The world had become nothing but white.
Snow and sky merged into a single endless sheet, broken only by the jagged teeth of ice ridges. The wind howled like a living creature, tearing at our fur hoods, stealing words from our mouths before they left our lips.
It was January of 1912, and our expedition had already been gone from New York for nearly a year. I was twenty-eight then, filled with the fire of youth and the arrogance of believing man could bend nature to his will.
We were six in total, led by Captain Harris, a stubborn veteran who had chased the northern lights across Greenland and sworn he would reach farther than any man alive. I believed him. We all did.
But belief doesn’t keep you warm when the mercury drops so low it freezes inside the thermometer.
By the third week of January, rations were dwindling. Scurvy gnawed at two of our men, their gums bleeding as they struggled to haul the sleds. And then came the cold snap—days where the air itself felt like shattered glass.
That was when I first noticed the pain in my toes. At first it was just numbness, a strange heaviness. Then the skin turned waxy, pale as candle wax.
“Frostbite,” Harris muttered when I showed him. He said it like a curse. “Keep moving. Don’t let it spread.”
But movement was agony. Each step was like walking on knives. Still, I pushed on, because in the white silence of the Arctic, stopping was the same as dying.
We camped that night in the shadow of a broken ridge, the wind screaming over the top like a banshee. The dogs curled tight into the snow, their bodies trembling, their breath crystallizing into ice that clung to their fur.
I peeled off my boot to inspect the damage. The sight made my stomach lurch. My toes were gray now, with a strange waxen sheen. They looked like they didn’t belong to me at all.
“God almighty,” whispered Thomas, one of the younger sailors, as he glanced over. “That ain’t right. That ain’t right at all.”
Captain Harris crouched beside me, his eyes hard. “First degree, maybe second. You let it get worse, you’ll lose the foot. Keep them warm, lad. Wrap ’em close to your belly if you have to.”
I nodded mutely, too ashamed to admit the truth: no amount of wrapping could drive away the ice that had already taken hold.
That night, as the blizzard raged, I did as Harris said. I pressed my bare feet against my stomach under the layers of wool, wincing at the cold bite of my own flesh. I prayed for the warmth to return, but the numbness only deepened.
Sleep came in fitful bursts. I dreamt of fire, of hearths back in Montana, of summer fields where the sun beat down like a blessing. And always, when I woke, there was only white.
By morning, two of my toes had turned black.
The march grew slower. Each mile felt like ten. My feet throbbed with a pain so sharp it blurred into something distant, almost unreal. At times I wondered if the frostbite was crawling upward, gnawing at me from within.
We lost one of the dogs that day. It collapsed in the snow, sides heaving, then stilled forever. Harris ordered it cut free from the traces. We could not afford dead weight. The rest of the team pressed forward, gaunt faces set in grim silence.
By evening, my condition was impossible to hide. I stumbled often, each fall drawing curses from the men who had to stop and haul me upright. My toes were blacker still, hard and brittle. The skin cracked when I touched it.
“You’ll have to amputate,” said Dr. Collins, the expedition’s surgeon, as we huddled in the dim glow of the camp stove. His voice was steady, but his eyes betrayed doubt. “Dead flesh spreads infection. We can’t risk it.”
I stared at him, horrified. “You mean cut them off? Out here?”
“Yes. Out here. Without proper instruments, without chloroform, without anything but a saw and whiskey. If you don’t, you may not live long enough to see New York again.”
The others said nothing. In the Arctic, compassion was a luxury. Survival was the only law.
I swallowed hard. “Not yet. Please. Just give me time.”
Collins nodded reluctantly, but I could see in his eyes he had already made his calculations.
The days blurred. Hunger gnawed, cold tore at us, and my world narrowed to the agony in my feet.
One evening, Harris called me aside. His beard was stiff with ice, his eyes red from wind.
“You’re slowing the team, boy. And you know what that means.”
I met his gaze. “I can still pull. I can still fight.”
“Can you?” His voice was flat. “If you fall, if you drag us all down—don’t think for a second we won’t leave you.”
Rage flared in me then, hot enough to momentarily chase away the cold.
“Leave me if you must,” I spat. “But I’ll crawl if I have to. I’m not dying out here.”
Harris studied me for a long moment, then nodded. “See that you don’t.”
That night, I made my decision. With a knife heated over the stove, I lanced the worst of the blackened flesh myself, hissing between clenched teeth as the smell of scorched skin filled the tent. Thomas tried to stop me, horrified, but I waved him away.
“I won’t let it take more,” I growled.
It was crude, brutal, but somehow it slowed the spread. The bleeding froze almost as soon as it began, and I wrapped my feet in every scrap of cloth I could find.
I don’t know if it was courage or madness. Perhaps both. But it kept me alive another day.
By February, only four of us remained. Two had perished—one from scurvy, another swallowed by a crevasse hidden beneath the snow. Their names were added to the ice, claimed forever by the white silence.
My feet were ruined. I lost three toes in total, one blackened stump after another. The pain was endless, but so was the will to live. Every mile closer to the coast, every faint glimpse of open water on the horizon, I clung to like salvation.
And then, one gray morning, we saw it: the ship. Our relief vessel, dark against the pale horizon, anchored in the bay like a miracle.
We wept. Grown men, hardened sailors, fell to their knees in the snow and sobbed like children.
When they carried me aboard, my body was broken, scarred, half-frozen. But I was alive.
Years later, when I sit by the fire in my small house in Boston, I still feel the ghost of that cold in my bones. I see the endless white, hear the wind shrieking across the ice, smell the sickly sweet rot of my own flesh.
But I also remember the promise I made myself in that frozen hell: I will not die here. I will crawl if I must, but I will not die.
And somehow, against all odds, I kept it.
The white silence did not claim me.