The North Water

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The stranger is covered in blood, drenched and laved in it from head to foot. He resembles a skinned seal or a stillborn child newly pushed from his mother’s womb. He is breathing, just, but his blood-caked eyes are closed up and he is half-frozen. They drag his body off to the side and leave it there while they skin and butcher the bear, then pack the meat and hide onto the sledge. One hunter takes the stranger’s rifle, and the other takes his knife. They debate whether to kill him where he lies or take him back to the camp. They argue awhile, then agree to take him back. Whatever else he is, they reason, he is a lucky bastard, and a man who is that lucky deserves another chance. They pick him up and lay him on the sledge. He groans a little. They prod and shake him but he doesn’t wake. They push snow into his mouth, but the snow merely melts on his ravaged tongue and drools out onto his chin in pinkened rivulets.

At the winter camp, the wives give him water and warmed seal blood to drink. They wash his face and hands, and pull off his blood-stiffened garments. When word gets out of what has been found, the children come to stare. They peer and prod and giggle. If he opens his eyes, they squeal and run away. Soon the rumors begin. Some say he is an Angakoq, a spirit guide, sent direct from Sedna to help with their hunting, while others say he is an evil ghost, a shabby tupilaq, whose touch will kill and whose very presence causes sickness. The hunters consult the shaman, who advises them that the stranger will not recover until he is returned to his own people. They should take him south, the shaman says, to the new mission on Coutts Inlet. They ask him if the stranger is lucky, as they supposed he must be, and whether any of his luck will pass to them. The shaman tells them that he is indeed lucky, as they supposed, but that his luck is of a particular, alien kind.

They carry him, wrapped in hides and palely shivering, back onto the sledge and take him south, past the frozen lake and the summer hunting grounds, to the mission. The red painted cabin is set on a shallow rise, with the frozen sea below it and the tall mountains behind. There is a large igloo standing adjacent, with a line of black smoke rising through the opening in the roof, and a set of tethered sledge dogs curled asleep in front. The hunters are greeted on their arrival by the priest, a bright-eyed, wiry Englishman with graying hair and beard and an expression earnest but fiercely skeptical. They point to Sumner and explain where they found him and how. When the priest looks doubtful, they trace a map of the shoreline with their fingers in the snow and point to the place. The priest shakes his head.

“A man can’t just appear from nowhere,” he says.

They explain that, in that case, he is most likely an Angakoq and that, until now, he has been living in a house at the bottom of the sea with Sedna the one-eyed goddess and her father, Anguta. At this, the priest becomes irritable. He starts telling them again (as he always does) about Jesus, and then goes into the cabin and brings out the green book. They stand by their sledges and listen to him read in clumsy Inuktitut. The words make a kind of sense, but they find the stories far-fetched and childlike. When he’s finished, they smile and nod.

“Then perhaps he is an angel,” they say.

The priest looks at Sumner and shakes his head.

“He’s not an angel,” he says. “I will guarantee you that.”

They carry Sumner inside and lay him on a cot near the stove. The priest covers him in blankets, then crouches down and tries to shake him awake.

“Who are you?” he says. “What ship do you come from?”

Sumner half-opens one eye but doesn’t attempt to answer. The priest frowns, then leans forwards and examines Sumner’s frost-blackened countenance more closely.

“Deutsch?” he asks him. “Dansk? Ruski? Scots? Which one is it now?”

Sumner gazes back at him for a moment without interest or recognition, then closes his eye again. The priest stays crouching beside him for a moment, then nods and stands up.

“You lie there awhile and rest yourself,” he says, “whoever you are. We’ll talk more after.”

The priest makes coffee for the hunters and asks them more questions. When they have gone, he feeds Sumner brandy with a teaspoon and rubs lard into his frostbite. When Sumner is settled, the priest sits at a table by the window and writes in the green book. There are three other thick leather-bound volumes by his elbow and now and then he opens one, looks into it, and nods. Later, an Esquimaux woman comes in with a pan of stew. She is wearing a deerskin anorak cut longer at the rear and a black wool hat; she has V-shaped blue lines tattooed in parallel across her forehead and the back of both hands. The priest takes two thick white bowls from the shelf above the door and pushes back his papers and books. He spoons half the stew into one bowl and half into the other, then gives the pan back to the woman. The woman points at Sumner and says something in her native language. The priest nods, then says something in reply which makes her smile.

Sumner, lying motionless, smells the hot food. Its soft scent reaches him through the nerveless weft of his exhaustion and indifference. He is not hungry, but he is beginning to remember what hunger might be like, the particular, hopeful nature of its aching. Is he ready to return to all that? Does he want to? Could he? He opens his eyes and looks around: wood, metal, wool, grease; green, black, gray, brown. He turns his head. There is a gray-haired man sitting at a wooden table; on the table there are two bowls of food. The man closes the book he is reading, murmurs out a prayer, then stands up and brings one of the bowls over to where Sumner is lying.

