The North Water

CHAPTER TWENTY

It is still half-dark when they find the first mate’s corpse spread-eagled on the snow, frozen hard, throat gashed, bibbed and spewed over with blood. They assume the Yaks have murdered him until they realize that the Yaks are both dead themselves, and it is only then that they notice Drax is missing. When they figure what has happened, they stand there stunned, unable to parse the world implied by such events. They look down at Cavendish, dead and rime-covered, as if expecting him to speak to them again, to offer up one last unbelievable opinion on his own demise.

Within the hour, under Otto’s direction, they bury Cavendish in a shallow, scooped-out trench at the tip of the headland and cover the body over with slabs of rock and stones prized from the cliff face. Since the Yaks are heathens and their funerary rites, in consequence, obscure, they leave their bodies as they found them, only blocking the snow house entrance and collapsing the roof and walls on top to form a crude and temporary mausoleum. Once this work is complete, Otto calls the men into the tent and suggests they pray together for God’s mercy in their present distress and for the souls of the recently deceased. A few kneel and bow their heads; others unfurl themselves lengthways or crouch cross-legged, yawning and picking at themselves like apes. Otto closes his eyes and tilts his chin upwards.

“Oh dearest Lord,” he starts, “help us to understand Your purposes and Your mercy. Preserve us now from the grave sin of despair.”

As he speaks, a jury-rigged blubber lamp is still burning at the center of the tent. A curlicue of black smoke twists up from it and meltwater drips off the canvas where the heat has risen and touched the half-inch inner layer of ice.

“Let us not give in to evil,” Otto continues, “but give us faith in the workings of Your Providence even in this time of our confusion and suffering. Let us remember that Your Love created this world and Your Love sustains it still at every moment.”

Webster the blacksmith coughs loudly, then leans his head out of the tent and spits into the snow. McKendrick, who is on his knees and trembling, begins to weep softly and so does the cook and one of the Shetlanders. Sumner, who is light-headed and nauseous from a combination of fear and hunger, tries to concentrate on the question of the manacles. Since Drax could not have committed three murders with his wrists and ankles chained together, he must have freed himself beforehand, he thinks, but how could he do so? Did the Yaks assist him? Did Cavendish? Why would anyone wish to help a man like Drax escape? And if they did help him, why did they all three end up dead?

“Guard and direct the spirits of those who have just died,” Otto says. “Protect them as they travel through the other realms of time and space. And help us remember always that we are a part of Your greater mystery, that You are never absent, that even if we fail to see You, or if we mistake Your presence for some other lesser thing, You are still there with us. Thank you, Lord, Amen.”

The amens come back to him in ragged, grumbling chorus. Otto opens his eyes and looks about as though surprised at where he finds himself. He suggests they sing a hymn, but before he can begin, he is interrupted by Webster. The blacksmith appears angry. His dark eyes are filled with a bitter eagerness.

“We’ve had the Devil hisself living here amongst us,” he shouts out. “The Devil hisself. I seen his footprints out there in the snow just now. The cloven hoof, the mark of Satan. I seen it clear as day.”

“I seen it too,” McKendrick says. “Like the tracks of a pig or a goat, ’cept there int no pigs or goats alive in this forsaken hole.”

“There were no such tracks,” Otto says, “no marks at all except those left by the dogs. The only Devil is the one inside ourselves. Evil is a turning away from good.”

Webster shakes his head.

“That Drax is Satan taken on a fleshly form,” he says. “He int human like you or me, he just looks that way when he chooses to.”

“Henry Drax is not the Devil,” Otto tells him patiently, as if correcting an elementary confusion. “He’s a tormented spirit. I’ve seen him in my dreams. I’ve spoken to him there many times.”

“There’s three dead men outside I’d weigh against your fucking dreaming,” Webster says.

“Whatever he may be, he’s gone now,” Otto says.

“Aye, but where is he gone to? And who says he won’t be coming back betimes?”

Otto shakes his head.

“He won’t come back here. Why would he?”

“The Devil does as he wishes to,” Webster says. “He pleases hisself, I’d say.”

The possibility of Drax’s return sets the men into a hubbub. Otto tries to quiet them, but they ignore him.

“We have to leave this place,” Webster tells them all. “We can find the Yaks’ camp and they can take us down to the Yankee whaling station on Blacklead Island. We’ll be safe there.”

“You don’t know where the Yak camp is or how far distant,” Otto says.

