The North Water

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The sea is beginning to refreeze. New ice, thin as glass, is forming between the existing floes, gluing them together. Soon enough, the bay will form into a solid white mass, rough-surfaced, immoveable, and they will be locked in until the spring thaw arrives. The men sleep, smoke, play cards. They eat their meager rations but make no efforts to improve their lot or prepare for the brutal winter to come. As the temperature falls, and the nights lengthen, they burn driftwood washed in from the wreck of the Hastings and finish the final bags of coal they salvaged from the Volunteer. In the evenings, after supper, Otto reads drearily from the Bible, and Cavendish leads them all in ribald song.

Since the night he saw the bear, Sumner’s symptoms have been gradually reducing. He still has headaches and night sweats, but the nausea is not so frequent and his stool is firmer. Freed to this degree from the hectoring tyrannies of his own body, he is better able to notice the condition of those around him. Without the usual healthful rigor of their shipboard duties, they have grown listless and pale. If they are to have enough strength and will to live through the depredations of the coming winter, to fend off the effects of cold and hunger, it occurs to him that they must be made to move about somehow, to invigorate themselves with exercise and labor. If not, then their current mood of melancholy will likely harden into despair and a more deadly lassitude will overtake them all.

He speaks to Cavendish and Otto, and they agree that the men should be divided into two roughly equal watches and that each morning, so long as the weather allows it, one watch will take the rifles and climb the cliffs to hunt for food and the other will spend an hour at least outside the tent tramping up and down the strand as a way of maintaining their vigor. The men, when they are told this, show little enthusiasm for the scheme. They appear unconcerned when Sumner explains that if they remain immobile and torpid their blood will thicken and clot inside their veins and their organs will become flaccid and eventually fail. It is only when Cavendish bellows at them and threatens to reduce the rations still further if they don’t comply that they sourly give in.

Once begun, the daily hunting produces little that is edible — some small birds, occasionally a fox — and the trudging back and forth is much resented. After less than a month, these Spartan regularities are interrupted by two days of unceasing horizontal snow and pounding gales. Afterwards, there are drifts five feet deep all around the camp, and the temperature has dropped so low that it is painful to inhale. The men refuse to hunt or walk in such conditions and when Cavendish ventures out alone, in spite of them, he returns an hour later empty-handed, exhausted, and frostbitten. That same night they start to break up the second whaleboat for fuel, and, as the brutal cold persists and deepens, they burn more and more of it every day, until Cavendish is forced to take control of the remaining wood supply and begin to ration its use. The fire, already meager, becomes for most of the day little more than a small pile of faintly glowing embers. A layer of ice forms on the inside of the tent and the very air itself feels viscous and gelid. All night, triple-layered in wool, flannel, and oil skin, clustered together like the victims of a sudden massacre, men shudder and spasm and jolt themselves awake.

* * *

Before they see the sledge, they hear the sledge dogs’ hectic barking. Sumner thinks at first that he is dreaming of Castlebar and Michael Duigan’s famous pack of lurchers coursing hare, but when the other men begin to rouse and mumble, he realizes that they must hear it too. He wraps a scarf tight about his head and face and goes outside. Looking west, he sees a pair of Yaks coming in at a pace across the sea ice, their brindled dogs fanned out in front of them, their rawhide whip, antenna-like, flicking and wafting in the frigid air. Cavendish rushes out of the tent, then Otto and the rest of the men. They watch the sledge gradually approaching, appearing ever more solid and real as it does so. When it reaches them, Cavendish steps forwards and asks the Yaks for food.

“Meat,” he says loudly, “fish.” He makes crude feeding gestures with his fingers and mouth. “Hungry,” he says, pointing at his own stomach first and then the stomachs of the other men.

The Yaks look at him and grin. They are small and dark-skinned both. They have flat gypsy faces and filthy black hair down to their shoulders. Their anoraks and boots are stitched from untanned caribou and their britches from bear fur. They point back at the loaded sledge. The dogs are barking madly all around.

“Trade,” they tell him.

