The North Water

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Beyond the ice plain’s edge another pressure ridge rears up, brown-edged and haggard at the peaks, its steep flanks bermed and bastioned like an antique siegework. The bear tracks west until it finds a gap, then leaps up into it and clambers through. The risen sun, smeared by cloud, gives off no noticeable heat. Sumner’s sweat drips down into his beard and eyebrows and freezes into hard spangles. The bear has slowed down to a walk now, but so has Sumner. As he follows it up and across the ridge and onto another undulant snowfield, the gap between them barely alters. He gains twenty yards, then loses it again. The aching in his legs and chest is sharp and hot but regular. He thinks of turning back but doesn’t. The chase has found a rhythm already, a pattern he can’t easily disrupt. When he is thirsty, he reaches down and eats the snow; when he is hungry, he lets the feeling rise, peak, then pass away. He breathes, he walks, the bear precedes him always, badged high with blood, steam-bound, its tracks as broad and round as soup bowls.

Every minute he expects the bear to fail, to weaken, to begin to die, but it never does so. It persists. Sometimes he feels a fierce and violent hatred for it, at other times a sickly kind of love. Rump muscles roil beneath the bear’s slack fur. Its giant legs lift and fall like drop hammers. They pass by a berg embedded in the floe — two hundred feet high, half a mile long, starkly vertical and flat-topped like the rhomboid plug of an extinct volcano. Its steep and shear-marked sides are veined with blue and gaitered at their base with drifted snow. Sumner has no pocket watch but guesses it is now past noon. He realizes he has come too far, that even if he kills the bear he will not be able to carry its meat back to camp. This truth disturbs him for a moment, but then, as he walks onwards, its power thins and fades, and all he is aware of is the lift and press of his feet across the snow and the hollow roar of his own quick breathing.

An hour or so later, they reach a long line of high black bluffs, their dark faces soilless and switchbacked with pale gray threads of ice. The bear pads steadily alongside, until it reaches a narrow, shadow-draped breach in the cliff face. It glances rearwards once, then turns sharply and disappears from sight. Sumner follows after. When he reaches the opening, he turns as the bear turned and sees before him a long, narrow, ice-choked fjord, steep-sided and without apparent egress. To the left and right, high gray rocks gashed with couloirs grope up towards the pallid sky. The ice underfoot is flat and pure as marble. Sumner, pausing at the threshold and looking about, senses he has been here before, that this place is already known to him somehow. Prefigured in a dream perhaps, he thinks, or in some opiated flight of fancy. He steps across the threshold and continues walking forwards.

Along the bone-white valley floor, between looming walls of gneiss and granite, beast and man proceed in loose-knit tandem — separate yet eerily conjoined — as if along a corridor or hallway paved with snow and canopied with sky. Sumner feels the weight of the rifle pulling down against his shoulder and the stubborn ache of his mal-united leg. He is light-headed now and sorely weakened by hunger. Presently, it starts to snow: light at first, but then thicker and more forceful.

As the wind and cold increase, and the snow drops down in dense diagonal gusts, Sumner loses sight of the bear. It appears, then disappears from his view in awkward, flickering glimpses, like an image in a zoetrope. Its outline blurs, then complicates, and finally dissolves. Soon, the sky and the cliffs disappear also, and all he can see is the blizzard’s ashen iterations — everything swirling and shifting — nothing clear or separate or distinct. Enclosed in this bewildering mesh, he loses all sense of time and direction. He staggers back and forth, witless and nearing exhaustion, for what feels like hours but could be only minutes or even seconds. Eventually, by chance, he stumbles onto the rumbled scree slope and takes shelter in the lee of a brindled boulder. Waves of fear and panic gather and break inside him as he crouches there. He is shuddering with cold, and he feels his sweat-soaked clothes beginning to harden around him like a suit of mail. He has no sensation left in either feet or hands. Snow gathers along the creases of his face and lips but doesn’t melt. He has walked much too far, he knows it now: he has strayed from his true purposes, he is lost and bewildered, and his failure is complete.

Looking up through the hazy downfall, he sees a dead boy standing before him, grubby and barefooted, clad in a dhoti and blood-soaked tabard. He is holding a limp cabbage leaf in one hand and a tin cup of water in the other. The bubbling bullet wound in his chest goes all the way through to the other side now. A yellow, coin-sized patch of light is just visible where his heart should rightly be. It is like a narrow loophole in the thickness of a castle wall. Sumner raises his right hand in awkward greeting, but the boy offers no response. Perhaps he is angry with me, Sumner thinks. But no, the boy is weeping, and, seeing this, he starts to weep himself for sympathy and shame. The warm tears course down his cheeks and then harden and freeze amidst the tangled edges of his beard. As he sits and weeps, he feels himself liquefying, losing form, sliding away into a stew of sadness and regret. His body starts to shake and shudder. His breathing slows and his heartbeat becomes languid and unwilling. He senses death, feels its leaden presence, scents its fecal perfume on the whipping air. The boy reaches out for him, and Sumner sees, through the spy hole in his chest, another world in miniature: perfect, complete, impossible. He stares for a moment, captivated by the brilliance of its making, then turns away again. He grabs himself tightly, breathes in, and looks about. The child is gone: there is nothing in existence but the raging storm and, concealed somewhere inside it, the bear he must kill if he is to live. He pulls his legs up to his chest and hugs them for a moment. He stands up with difficulty and loads the rifle with numb and trembling fingers. When he is finished, he steps away from the boulder and shouts out into the freezing air.