“It’s away off to the west somewhere. If we follow the shoreline, we’ll find it soon enough.”

“You’ll die before you get there. You’ll freeze to death for sure.”

“I’ve had about my fill of taking other men’s advisements,” Webster says. “We followed orders since we left from Hull, and it’s that has brought us to this sorry fucking pass.”

Otto looks to Sumner, and Sumner thinks a moment.

“You’ll have no tent,” he tells him, “no furs or skins to wear. There are no roads or tracks of any kind here, no landmarks any of us recognize, so even if the camp is close you may not find it ever. You might survive one night out in the open air, but for sure you won’t survive two.”

“Those as want to stay in this accursed place can stay,” Webster says. “But I int staying an hour longer here.”

He stands up and starts gathering together his possessions. His face is stiff and pale, his movements jerky and enraged. The others sit and watch him, then McKendrick, the cook, and the Shetlander stand up too. McKendrick’s sunken cheeks are still wet with tears. He has open sores on his face and neck from his time down in the hold. The cook is shivering like an animal in distress. Otto tells them to delay, to eat dinner in the tent tonight and then leave at first light if they must, but they take no notice. When he presses them, they raise their fists against him and Webster pledges he will knock down any man who seeks to stand in their way.

The four men depart shortly afterwards, without ceremony or extended farewell. Sumner gives them each their share of the frozen seal meat, and Otto hands Webster a rifle and a handful of cartridges. They shake hands quickly but neither party attempts to speak or soften the dread implications of their leaving. As they watch them walk away, their dark outlines shrinking into the general blankness, Sumner turns to Otto.

“If Henry Drax isn’t the Devil, I can’t claim to know just what he is. If there’s a word been coined for a man like him, I don’t believe I’ve learned it.”

“Nor will you learn it,” Otto says, “not from any human book, at least. A fellow like him won’t be caged in or fixed by words.”

“By what then?”

“Faith alone.”

Sumner shakes his head and laughs unhappily.

“You dreamt we’d die, and now it’s coming true,” he says. “It’s getting colder every day, and we have three weeks’ food at most and no hope of help or rescue. Those four bastards just gone are good as dead already.”

“Miracles occur. If great evil exists, why not great good the same?”

“Signs and fucking wonders,” Sumner says. “Is that the best that you can offer me?”

“I don’t offer you anything at all,” Otto answers calmly. “It’s not in my power to do so.”

Sumner shakes his head again. The three remaining men have retreated into the tent for warmth. It is too cold to linger outside for long, but he cannot bear the thought of returning to their dreary, hopeless company, so instead he sets off walking east, past Cavendish’s new-dug grave and out onto the frozen bay. The sea ice has been cracked by winds, buckled, and then refrozen into a rubbled landscape of crazed and tilted blocks fissured and motionless. Black mountains, gargantuan and sumptuous, rise off in the distance. The dangling sky is the color of milky quartz. He walks until he is breathless and his face and feet are numb, and then turns about. The wind is blowing against him as he begins to walk back. He feels it seeping through his layers of clothing, nudging and chilling his chest, groin, and thighs. He thinks of Webster and the others walking west and feels suddenly sickened and wretched at his core. He stops, groans, then leans over and vomits out gobbets of half-digested seal meat onto the frozen snow beneath. He feels a sharp pain like a lance jabbing in his stomach and releases an involuntary squirt of shit into his trousers. For a moment, he cannot breathe at all. He closes his eyes and waits, and the feeling passes. The sweat is frozen on his brow, and his beard is hard now with saliva and bile and fragments of tooth-ground meat. He looks up at the snow-packed sky and opens wide his mouth, but no sounds or words come out of it, and, after a short while longer, he closes it again and walks on silently.

* * *

They divide up evenly the scanty rations that remain and allow each man to cook and eat them as and when he pleases. They take turns to feed and tend the fitful blubber lamp. The remaining rifle lies near the entrance of the tent for anyone who wishes to hunt with it, but although they pass to and fro to shit and piss and bring back snow to melt for water, no one picks it up. There is no one in command any longer: Otto’s authority has gone, and Sumner’s role as surgeon, without his medicines, means nothing. They sit and wait. They sleep and play cards. They tell themselves that Webster and the others will send help, or that the Yaks themselves will surely come out searching for the two who are dead. But no one arrives, and nothing changes. The only book they have is Otto’s Bible and Sumner refuses to read from it. He cannot bear its certainties, its rhetoric, its all-too-easy hope. Instead, he silently recites The Iliad. Whole sections return to him at night, unbidden, near-complete, and in the morning, he tells them over line by line. When the other men see him mumbling to himself like that they assume he is at prayer, and he doesn’t seek to disabuse them since this is as close to honest prayer as he is ever likely to come.