Cavendish nods.

“Show me,” he says.

They undo the lashings on the sledge and show him a frozen seal carcass and what looks like the hind part of a walrus. Cavendish calls Otto over and the two men briefly confer. Otto goes back into the tent and comes out with two blubber knives and a hand ax. The Yaks examine them carefully. They give the ax back but keep both the knives. They show Cavendish an ivory harpoon head and some soapstone carvings, but he waves them off.

“All we want is the food,” he says.

They agree to swap the frozen seal carcass for the two knives and a length of whale line. Cavendish gives the meat to Otto, and Otto takes it inside the tent, hacks it into lumps with the hand ax, and drops the lumps onto the embers of the fire. They hiss a moment, and then, after a few minutes longer, begin to broil and give off steam. While the men wait eagerly to eat, the Yaks tether and feed their dogs. Sumner hears them outside, laughing and chattering away in their own rapid, jerky tongue.

“If they give us seals,” he says to Cavendish, “we can live until the spring. We can eat the meat and burn the blubber.”

Cavendish nods.

“Aye,” he says. “I need a parley with them aboriginal fuckers. I need to strike up a good bargain. Problem is, they know we’re fucked already. Listen to ’em out there, laughing and joking with themselves.”

“You think they’d let us starve to death?”

Cavendish sniffs.

“Happily they would,” he says. “Heathenish fuckers such as them int burdened with the Christian virtues as men like us are. If they don’t fancy what we have to offer, they’ll be gone just as quick as they arrived.”

“Offer the rifles,” Sumner suggests. “Ten dead seals for each rifle. Three rifles is thirty seals. We can live off that.”

Cavendish thinks a moment, then nods.

“I’ll tell them twelve,” he says, “twelve per rifle. Though I honestly doubt the savage bastards can even count that high.”

After they have eaten, Cavendish goes back outside, and Sumner goes with him. They show the Yaks one of the rifles and then point back at the tent and make feeding gestures. The Yaks examine the rifle, heft it, peer along the barrel. Cavendish loads a cartridge and lets the elder Yak shoot it off.

“That there’s a fucking good weapon,” Cavendish says.

The Yaks talk to each other for a while, then slowly reexamine the rifle. When they finish, Cavendish leans down and makes twelve short marks in the snow. He points to the rifle, then he points to the marks and then to the tent. He makes the same feeding gesture as before.

For a minute, the Yaks say nothing. One of them reaches into his pocket, takes out a pipe, and stuffs and lights it. The other smiles briefly, says something, then bends down and rubs out six of the marks.

Cavendish purses his lips, shakes his head, and then slowly reinscribes the same six marks.

“I won’t be jewed down by no fucking Esquimaux,” he says to Sumner.

The Yaks look displeased. One of them frowns, says something to Cavendish, and then quickly with the toe of his boot rubs out the same six marks again and then rubs out another.

“Shit,” Sumner whispers.

Cavendish laughs scornfully.

“Only five,” he says. “Five fucking seals for a rifle. Do I honestly look like that much of a cunt?”

“If they leave us now, we’ll starve to death,” Sumner reminds him.

“We’ll survive without them,” he says.

“No we fucking won’t.”

The Yaks look back at them indifferently, point down at the five marks on the ground, then hold out the rifle as if well prepared to give it back. Cavendish looks at the rifle steadily but doesn’t reach for it. He shakes his head and spits.

“Gouging ice-nigger bastards,” he says.

* * *

The Yaks build themselves a small snow house fifty yards away from the tent, then mount the sledge and go back out onto the ice to hunt. It is dark when they return. The black sky is dense with stars and upon its speckled blank the borealis unfurls, bends back, reopens again like a vast and multicolored murmuration. Drax, still in manacles, but left unguarded now since they are all, in effect, imprisoned by the shared calamity, watches them unship their kill. He listens to the throttled grunting of their caveman speech, sniffs, then smells, even through the frigid air, the sour reek of their grease-streaked armature. He weighs them up awhile — their height, their weight, the speed and implication of their various shiftings — then walks towards them, clinking as he goes.