“Come on out here now,” he yells. “Come on out here now, you baleful bastard, and let me shoot you dead.”

There is no response, nothing except the wind-driven snow and the silent slabs of rock and ice. He peers blindly forwards and yells again. The storm continues unabated; the high wind wails. He could be standing alone on the surface of some far-flung, bitter moon, ice-choked, sunless, and unpeopled. He yells a third time, and, like a sudden ghost, conjured against its will, the bear appears before him, less than thirty yards away, part veiled by thickly wafting snow but clearly visible. He sees the ragged edges of its shoulder wound, the thin white saddle of snow settled across its spine. The bear looks blankly back at him; steam leaks from its nostrils like smoke from a cooling campfire. Sumner raises his rifle and takes unsteady aim at its enormous chest. His head is clear. There is nothing left to decide or hope for. All that exists is this single moment, this event. He breathes in, then out again; his heart fills up with blood, then empties. He pulls the trigger, hears the powder catch and roar, and feels the recoil.

The bear drops down onto its knees, and then falls sideways. The report echoes off the high rocks — loud, then quieter, then quieter still. Sumner lowers the rifle and runs over to the body. He crouches down, puts both his palms on the bear’s still-warm flank, and pushes his face and fingers deep into the fur. His lips are parted, and he is gasping. He takes a blubber knife from his belt, hones its edge with a whetstone, and tests the sharpness against his thumb. He makes the first incision near the groin, and then cuts up through the soft flesh of the belly until he meets the sternum. He starts sawing through bone until he reaches the throat. He cuts the windpipe, then jams his boot heel against one side of the severed rib cage, grips the other with both hands, and breaks it open. He feels the sudden kitchen-heat of the bear’s inner organs and tastes the heady, carnal fetor that rises out of them. He drops the blubber knife onto the snow and pushes both his bare hands down into the dead bear’s steaming guts. His frozen fingers feel like they might burst apart from the warmth. He grinds his teeth and pushes his hands in deeper. When the pain reduces, he pulls them out, dripping with red, rubs his face and beard with the hot blood, then picks up the knife again and begins to sever and remove the bear’s innards. He tugs out the heart and lungs, the liver, intestines, and stomach. The deep cavity that remains is half-filled with a steaming pool of hot black liquid — blood, urine, bile. Sumner leans forwards and starts to drink it, ladling it up quickly into his open mouth with both hands. As he drinks, and as the bear’s heat passes directly into him like an elixir — down his throat, into his empty stomach, and outwards — he starts to tremble, then twitch. After a minute he begins to spasm uncontrollably, his eyes roll back into his skull, and blackness overtakes him.

When the fit passes, Sumner is lying prone and half-covered by drifting snow. His beard is stiff with ursine gore, both hands are dyed dark red, and the arms of his peacoat are soaked up to the elbows. His mouth, teeth, and throat are caked with blood, both animal and human. The tip of his tongue is missing. He pulls himself to his feet and looks about. The wind howls, and the air is dense with close-set waves of gusting ice. He can no longer see the cliffs, or the scree slope, or the boulder where he sheltered previously. He looks down at the bear’s eviscerated corpse, its split and opened rib cage yawning like an empty tomb.

He pauses a moment, considers, then, as if stepping into a bath, he bends and lowers himself down into the striated crimson cavity. The severed bones close over him like teeth. He feels the stiffened muscle compress and spread beneath him. There is the clean wet smell of butchery, a faint but marvelous residue of animal warmth. He tucks his sea boots up into the hollowed-out abdomen and pulls the dead flesh tight around him like an overcoat. He hears the howling wind still but doesn’t feel it. He is enclosed, encoffined, in a tight and vasculated darkness. Lying there, his mutilated tongue begins to swell inside his mouth; blood and saliva bubble out from his lips and dribble down into his beard. He wishes to pray, to speak, to make himself known somehow. He remembers Homer — a hero’s corpse, the funeral games, the armor bent and broken — but when he tries to murmur out the opening dactyls, instead of words what burbles from his brutalized mouth are the inchoate grunts and gaspings of a savage.