“Will you eat something now?” he asks him. “Here, let me help you.”

The priest kneels down, puts his hand behind Sumner’s head, and raises it up. He scoops a piece of meat onto the spoon and brings the spoon to Sumner’s lips. Sumner blinks. A wave of feeling, dense and unnameable, sweeps through his body.

“I can feed you better if you’d open up your mouth a little,” the priest says. Sumner doesn’t move. He understands what is being asked of him but makes no effort to comply.

“Come on now,” the priest says. He puts the very tip of the metal spoon onto Sumner’s lower lip and gently presses down. Sumner’s mouth opens a little. The priest tips the spoon up quickly, and the meat slides onto Sumner’s lacerated tongue. He lets it sit there a moment.

“Chew,” the priest tells him, making a chewing motion himself and pointing up at his jaw so Sumner is sure to see. “You won’t get any of the goodness out if you don’t chew it right.”

Sumner closes his mouth. He feels the meat’s taste seeping into him. He chews it twice, then swallows. He feels a sharp pain and then a duller ache.

“Good,” the priest says. He scoops another piece of meat and does the same again. Sumner eats three more pieces but lets the fourth drop out onto the floor unchewed. The priest nods, then lowers Sumner’s head back down onto the blanket.

“We’ll try you with a mug of tea later on,” he says. “See how you do with that.”

After two days more, Sumner is able to sit up and eat by himself. The priest helps him into a chair, puts the blanket over his shoulders, and they sit together on two adjacent sides of the small wooden table.

“The men who found you consider you what they call an Angakoq,” the priest explains, “which means ‘wizard’ in the Esquimaux language. They believe that bears have great powers, and that certain, chosen men partake in them. The same thing is true of other animals too, of course — deer and walrus, seals, even certain seabirds, I believe — but in their mythology the bear is the most powerful beast by far. Men who have the bear as their genius are capable of the greatest magic — healing, divination, and so on.”

He glances at the stranger to see if there is any sign that he has understood, but Sumner looks impassively down at his food.

“I’ve seen some of their Angakoqs in action and they’re naught but conjurers and charlatans, of course. They dress themselves up in gruesome masks and other audacious gewgaws; they make a great song and dance in the igloo, but there’s nothing to it at all. It’s nasty heathenish stuff, the crudest kind of superstition, but they know no better and how could they? They’d never seen the Bible before I got here most of them, never heard the gospel preached in earnest.”

Sumner looks up at him briefly but doesn’t pause from his chewing. The priest smiles a little and nods encouragement, but Sumner doesn’t smile back.

“It’s slow and painful work,” the priest goes on. “I’ve been here alone since the early spring. It took months to win their trust — through gifts at first, knives, beads, needles, and so on, and then through acts of kindness, giving help when they needed it, extra clothes or medicines. They are kindly people, but they are very primitive and childlike, almost incapable of abstract thought or any of the higher emotions. The men hunt and the women sew and suckle children, and that forms the limit of their interests and knowledge. They have a kind of metaphysics, true, but it is a crude and self-serving one, and, so far as I can tell, many don’t even believe in it themselves. My task is to help them grow up, you might say, to develop their souls and make them self-aware. That is why I am making the translation of the Bible here.” He nods at the piles of books and papers. “If I can get it right, find the correct words in their language, then they will begin to understand, I’m sure. They are God’s creatures after all, in the end, just as much as you or I.”

The priest spoons up a piece of meat and chews it slowly. Sumner reaches for his mug of tea, picks it up, sips, then puts it back down on the table. For the first time in days he feels the words gathering inside him, dividing, accumulating, taking on strength and form. Soon, he knows, they will begin to rise up his throat and then they will spill out onto his bruised and ulcerated tongue, and then, whether he likes it or not, whether he wants it or not, he will speak.

The priest looks at him.

“Are you ill?” he asks.

Sumner shakes his head. He raises his right hand a moment, then opens his mouth. There is a pause.

“What medicines?” he says.

It comes out in a blurred mumble. The priest looks confused, but then smiles and leans eagerly forwards.

“Say that again,” he says. “I didn’t quite catch…”

“Medicines,” Sumner repeats. “What medicines do you have?”

“Oh, medicine,” the priest says. “Of course, of course.”

He stands up, goes into the storeroom at the rear of the cabin, and comes back with a small medicine chest. He places it down on the table in front of Sumner.

“This is all I have,” he says. “I’ve used the salts a good deal, of course, and the calomel for the native children when they have the flux.”

Sumner opens the box and begins taking out the bottles and jars, peering at the contents and reading the labels. The priest watches him do it.

“Are you a doctor?” he asks. “Is that what you are?”

Sumner ignores the question. He takes out everything in the chest, and then tips the chest upside down to make sure it is truly empty. He looks at the collection arrayed on the tabletop and shakes his head.

“Where’s the laudanum?” he says.

The priest frowns but doesn’t answer.