“Ye got two nice fat-looking ones there,” he says, pointing at the two dead seals. “I can help you butcher ’em if you’d like.”

Although they have been out hunting all day, the two men seem as fresh and lively as before. They look at him a moment, then point at his chains and laugh. Drax laughs with them, then rattles the chains and laughs again.

“Them cunts in there don’t trust me, see,” he says. “They think I’m dangerous.” He makes a distended, monster face and claws the air to illustrate his meaning. The Yaks laugh louder still. Drax reaches down and takes one of the dead seals by the tail.

“Let me butcher this one for ye,” he says again, making a cutting gesture along its belly as he does so. “I can do it easy.”

They shake their heads and wave him off. The elder takes a knife, leans down, and quickly cuts open and guts the two seals. He leaves the parti-colored giblets, purple, pink, and gray, steaming in a pile on the snow, then separates the blubber from the meat. Drax watches on. He smells the ferric blood-tang of the innards and feels the drool begin to puddle in his mouth.

“I’ll haul that over for ye if you’d like it,” he says.

The two men ignore him still. The younger takes the meat and blubber over to the tent and gives it to Cavendish. The elder starts swiftly picking through the piles of giblets with his blade. He finds one of the livers, slices off a good-sized piece, and eats it raw.

“Christ alive,” Drax says. “I hant seen that before. I seen plenty, but I hant seen that.”

The man looks up at Drax and grins. His teeth and lips are red with seal blood. He cuts off another piece of the raw liver and offers it to him. Drax considers a moment, then takes it.

“I’ve eaten worse in my day,” he says. “Plenty worse.”

He chews once, then swallows it down and smiles. The elder Yak smiles back and laughs. When the younger one comes back from the tent, they confer for a while and then beckon Drax closer. The elder reaches into the pile of giblets and pulls out a severed eyeball. He pierces its skin with the point of the knife and sucks out the inner jelly. They look at Drax and grin.

“That don’t trouble me none,” Drax says. “I’ve eaten eyeballs before, an eyeball’s easy pickings.”

The elder finds another eyeball, pierces it as before, and gives it to him. Drax sucks out the juice, then puts the rest into his mouth and swallows it down. The Yaks start cackling wildly. Drax opens his mouth wide and sticks out his tongue to show that it’s truly gone.

“I’ll gobble down anything you can give me,” he says, “any fucking thing at all — brains, bollocks, hooves. I int fussy, see.”

The elder Yak points to his chains again, growls and claws the air.

“Aye,” Drax says. “Aye, that’s about the size of it right there.”

* * *

That night the Yaks feed their dogs with the remains of the rancid walrus meat, tether them to whalebone stakes driven into the gravel, and then crawl inside the snow house and settle down to sleep. They leave again early the next morning but return after dark with no seals to show for their labor. The next day, it is snowing too hard to hunt and they stay inside the snow house all day. Drax hobbles through the blizzard, past the scattered humps of curled-up dogs, to visit them. He gives them each a pinch of tobacco and asks them questions. When they miss his meaning, he repeats himself more loudly and makes signs. In response, they point and laugh and trace out patterns in the air or on the rawhide surface of their reindeer sleeping bags. Occasionally, they slice off a piece of the frozen seal liver and gnaw on it like licorice. There are periods of silence, and periods in which the Yaks talk to each other as though he is not even there. He watches them and listens to what they say, and, after a while, he understands what he must do next. It is not a decision, so much as a slow uncovering. He feels the future gradually show itself. He smells its hot perfume hanging in the arctic air, like a dog smells the rank requirements of a bitch.

When the blizzard abates, the Yaks go out seal hunting again. They kill one seal on the first day, and two more on the next. When they give over the final butchered carcass as agreed, Cavendish shows them the second rifle. He makes five more marks in the snow, but the Yaks shake their heads and point back in the direction they came from.

“They want to go back home,” Sumner says. They are standing outside the tent; the sky is bright and clear, but the air around is bitter cold. Sumner feels its desiccating bluntness press against his face and eyes.

