Rationing the Days
Where numbers are honest, silence does the arithmetic
By the third month in the ice, the of survival had become my most constant companion.
Each morning I counted the cases of biscuit, the tins of , and the sacks of flour.
The numbers were honest, and the honesty of numbers is a colder thing than any wind.
I calculated that our , stretched to their limit, would last us until the middle of winter.
Beyond that date the columns in my notebook simply stopped, and I did not fill them in.
I cut the daily by a third, and announced the change as though it were a minor adjustment.
The men received the news in silence, and the silence told me they had done their own .
Hunger, I had read somewhere, is patient; it does not shout, but it never leaves the room.
We learned to eat slowly, to make a single biscuit occupy the attention of a whole meal.
Harding proposed that we kill the weakest of the dogs to spare the food they consumed.
I agreed, though I did not watch it done, and I recorded the fact in three plain words.
A commander may permit himself , but he may not permit himself to display it.
The men gave the dogs names, and mourned them, and ate what little there was without complaint.
I noticed that the youngest among us, the Perry, had begun to hide part of his .
He was saving it, I discovered, for a companion whose strength was failing faster than his own.
Such things I did not record as heroism, because the men would have been embarrassed to read it so.
I wrote instead that the held, that was steady, that the temperature fell to forty below.
The plainness of the entries was itself a kind of discipline, a refusal to let fear onto the page.
At night I lay awake performing the same divisions, as if a different answer might present itself.
It never did, for is loyal only to the truth, and the truth was very simple.
We had too little food and too much time, and one of the two would have to change.
I began, quietly, to plan for the day we would abandon the ship and walk.
To speak of it aloud would have frightened the men, so I kept the plan folded inside me.
Meanwhile I praised the cook, who could make a sound out of a handful of oats.
Small ceremonies, I found, held us together where large hopes would only have exposed our danger.
A birthday was marked with an extra biscuit; a song was sung; the darkness was briefly forgotten.
I understood that leadership, in that place, was mostly the art of dividing very little among very many.
And so I counted, and cut, and counted again, and told no one how short the numbers had grown.