“The laudanum,” Sumner says again more loudly. “The fucking laudanum, where is it gone to?”

“We have none of that left,” the priest says. “I had one bottle but it’s used up already.”

Sumner closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again, the priest is putting the medicines carefully back into the chest.

“I see you can talk plain English after all,” he says. “For a while there I was fearing you were a Polack or Serb or some other strange denomination.”

Sumner takes up the bowl and spoon, and starts eating again as if nothing has happened.

“Where are you from?” the priest asks him.

“It doesn’t matter so much where I’m from.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t to you, but if a man is being fed and kept warm in a spot where he would likely die if left to fend for himself, you might expect a little courtesy is due to the people who are doing it for him.”

“I’ll pay you back for the food and the fire.”

“And when will you do that, I wonder?”

“In the spring, when the whaling ships come back.”

The priest nods and sits down again. He rakes his fingers through the edges of his gray beard, then scratches the point of his chin with his thumbnail. His cheeks are flushed, but he is struggling to remain charitable in the face of Sumner’s insults.

“Some might call it a kind of miracle what happened to you,” he says, after a pause, “being found preserved alive on the ice inside the body of a dead bear.”

“I wouldn’t call it that myself.”

“Then what would you call it?”

“Perhaps you should be asking the bear.”

The priest stares back at him for a moment, then yaps out a laugh.

“Oh, you’re a clever kind of fellow, I can see that,” he says. “Three days lying over there silent as the grave, not a single word from your lips, and now you’re up and making merry with me.”

“I’ll pay you back for the food and the fire,” Sumner says again flatly, “just as soon as I get another berth.”

“You’re sent here for a reason,” the priest says. “A man doesn’t just appear like that from nowhere. I don’t know what the reason is yet, but I know the Good Lord must have one.”

Sumner shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “Not me. I want no part of that rigmarole.”

* * *

Half a week later, a sledge arrives carrying two hunters the priest has not seen before. He pulls on his anorak and mittens and goes outside. The woman, whose Christianized name is Anna, comes out of the igloo at the same time, greets the men, and offers them food. They talk to her for several minutes, and then, speaking more slowly so he will understand them, they talk to the priest. They explain that they have found a ruined tent a day’s journey away with four dead white men lying frozen within it. They show him, as proof, the items they have salvaged — knives, ropes, a hammer, a grease-stained copy of the Bible. When he asks if they will go back there to retrieve the bodies so they can be buried with the proper rites, they shake their heads and say they must continue on with their hunting. They feed their dogs on walrus meat, then eat in the igloo and rest awhile but do not stay overnight. They try to sell him the Bible before they leave, but when he refuses to trade for it, they hand it to the woman Anna as a gift. After they have gone, Anna comes to the cabin and explains that the hunters told her they also found two dead Esquimaux at the white men’s camp. They were both stripped naked, she reports, and one had been murdered with a knife. She points to her own neck and indicates the location of the wounds.

“One here,” she says, “and the other here.”

Later, when the two of them are alone, and after he has thought on it a little while, the priest tells the hunters’ story to Sumner. He watches his reactions.

“As I understand it, the place they found the bodies is not so very far from where you were found yourself,” he says. “So I’m guessing you will know the men who died; I’m guessing that they were your own shipmates.”

Sumner, who is seated by the stove whittling at a piece of driftwood, scratches his nose and nods once in agreement.

“Were they dead when you left them?” the priest asks him.

“Only the Yaks.”

“And you didn’t think to go back there?”

“I knew that blizzard would have killed them.”

“It didn’t kill you.”

“I’d say it tried its damnedest.”

“Who murdered the Esquimaux?”

“A man named Henry Drax, a harpooner.”

“Why would he do such a thing?”

“Because he wanted their sledge. He wanted to use it to escape.”

Frowning and shaking his head at this extraordinary intelligence, the priest picks up his pipe and fills it with tobacco. His hand is trembling as he does so. Sumner watches him. Charcoal ticks and crackles in the stove beside them.

“He must have traveled north,” the priest says after a pause. “The northern tribes of Baffin Land are a law unto themselves. If he fell amongst them there is no way of us ever finding out where he is or what has become of him. He may be dead, but more likely he has traded the sledge for shelter and is waiting for the spring.”

Sumner nods. He watches the candle’s shimmering ghost hovering in the darkened windowpane. Beyond it, he sees the pale template of the igloo, and, beyond that, the high hard blackness of the mountains. He thinks of Henry Drax still alive somewhere and shudders.

The priest stands up. He takes a bottle of brandy from the cabinet near the door and pours them both a glass.

“And what is your name?”

Sumner looks up at him sharply, then turns back to the driftwood and continues whittling.

“Not Henry Drax,” he says.

“Then what?”

“Sumner. Patrick Sumner from Castlebar.”

“A Mayo man,” the priest says lightly.

“Aye,” he says. “Once upon a time.”

“And what is your history, Patrick?”