“They can’t go back,” Cavendish says. He points down at the ground again and waves the rifle at them.

The elder one shows him the rifle they already have, then points again to the west.

“Utterpok,” he says. “No trade.”

Cavendish shakes his head and softly curses.

“We have enough meat and blubber now to last a month,” Sumner says. “So long as they come back before the supply runs out, we can survive.”

“If that old bastard goes the other one must stay here with us,” Cavendish says. “If they go off together, we can’t be sure they’re ever coming back.”

“Don’t threaten them,” Sumner warns. “If you press too hard, they’ll be gone for sure.”

“They may have that one rifle but they hant got no balls or powder for it yet,” Cavendish says. “So I reckon I can threaten the bastards all I like if I have a mind to do it.”

He points at the younger man and then at the snow house.

“He stays here,” he says. “You”—pointing at the older man, then gesturing west—“can fuck off if you want to.”

The Yaks shake their heads and smile ruefully, as if they understand the suggestion but find it both foolish and faintly embarrassing.

“No trade,” the older one repeats lightly. “Utterpok.”

Unafraid, amused even, they look at Cavendish for a while longer, then turn away and start walking back towards the sledge. The tethered dogs uncurl from their snow holes and start to yip and howl as they approach. Cavendish reaches into his pocket for a cartridge.

“You think killing them will change their minds?” Sumner says. “Is that your best idea?”

“I int killing anyone yet, I’m just aiming to get a little more attention, that’s all.”

“Just wait,” he says. “Put down the gun.”

The Yaks are already busy reloading their sledge, rolling up their bedding, and lashing it to the wooden frame with strips of walrus hide. When Sumner walks across to them, they don’t trouble to look up.

“I have something for you,” he says. “See here.”

He holds out his gloved hand and shows them the looted gold ring that he has been carrying, buttoned in his waistcoat pocket, since the day of Drax’s capture.

The elder one looks up, pauses what he is doing, and touches the younger on the shoulder.

“What use do such as they have for gold and jewels?” Cavendish asks. “If ye can’t eat it or burn it or fuck it, it int much use out here, seems to me.”

“They can trade it with other whalers,” Sumner says. “They’re not so stupid.”

The two men come closer. The elder one picks the ring from Sumner’s dark woolen mitten and examines it carefully. Sumner watches him.

“If you stay here,” he says to the younger man, pointing, “that ring is yours to keep.”

The two men talk between themselves. The younger one takes the ring, sniffs it, then licks it twice. Cavendish laughs.

“Daft bastard thinks it’s made of marzipan,” he says.

The elder presses his palm onto the chest of his anorak and then points off to the west. Sumner nods.

“You can go,” he says, “but this one stays with us.”

They look at the ring for a while longer, turning it over several times and scraping at the bright jewels with their blackened fingernails. In the flat arctic light, blanched and unvariegated, amidst the swathing landscape of snow and ice, it seems like something unearthly, an object imagined or dreamed of rather than hewn and fashioned by human hand.

“If they’ve been on board a whaler to trade, they’ve seen coins and watches before, mebbe,” Cavendish says, “but never such a pretty thing as that.”

“It’s worth five rifles or more,” Sumner tells them, holding up his fingers and pointing.

“Ten or more,” Cavendish says.

The elder one looks at them and nods. He gives the ring to the younger one, who smiles and tucks it down into the hairy complication of his britches. They turn away and begin unpacking the sledge. As he walks back towards the tent, Sumner feels a disorienting lightness, a sudden unaccounted space inside him, like a cavity or abscess, where the ring used to be but isn’t.

* * *

Later, when the darkness has settled around the camp, and after they have eaten their usual supper of half-scorched seal meat and ship’s biscuit smeared with grease, Drax waves to Cavendish to get his attention, then beckons him over. He is sitting apart from the other men, in a dark and frigid angle of the tent far from the fire. He is wrapped in a coarse blanket and is passing the time by scrimshawing a crude image of Britannia triumphant into a fragment of walrus ivory. Since he is not allowed the use of a knife, he employs a sharpened iron nail instead.