A week after the departure of Webster and the others, a fierce storm blows in off the bay, and the tent is lifted away from its moorings and ripped along one seam. They spend a wretched, bone-chilled night clustered together gripping the sagged and flapping remnants, and in the morning, as the weather clears, they commence, glumly, to make what repairs they can. With his jackknife, Otto whittles and bores some rough needles out of seal bone, hands them to the men, then commences pulling lines of thread from the frayed cuffs of one of the blankets. Sumner, stiff and dazed from lack of sleep, walks off in search of rocks suitable for reanchoring the edges of the tent. The wind is bitter and blustery, and in places he has to wade through thigh-deep drifts of snow. As he passes by the tip of the headland, with the rough ice stretching out before him and the wind whipping crystalline spindrift from its angled peaks, he notices Cavendish’s gravesite in a state of ghastly disarray. The covering stones have been scattered and the corpse itself has been half-consumed by animals. All that is left is a grotesque and bloody gallimaufry of bones, sinew, and innards. Pieces of shredded undergarment are strewn about haphazardly. The right foot, gnawed off above the ankle but with toes intact, lies off to one side. The head is missing. Sumner comes closer and slowly crouches down. He takes his knife from his pocket and levers out a rib from the frozen mass. He pokes and peers at it awhile, touches its broken end with his fingertip, then looks off into the white distance.

When he gets back to the tent, he takes Otto to one side and explains what he has just seen. They talk together for a while, Sumner points, Otto crosses himself, then they walk across to where the snow house used to be and begin digging down into the icy ruins with their bare hands. When they reach the stiff and frozen bodies of the two Yaks, they pull them free and strip off the remains of their sealskin undergarments. Lifting the bodies up by the heels like wheelbarrows, they drag them farther away from the tent. When they judge the distance and angle is right, they place them down again. They are panting from the effort of the pull, and steam is rising up from their heads and faces. They stand talking awhile longer and then walk back to the ramshackle tent. Sumner loads the rifle, then explains to the other men that there is a hungry bear somewhere out on the ice and the dead Yaks are bait for it.

“There’s enough good meat on a beast like that to last the five of us a month or more,” he says. “And we can use the hide for extra clothing.”

The men look back at him, empty-eyed, indifferent, strained beyond their limits. When he suggests they share the effort — that each man take the rifle for two hours at a time and keep a watch out for the bear while the others rest or repair the tent — they shake their heads.

“Dead Yaks int good bait for a bear,” they tell him, with a sureness which suggests they have tried such a thing before and found it disappointing. “Such a plan won’t work.”

“Help me anyway,” he says. “What harm can it do?”

They turn away and begin to deal out the cards: one, one, one; two, two, two; three, three, three.

“A cockeyed plan like that won’t work,” they say again, as if their gloomful confidence itself provides them comfort. “Not now, not ever.”

He sits at one side of the tent with the loaded rifle at his feet and peers out through a spy hole cut into the gray canvas. Once, while he is watching, a rook comes down and settles on the forehead of the elder Yak, pecks briefly at the matted tanglement of his frozen hair, and then extends its wings and jerks upwards and away. Sumner considers firing at it, but saves his powder. He is patient, hopeful. He is sure the bear is close. Perhaps it is asleep after its recent feasting, but when it wakes it will be hungry again. It will sniff the air and remember the treasures nearby. As it gets darker, Sumner hands the rifle across to Otto. He cuts a two-inch cube of seal meat from his cache of provender, skewers it on the point of his knife, and holds it over the blubber lamp to cook. The other three, without pausing from their endless game of euchre, observe him carefully. When he has eaten he lies down and covers himself.

After what seems like barely a moment, Otto nudges him awake again. There is ice on the outside of his blanket where the moisture from his breath has seeped through its weft. Otto tells him there is still no sign of any bear. Sumner shuffles across to the spy hole and looks out again. The moon is gibbous, the arcing sky garrulous with stars. The two dead bodies lie just as they were, exposed and recumbent, like the eerie gisants of a long-forgotten dynasty. Sumner props himself against the rifle and wills the bear to come to him. He tries to picture its arrival, its slow-footed emergence from the murk. He imagines its curiosity, its wariness: the smell of dead flesh pulling it forwards, a sense of strangeness, foreignness, holding it back.