“I have none to speak of.”

“Come,” he says, “every man has his history surely.”

Sumner shakes his head.

“Not me,” he says.

* * *

On Sundays, the priest holds Communion in the main room of the cabin. He pushes the table to one end of the room, clears off the books and papers, and puts a linen tablecloth, a crucifix, and two candles in brass candlesticks down in their place. There is a pewter jug and chalice for the wine, and a chipped china plate for the wafers. Anna and her brother attend always and sometimes four or five others come down from the camp nearby. Sumner acts as altar boy. He lights the candles, then blows them out again. He dabs the lip of the chalice with a rag to keep it clean. When required, he even reads the lesson. The whole thing is nonsense, he believes, a crude human circus with the priest as ringmaster and lion tamer combined, but it is easier to go along with it once a week, he thinks, than argue the toss on each separate occasion. What the Esquimaux make of it all, though, he can’t imagine. They stand and kneel as required, even sing the hymns as best they can. He suspects they find it secretly amusing, that it serves them as a form of exotic entertainment in the otherwise dull expanses of winter. When they get back to their igloo, he imagines them laughing at the priest’s solemnity and gaily mimicking his pointless, ponderous gestures.

One Sunday, after the service has concluded and the tiny congregation is standing smoking pipes or sipping mugs of sugared tea, Anna tells the priest that one of the Esquimaux women from the camp has a sickening infant and is asking her for medicine. The priest listens, nods, then goes to the storeroom and selects a bottle of calomel pills from the medicine chest. He gives the woman two of the white pills and tells her to divide them in half and to give the child one-half each morning and keep it tightly swaddled in the meantime. Sumner, who is sitting by the stove in his usual place, watches on but doesn’t speak. When the priest has moved away he stands up and walks over to the Esquimaux woman. He gestures to look at her child. The woman says something to Anna and then, after Anna replies, removes the child from the hood of her anorak and hands it to Sumner. The child’s eyes are dark and sunken, and its hands and feet are cold. When Sumner pinches its cheek, it doesn’t cry or complain. He gives the child back to his mother, then reaches behind the stove and takes a small piece of charcoal from the galvanized bucket. He twists it beneath his boot heel, then licks his index finger and dabs it down into the black powder. He opens up the infant’s mouth and smears the charcoal powder on its tongue, then gets a teaspoon of water and washes it down. The infant turns red, coughs, then swallows. Sumner takes a larger piece of charcoal from the bucket and hands it to Anna.

“Tell her to do what I just did,” he says. “She should do it four times each day, and she should feed the baby as much water as she can in between.”

“And the white pills too?” she says.

Sumner shakes his head.

“Tell her to throw away the pills,” he says. “The pills will make it worse.”

Anna frowns and then looks down at her feet.

“Tell the woman I am an Angakoq,” Sumner says. “Tell her I know a lot more than the priest ever will.”

Anna’s eyes widen. She shakes her head.

“I cannot tell her that,” she says.

“Then tell her she must choose for herself. The pills or the charcoal. It is up to her.”

He turns away, unfolds his pocketknife, and starts up again with the whittling. When Anna tries to speak to him again, he waves her away.

* * *

The two Esquimaux hunters who rescued Sumner return to the mission a week later. Their names are Urgang and Merok. They are ragged, cheerful men both, lank-haired and boyish. Their ancient anoraks are torn and shabby, and their bulbous bearskin trews are darkened in patches by seal grease and baccy juice. On arrival, after tethering the dogs and doing the decencies with Anna and her brother, they draw the priest aside and explain that they want Sumner to come with them on their next hunting trip.

“They don’t need you to hunt,” the priest tells Sumner shortly afterwards. “They just want you to be there. They suspect you have magical powers, and they think the animals will be drawn to you.”

“How long would I be gone?”

The priest goes outside to check.

“They say a week,” he says. “They’re offering you a new set of furs to wear and a fair portion of the catch.”

“Tell them yes,” Sumner says.

The priest nods.

“They’re good-hearted fellows, but crude and backwards, and they speak not a word of English,” he says. “You’ll be able to act as a good example of the civilized virtues while you’re in amongst them.”

Sumner looks at him and laughs.

“I’ll be no such fucking thing,” he says.

The priest shrugs and shakes his head.

“You’re a finer man than you think you are,” he tells him. “You hold your secrets tight, I know that, but I’ve been watching you awhile now.”

Sumner licks his lips and spits into the stove. The blob of khaki phlegm bubbles a moment, then disappears.

“Then I’d thank you to stop watching. What I may or mayn’t be is my business, I think.”

“It’s between you and the Lord, true enough,” the priest replies, “but I hate to see a decent man miscount himself.”

Sumner looks out of the cabin window at the two slovenly-looking Esquimaux and their piebald pack of hounds.

“You should save your good advice for those who need it most,” he says.

“It’s Christ’s advice I’m giving out, not my own. And if there’s a man alive who doesn’t need that, I’ve yet to meet him.”