Cavendish sighs and lowers himself onto the rug-covered floor.

“What now?” he asks.

Drax continues scraping for a while, then turns to look at him.

“Remember that time we talked about afore,” he says. “That time we both thought might never ever happen. Remember that one?”

Cavendish nods reluctantly.

“I remember it well enough,” he says.

“Then I ’spect you can moreless guess what I’m about to tell you.”

“That time hant come,” he says. “It can’t have. Not out here in the icy fucking wastes of nowhere.”

“It has though, Michael.”

“Bollocks to that.”

“When the Esquimaux leaves in the morrow, he’ll take me with him on the sledge. It’s all agreed between us. All I need from you is a file to cut these chains off, and a quick glance the other way.”

Cavendish snorts.

“You’d rather live as a Yak than hang as an honest Englishman, is that it now?”

“I’ll winter over with ’em if they let me, and come spring I’ll look out for a ship.”

“A ship bound for where?”

“New Bedford, Sebastopol. You won’t ever see sign of me again. I’ll swear to that at least.”

“We’re all of us trapped here now. Why should I help you alone escape?”

“You’re only keeping me alive and breathing so they can hang me later on. Where’s the sense or reason in that? Let me take my chances with the Yaks. The savage bastards may stick a lance in me, but if they do, there’s no man here’ll mourn my passing much.”

“I’m a whaleman, not a fucking jailer,” Cavendish says. “That’s true enough.”

Drax nods.

“Think on it,” he says. “It’s one less mouth to feed, and fuck knows there’s no abundance of food around here at present. When you get back to England there’ll be no blame attached, and you and Baxter can go about your business without no trouble from me.”

Cavendish looks at him.

“You’re an evil, filthy, conniving bastard, Henry,” he says, “and I ’spect you always were one.”

Drax shrugs.

“Mebbe,” he says. “But if I am what you call me, why would you want such a fiend living so close amongst you, when you have the God-given chance to cut him free?”

Cavendish stands up abruptly and walks away. Drax goes back to his carving. It is dark outside and the glow from the blubber lamp is frail and intermittent. He can barely see what he is doing, but as he works he feels the shallow lines of engravure with his fingers, as a blind man might, and imagines the glorious and patriotic pictures they will form when he is done. Cavendish comes back shortly and crouches beside him as if wishing to inspect his work.

“You can’t use it inside the tent,” he says, showing him the file, then pushing it underneath the folds of Drax’s blanket. “The others will hear for sure.”

Drax nods and smiles.

“That seal meat don’t agree with me none,” he says. “I’ll be in and out all night for shitting, I ’spect.”

Cavendish nods. He stays crouching, placing one hand on the floor for balance.

“I been thinking,” he says.

“Oh aye.”

“What if I come along with ye when you go?”

Drax sniffs and shakes his head.

“It’s safer here.”

“We can’t all winter through alive. Ten men? It int possible.”

“One or two may die, but I’d say you won’t be one of ’em.”

“I’d sooner take my chances with the Yaks, like you are.”

Drax shakes his head again.

“That int the agreement I made. It’s me alone.”

“Then I’ll make my own agreement, separate like, why not?”

Drax turns the ivory over in his hand and feels its shallow indentations with his thumb.

“You’re best to stay,” he says again.

“Nay, I’ll be coming with,” he says. “And that there file’s my ticket out.”

Drax thinks a moment, then reaches into the blanket and touches the file’s relentless edges, feels its tight-packed rills like the cold surface of a metallic tongue.

“Ye always were a bold and blusterous fucker, Michael,” he says.

Cavendish smirks and rubs his beard eagerly.

“You’d thought to get one over on me, I ’spect,” he says. “But you won’t do it. I int staying here to die with these others. I got bigger plans than that.”

