracking. If we retraced our steps just a couple of miles north or
south of this route the topography might look entirely different. Still, it gave me some kind of information and made
me feel less blind.
    Ten minutes later, when we should have been about two
miles in, I started to surface very slowly. I was expecting to
strike ice with the portal and didn’t want to strike it hard. At
about seven feet from the surface I heard a gentle crunch
above us and we came to a stop. It didn’t bother me; that’s
what I