In the morning, Sumner dons his new suit of clothes and perches himself on top of the hunters’ sledge. They carry him back to their winter campground, a low complex of interlinked igloos with sledges, tent poles, drying frames, and other pieces of wood and bone scattered about on the trampled and piss-marked snow. They are greeted by an eager cluster of women and children and an uproar of barking dogs. Sumner is led into one of the larger igloos and shown a place to seat himself. The igloo is lined, top and bottom, with reindeer hides, and warmed and lit by a soapstone blubber lamp at its center. It is dank and gloomy inside and reeks of old smoke and fish oil. Others follow him in. There is laughter and talking. Sumner fills his pipe bowl and Urgang lights it for him with a taper made of whale skin. The dark-eyed children chew their finger ends and silently stare. Sumner doesn’t speak to anyone or attempt to communicate by glance or gesture. If they believe he is magic, he thinks, then let them. He has no obligation to set them right, to teach them anything at all.

He watches as one of the women heats a metal saucepan full of seal blood over the lamp. When the blood is steaming hot, she removes the pan from the low flame and passes it around. Each person drinks, then passes it on. It is not a rite or ritual, Sumner understands, it is just their way of taking food. When the pan reaches him he shakes his head; when they press it on him he takes it, sniffs, then gives it to the man on his right. They offer him a piece of raw seal liver instead, but he turns it down also. He realizes that he is offending them now; he notices the flickers of sadness and confusion in their eyes, and wonders whether it would be easier, better, to concede. When the pan comes round again, he accepts it and drinks. The taste is not unpleasant, he has eaten worse. It reminds him of an oily and saltless version of oxtail soup. He drinks again to show himself willing, then passes the pan on. He senses their relief, their pleasure that he has accepted their proffered gift, that he has joined them somehow. He doesn’t begrudge these beliefs although he knows they aren’t true. He hasn’t joined them — he is not an Esquimaux any more than he is a Christian or an Irishman or a doctor. He is nothing, and that is a privilege and a joy he is loath to give up. After the eating is finished, they play games and make music. Sumner watches them and even joins in when he is asked to. He throws up a ball made of walrus bone and tries to catch it in a wooden cup; he artlessly mimics their singing. They smile and pound him on the shoulder; they point at him and laugh. He tells himself he is doing it for the new set of furs, for the promised portion of the seal meat, both of which he will give to the priest. He is busy paying his way.

They sleep, all together, on a platform built up of snow and covered over with branches and hides. There are no distinctions or barriers between them, no attempt to create privacy or hierarchy or enclosure of any kind. They are like cattle, he thinks, lying together in a cattle shed. Sometime in the night, he wakes and hears two people fucking. The noises they make suggest not pleasure or release but a kind of unwilling and guttural need. In the morning, he is woken early and given water by Punnie, one of Urgang’s two wives — a square-shouldered, stocky woman with a broad face and a fierce expression. Urgang and Merok are already outside preparing the sledge for the hunting. When he goes to join them, he notices they are quieter and less boisterous than before, and he guesses they are nervous. Probably they have boasted wildly about the white man’s magical powers, and they are wondering if they have said too much.

When everything is ready, Sumner gets onto the sledge again and they drive it out onto the sea ice. They track along the coastline for several miles before stopping at a place which seems to Sumner no different from the hundred others they have already seen and passed without pausing. They take the spears off the sledge and tip the sledge over, jamming it hard down into the snow to prevent the dogs pulling it away, then they unharness one of the dogs and let it loose to sniff around for a breathing hole. Sumner watches them and follows after, but they pay him no attention and he wonders after a while if they have already discounted him, whether something he has done or said already has made them doubt his supernatural influence. When the dog starts circling, then barking, Merok grabs it by the mane and pulls it away. Urgang gestures for Sumner to stay where he is; then, holding the spear upright in one hand like a pilgrim’s staff, he slowly approaches the breathing hole. When he gets close to it, he kneels down and scrapes away the covering of snow with his knife. He peers into the hole, tilts his head to listen, then pushes the snow back on top, closing the gap he has just made. He takes a piece of sealskin from inside his anorak, lays it down on the ice, and stands on top of it. He bends his knees and leans towards the hole with his hands holding the long iron-tipped spear horizontal against his thighs and his body tilted forwards.