It is so cold outside the tent that Drax can only work on his manacles for twenty minutes at a time before he begins to lose feeling in his hands and feet. It takes him four separate trips spaced out across the night to fully free himself. Each time he leaves the tent, he picks his way carefully through the low hillocked landscape of dark sleeping bodies, and each time he comes back, frosted and shuddering, his clothes stiffened with ice, he does the same. The men groan and curse as he nudges into them, but no one opens their eyes to look, aside from Cavendish who watches him intently.

Freed from the chains, he feels suddenly larger and younger than before. It is as if, since the instant he murdered Brownlee, he has been asleep and now he is awake again at last. He has no fear of the future, no sense of its power or meaning. Each new moment is merely a gate he walks through, an opening he pierces with himself. He whispers to Cavendish to get himself ready and wait for his whistle. He ties his clothing into a bundle with a cord, tucks the bundle under his arm, then drops the file into his coat pocket and makes his way over to the snow house. The moon is high and waning. Its frail light turns the broad white snowscape the color of gruel. The fierce air around him is crisp and odorless. The dogs are sleeping; the sledge is packed. He lowers himself onto his hands and knees and crawls inside the snow house. It is pitch-black, but he can smell them anyway — the younger on the left, the elder on the right — and hear them softly breathing. He is surprised they do not wake up, that his very presence does not alert them. He waits a moment, gauging the position of their heads and the directions they must be lying in. It is warmer here than in the tent, he notices. The atmosphere is close and oily. He reaches out carefully, slowly, and touches with the tip of his fingers the surface of one of the sleeping bags; he pushes very slightly down, and there is an answering moan. He puts his hand into his pocket and takes out the file. It is a foot long and an inch wide and one end is spiked. The spike is not especially sharp, but it is long enough for his purposes, and he thinks he will manage. He grips the end of the file in his fist and leans forwards. He can see the men’s faint outlines now — a thicker, denser black against the darkness of the snow house walls. He sniffs once in preparation, then reaches out and shakes the elder one awake. The man murmurs and opens his eyes. He leans up on one elbow and opens his mouth as if to speak.

Holding the file with both hands, Drax drives the spiked end into the man’s neck just below the ear; there is a spurt of hot blood and a noise somewhere between a gurgle and a gasp. He pulls out the spike and then quickly drives it in again, a little lower this time. When the younger man stirs, aroused by the noise, Drax turns, punches him twice to keep him quiet, then starts to throttle him. Being naturally scrawny and encased in a narrow, tight-fitting sleeping bag, he makes a poor fight of it and is suffocated before the elder one has finished dying. Drax pulls them both out of their bags, then strips the elder of his anorak, slits it up the side, and pulls it on over his own head. He feels around for the blubber knives and the rifle, then crawls back outside.

There is no sound or movement, no indication that anyone in the tent has heard a noise. He goes over to the sledge and gets the deerskin traces. One by one, he wakes the dogs and harnesses them. He crawls back inside the snow house, takes off the dead men’s boots, britches, and mittens and stuffs them inside one of the sleeping bags. When he comes out again, he sees Cavendish standing over by the sledge. He raises his right hand and walks across to him.

“I hant whistled you yet,” Drax tells him.

“I int waiting for no fucking whistle either.”

Drax looks at him and nods.

“The case is altered. I have to show you something now.”

“Show me what?”

Drax puts the sleeping bag down on the snow, tugs it open, and points inside.

“Lookee in there,” he says. “Tell me what you see.”

Cavendish pauses, shakes his head, then moves forwards and leans down to take a look in the bag. Drax steps off to the side, grabs him by the forelock, yanks his chin upwards, and cuts through his windpipe with one single slice of the blubber knife. Cavendish, rendered suddenly mute, grabs his gaping neck with both hands as if hoping to reseal the opening and drops onto his knees in the snow. He shuffles forwards for a few moments, like a crippled penitent, jerking, rasping, and gushing blood from his impossible wound, then topples, shudders like a hooked fish drowning in air, and stops moving completely. Drax turns him over and starts going through the pockets of Brownlee’s greatcoat.

“That wont my idea, Michael,” he tells him. “That one were yours alone.”