Gudge died during the night.
Dee found him in his bed the next morning when he didn’t show for breakfast. She’d come running into the common area saying his name before wrenching open the front door and dashing out into the snow. The station’s doctor, who Dee returned with a few long minutes later, told them, after checking the body, that he’d most likely died peacefully in his sleep, perhaps of a stroke.
Everyone in their small party was shocked. The food on the table abandoned. Penny, Anastasia, and Song were crying, Mole and Gecko were downcast. Miguel held Ibrahim—but, if anything, seemed in his slow way even more upset. Dee and Penguin looked bereft. Dee especially. Tortoise felt as if a wave had reared up and dragged them all down into cold, dark depths.
Gudge was dead.
Tortoise needed some air. He went out of the hut and away from the settlement, along the small rocky beach, which was free of snow and seal, until he found a boulder that was easy to climb. He sat there by himself. The sky was white and the sea was calm. He sat there for a long while, turning over his last conversation with the old quartermaster. Old Gudge.
Pebbles rattled in the small, shushing waves.
Tortoise sat there until he realised he was cold. On the way back, he stopped to look more closely at the bone on the beach. He’d noticed it on the way out. It was round and solid, with three wings: two horizontal and one vertical. A vertebra of some kind, he supposed, perhaps of a whale.
They covered Gudge in stones on the slopes above the settlement.
Miguel spoke first. One by one, the others did too.
There wasn’t anything else to do. It began to snow again, and they all went back inside.
They sat around the stove until late, grateful for its blazing warmth. For a long time they sat in silence, but then Penguin told them a funny story about the first time she’d met Gudge, and many of them shared their own memories. Captain Blake asked them about the journey of the Timothy Obi, and the crossing of the island, though he must’ve heard the story from Gudge. Later he told them about how he’d met Gudge in his youth decades before, on the Tokarua, and about the kind of man Gudge had been.
Next episode: Once More Into the Sea