Sumner lights his pipe. For a long time, Urgang stands motionless, then suddenly, as if stirred into action by the silent hailing of some mystical and Quakerish inner voice, he straightens up and in one rapid and indivisible flash of movement raises the spear and plunges it down through the loose-packed snow and into the body of the seal that has just risen to breathe. The barbed iron head, with a looped line reeved to it, detaches from the spear shaft. Urgang grips the line with both hands, digs his heels into the snow, and yanks up against the hidden downward thrashings of the wounded seal. As they wrestle each other, spumes of water pulsate upwards through the cleft in the ice. The water is clear at first, then pink, then bright red. When the seal finally dies, a gout of its blood, thick and dark, rises up out of the breathing hole and spatters across the ice at Urgang’s feet. He kneels down and, keeping hold of the line with one hand, takes his knife in the other and chips away at the sides of the hole. Merok runs across and helps to pull the dead seal out onto the surface of the ice. When it is clear, they push the iron spearhead out through the underside of the seal’s body, reattach it to the shaft, and then plug the open wounds with ivory toggles to avoid losing any more of the precious blood. The seal is large, a giant, almost twice as big as the norm. The hunters’ movements as they work around it are urgent and joyful. Sumner senses their elation, but also their wish to subdue it, to ensure that their pleasure does not confuse the purity of this moment. As the three of them walk back to the sledge together across the corrugated surface of the ice, with the dead seal dragging along behind like a sack of bullion, he feels, deep in his chest, as if in answer to an unasked question, the flickering warmth of an unearned victory.

Later, while the two hunters butcher the seal and pass out portions of the meat and blubber to the other families in the camp, the children gather round Sumner where he stands, tugging at his bearskin pantaloons, touching and rubbing themselves against his thighs and knees as if hoping for a share of the good luck he has brought. He tries to shoo them away but they ignore him, and it is only when the women come out of the igloos that they disperse. The size of the seal, it seems, has confirmed his status. They believe he has magic powers, that he can conjure the animals up from the depths and draw them onto the hunters’ spears. He is not a full-blown god, he supposes, but he is a kind of minor saint at least: he assists and intercedes. He thinks of the chromolithograph of Saint Gertrude hung on the parlor wall in William Harper’s house in Castlebar — the golden halo, the quill pen, the sacred heart lying like a holy beetroot on the flat of her outstretched palm. Is this any more absurd or improbable, he wonders, any more sinful even? The priest would have a thing or two to say on the matter, of course, but he hardly cares. The priest is in another world altogether.

Later, under the deer hides, Punnie presses herself up into him, rump against groin. He thinks at first that she is only rearranging herself, that she must be asleep like the others are, but then, when she does it again, he understands what is intended. She is short and thick-limbed, broad in the hips and no longer young. Her square-topped head reaches only up to his chest and her hair smells of dirt and seal grease. When he reaches out to touch her shallow breasts she doesn’t speak or turn around. Now that she is sure he is awake, she lies there waiting for him, the way her husband waited for the seal earlier out on the ice, poised but without expectation, both desirous and cleansed of all desire, like everything and nothing held together in silent balance. He hears her breathing and feels the soft heat her body radiates. She twitches once, then settles again. He thinks of saying something, then realizes there is nothing he can say. They are two creatures coupling. The moment has no greater meaning, no further implications. When he pushes into her, his mind empties out and he feels a purifying surge of inner blankness. He is muscle and bone, blood and sweat and semen, and, as he jerks and jitters to a rapid and inelegant conclusion, he needs and wants to be nothing else.

Each day the hunters go out and catch another seal, and each night, under the deer hides, while the others are sleeping, he couples with Punnie. She keeps her back turned against him always; she neither resists nor encourages. She never speaks. When he is finished she rolls away. When she gives him breakfast in the morning — warm water, raw seal liver — she treats him coolly, and there is no sign that she remembers anything that has occurred between them. He imagines she is acting out of a heathenish model of politesse, and that Urgang himself has encouraged or commanded this. He accepts the offering for what it is: no more or less. After a week, when it is time for him to return to the mission, he decides he will miss the vacancy of the ice and the incomprehensible jabber of the igloo. He has not spoken English since he left the mission, and the thought of the priest sitting in the cabin waiting for him with his books and papers, his opinions and plans and doctrines, fills him with irritation and gloom.

On the final night, instead of moving away when they have finished, Punnie turns back towards him. He sees through the lamp-leavened gloom her blunt and pockmarked face, her dark eyes and small upturned nose, the line of her mouth. She is smiling at him, and her expression is eager and curious. When she opens her lips to speak, he doesn’t realize, at first, what is happening. The words sound to him like noises only, like the low guttural clucks the hunters make when they are soothing their dogs at night, but then, with a shudder of dismay, he understands she is talking to him in a crude but recognizable form of English, that she is trying to say “good-bye.”

“Gud bye,” she says to him, smiling still. “Gud bye.”

He frowns at her, then shakes his head. He feels exposed and sullied by her efforts. Ashamed. It is as if a bright, burning light has been flashed upon the two of them and their pitiful nakedness has been revealed to the world. He wants her to be quiet again, to ignore him now as she has always ignored him before.

“No,” he whispers fiercely back at her. “No more of that. No more.”