He falls asleep while seated. He dreams of trout fishing on Bilberry Lough: it is summer and he is wearing shirtsleeves and a boater, above and below him is a blue expanse of sky and water, and all around the lake is edged with elms and oak. He is empty-headed, happy. When he wakes, he sees movement in the distance. He wonders if it is the wind against the snow or if the ice is shifting out in the bay, but then he sees the bear, starkly white against the ashen darkness. He watches it approach the dead bodies, moving, low-headed and rhythmical, without eagerness or urgency. He pushes the tent flap slowly to one side with one hand, checks the percussion cap, cocks the rifle, and raises it partway up to his shoulder. The bear is tall and broad but spindle-shanked and gaunt around the ribs. He watches it sniff at the two bodies, then raise its paw and place it atop the chest of the elder. No one else is awake. Otto is snoring softly. Sumner kneels. He rests his left elbow on his knee and presses the rifle stock into the softness of his right shoulder. He raises the sight and looks along the barrel. The bear is a rag of whiteness in the larger dark. He breathes in once, exhales, then fires. The bullet misses the head but hits high on the shoulder. Sumner grabs the bag of cartridges and rushes out of the tent. The snow is deep and uneven and he stumbles twice, then rights himself. When he reaches the bodies he sees a large patch of blood and then a spattered trail leading onward. The bear is nearly a quarter mile ahead now, running lopsidedly, favoring the right foreleg, as if the left is maimed or numb. Sumner runs after it. He is sure it cannot escape, that soon it will either collapse and die or turn around to fight.

Away to the east, the sky is faintly whitening. Narrow pearlescent fissures open in the dark ranks of close-packed cloud; the taut and featureless horizon turns gray, then brown, then blue. As he reaches the tip of the headland, Sumner’s lungs and gullet are aching from the cold; he is panting, and the blood is thrumming in his ears. The bear passes the desecrated gravesite without pause and then veers north out onto the ice field. Sumner loses sight of it briefly, then sees it again emerging from behind the heaped-up rubble of a pressure ridge. He clambers after, up and over, slipping and scrambling as he goes, dropping his rifle, then picking it up again. He follows the deep-set tracks, the blood spots. His leg aches, and his heart is thumping, but he tells himself it is a matter of time only, that every minute that passes weakens the bear a little more. He wades on through the snow. On either side, high, hard-frozen shards rear up like the pitched roofs of a half-drowned village. Grainy shadows gather in their lee, then spill out sideways.

The bear, despite the wound, moves steadily and surely, as though set on a course plotted long before. The sky is filled by narrow rolls of cloud, gray and brown on top, gilded below by the breaching sun. They move on, man and animal in primitive procession, through a landscape so smashed up and uneven, it might have been constructed by a simpleton from the shattered pieces of some previous intactness. After an hour, the ice flattens into a mile-wide plain, its surface gently ribbed like the palate of a hound. Halfway across, as if suddenly aware of its new environment, the bear slows, then stops and turns about. Sumner can see the smear of red blazoned on its flank and the gouts of steam rising from its muzzle. After a moment’s pause, he takes a waxed paper cartridge from his pocket, bites off the end, and pours the black powder into the bore of the rifle; he pushes the ball end of the cartridge in also, tears off the excess paper, and presses it home with the ramrod. His hands are trembling as he does this. He is dripping sweat, and he can feel his lungs wheezing and roaring inside his chest like bellows in an iron forge. He fumbles in his pocket for a percussion cap, finds one and fits it over the steel nipple. He paces forwards slowly until the gap between them is no more than three hundred feet, then lowers himself down onto the ridged ice. He feels its coldness against his stomach and thighs. His head is wreathed in steam. The bear watches carefully but does nothing. Its flanks are heaving. Strings of drool are dripping down from its jaw. Sumner raises and adjusts the sights, cocks the hammer, and, remembering the previous shot, aims a foot to the left. He blinks the sweat away from his eyes, squints, and pulls the trigger. There is the sharp crack of the percussion cap exploding but no recoil. The bear snorts at the sudden noise, then wheels about and starts to run again. Scuds of snow spume out from under it. Sumner, cursing the misfire, scrambles to his feet, tosses the old percussion cap away, and fits another one. He steadies himself, takes aim again, and shoots, but the bear is too far gone and the shot falls shy. He watches it awhile, then re-shoulders the rifle and begins to follow after.