* * *

Next day, when he arrives at the mission, it is dark and cold, and the borealis is unwinding across the night sky in peristaltic bands of green and purple, like the loosely coiled innards of a far-fetched mythic beast. Inside the cabin, he finds the priest stretched out on his cot, laid low and complaining of stomach pains. Anna, under the priest’s instruction, has placed a warm poultice on his abdomen and brought him castor oil and jalap from the medicine chest. He is badly bunged up, he explains to Sumner, and may require an enema if there is no movement presently. Sumner makes tea for himself and heats a can of bouillon soup. The priest watches him eat. He asks about the hunting trip, and Sumner tells about the seals and about the feasting.

“You encourage their superstitions then, I see,” the priest says.

“I let them believe what they want to. Who am I to interfere?”

“You do them no service by keeping them in ignorance. They lead a brutish kind of life.”

“I have no better truths to tell them.”

The priest shakes his head, then winces.

“Then what are you exactly?” he says. “If that is the case?”

Sumner shrugs.

“I am tired and hungry,” he tells him. “I am a man who is about to eat his dinner and go to bed.”

In the night the priest has a fierce bout of diarrhea. Sumner is woken by the sounds of loud groans and splattering. The cabin air is dense with the velvet reek of liquid feces. Anna, who has been sleeping curled on the floor, rises to assist. She gives the priest a clean cloth to wipe himself and takes the pot outside to empty. When she comes back inside, she covers him with blankets and helps him drink some water. Sumner watches but doesn’t move or speak. The priest strikes him as robust and healthy for a man of his age, and he assumes the constipation is a result of nothing more than the usual deficiencies of the arctic diet, bereft as it is of plants, vegetable matter, or fruit of any kind. Now that the purgatives have had their effect, Sumner is sure he will be back to his normal self soon enough.

In the morning, the priest declares he is much improved; he breakfasts sitting upright in the bed and asks Anna to carry over his books and papers so he can continue with his scholarly work. Sumner goes outside to say a last farewell to Urgang and Merok, who have spent the night in the igloo. The three of them embrace like old friends. They give him one of the seals, as agreed, but they also offer him one of their old hunting spears as a souvenir. They point at the spear, then at Sumner, then out onto the ice. He understands they mean him to go hunting by himself once they are gone. They laugh, and Sumner nods and smiles at them. He takes the spear and mimes the action of striking a seal through the ice. They cheer and laugh, and then when he does it again they cheer even louder. He realizes they are mocking him a little now to ease their parting, gently putting him in his place before they leave; they are reminding him that although he has magical powers he is a still a white man, and the idea of a white man knowing how to use a spear is comical indeed. He watches as their sledge disappears beyond the granite headland; then he goes back into the cabin. The priest is making notes in his journal. Anna is sweeping up. Sumner shows them the spear. The priest examines it, then passes it to Anna, who declares it is a well-made spear but too old to use.

They have crumbled hardtack and bouillon soup for lunch. The priest eats everything that is in front of him, but then, almost as soon as he has finished, he vomits it out again onto the floor. He stays in the chair for a while, bent over coughing and spitting, then climbs back into the bed and calls for brandy. Sumner goes into the storeroom and takes the bottle of Dover’s Powder from the medicine chest, dissolves a spoonful in water, and gives it to the priest to drink. The priest drinks it, then falls into a doze. When he wakes, he appears pale and complains of a more severe pain in his lower abdomen. Sumner feels his pulse and looks at his tongue, which is furred. He presses his fingertips into the priest’s abdomen. The skin is tense, but there is no sign of a hernia. When he presses just above the line of the ilium, the priest cries out and his body jackknifes. Sumner takes his hand away and looks out of the cabin window — it is snowing outside and the panes are thick with frost.

“If you keep the brandy down, that should help a little,” he says.

“I wish to God I could piss,” the priest says, “but I can barely squeeze out a drop.”

Anna sits by the bed and reads out Saint Paul’s letters to the Corinthians in her quiet and halting English. As the afternoon moves into evening, the priest’s pain worsens and he starts to moan and gasp. Sumner makes up a warm poultice and finds some paregoric in the medicine chest. He tells Anna to continue giving him brandy and the Dover’s Powder, and to use the paregoric whenever the pain gets worse. During the night, the priest wakes up every hour, his eyes bulging, and howls with pain. Sumner, who is asleep at the table, his head resting on his folded arms, jolts awake each time, his heart pounding, and his own guts twisting in sympathy. He goes over to the bed, kneels, and gives him more brandy to drink. As he sips from the glass, the priest grasps onto Sumner’s arm as if scared he might suddenly leave. The priest’s green eyes are wild and rheumy; his lips are crusted, and his hot breath is foul.

In the morning, when they are out of earshot, Anna asks Sumner whether the priest is going to die.

“He has an abscess inside him here,” Sumner explains, pointing to the right side of his belly just above the groin. “Some inner part has ruptured and his belly is filling up with poison.”

“You will save him though,” she says.

“There’s nothing I can do. It’s impossible.”

“You told me you are an Angakoq.”

“We are a thousand miles or more from any hospital, and I have no medicines to speak of.”

She gives him a disbelieving look. Sumner wonders how old this Anna is — eighteen? thirty? It is difficult to judge. All the Esquimaux women have the same leathery brown skin, the same small dark eyes and quizzical expression. A different man would have taken her to his bed, he thinks, but the priest has tutored her to read the Bible and answer back.

“If you can’t save him, then why are you here?” she asks. “What are you for?”

“I’m here by accident. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Everyone died except for you. Why did you live?”

“There is no why,” he says.

She glares at him, then shakes her head and goes back to the priest’s bedside. She kneels down and starts to pray.

After a few more hours, the priest begins having violent shivering fits and his skin turns cold and clammy. His pulse is faint and irregular, and his tongue has a large streak of brown along its center. When Anna tries to give him brandy, he throws it up. Sumner watches for a while, then pulls on his new set of furs and steps outside the cabin; it is bitterly cold and only semilight, but he is glad to escape from the sour stench of mortal illness and the priest’s constant, grating howls of complaint. He walks past the igloo and looks out east across the immense desert of sea ice to the faint white parabola of the far horizon. It is noon, but the stars are visible overhead. There is no sign of life or movement anywhere; everything is still and dark and cold. It is as if the end of the world has already happened, he thinks, as if he is the only man left alive on the frigid earth. For several minutes he stands where he is, listening to the shallow wheeze of his own breathing, feeling the red muscle of his heart gently thudding in his chest; then, remembering himself at last, he turns slowly around and goes back inside.

Anna is laying another poultice on the priest’s belly. She gives him a fierce look but he ignores it. He goes to the medicine chest and takes out a large bottle of ether, a wad of lint, and a lancet. He spends a few minutes sharpening the lancet to an edge with a whetstone. Then he clears the remaining books off the table and wipes it clean with a damp rag. He walks over to the bed and looks down at the priest. The elder man’s skin is waxen and damp, and his eyes are filled with pain. Sumner places his hand on his forehead and then peers into his mouth for a moment.

“Your cecum is abscessed,” he tells him, “or possibly ulcerated — the difference is unimportant. If we had any amount of opium in the medicine chest, that would help, but since we have none at all, the best thing to do is make a cut in your belly here to allow the diseased matter to flow out of you.”

“How do you know such things?”

“Because I’m a surgeon.”

Since he is in too much pain to comment or express surprise, the priest merely nods. He closes his eyes a moment to think, then opens them again.

“So you’ve done the thing before?” he asks.

Sumner shakes his head.

“I’ve neither done it myself nor seen it done. I read about it being performed by a man named Hancock in the Charing Cross hospital in London some years ago. On that occasion, the patient lived.”

“We’re a good way from London,” the priest says.

Sumner nods.

“I’ll do all I can in these conditions, but we’ll need a large amount of luck.”

“You do your best,” the priest says, “and I expect the Lord will take care of the remainder.”

Sumner asks Anna to fetch her brother in from the igloo and, when the brother arrives, he tips some of the ether onto the wad of lint and places it over the priest’s nose and mouth. They remove his clothes, then lift his naked, lolling body off the cot and lay it out on the table. Sumner lights an extra candle and places it on the windowsill to illuminate his work. Anna starts praying and rapidly crossing herself, but Sumner interrupts her pieties and instructs her to stand at the end of the table and apply more ether whenever the priest shows any sign of reviving. The brother, who is tall and has a genial, oafish air, is given a metal bucket and a towel, and told to stand by Sumner’s shoulder and stay alert.

He palpates the abdomen again, feeling its lines of hardness and give. He wonders for a moment if he has made a mistake, if this is a hernia or a tumor rather than an abscess, but then reminds himself why that can’t be true. He tests the sharpness of the lancet against his thumb, then presses the blade’s edge down into the priest’s flesh and makes a lateral cut from the top of his hip bone, halfway to the navel. It takes him several attempts to penetrate the layers of sheath, muscle, and fat and get into the abdomen proper. As he presses deeper, blood wells up and he wipes it away with a cloth and continues cutting. As soon as he pierces the cavity wall, a pint or more of foul and flocculent pus, turbid and pinkish gray, squirts unhindered out of the newly made breach, spattering across the table and coating Sumner’s hands and forearms. The roaring stench of excrement and decay instantly fills the cabin. Anna yelps out in horror and her brother drops the metal bucket. Sumner gasps and jolts backwards. The discharge is fibrinous, bloody, and thick as Cornish cream; it pulses out from the narrow opening like the last twitching apogee of a monstrous ejaculation. Sumner, squinting against the reek, curses, spits onto the floor, then, breathing through his mouth, cleans the muck from his hands and arms, and tells the brother to wipe the table down and throw the soiled rags into the stove. The three of them, working together, tip the priest over onto his side to further speed the drainage. He makes a low moan as they move him. Anna, with shaking hands, reapplies the etherized lint to his face until he settles. Sumner presses down on the skin and muscle around the edges of the wound with his fingertips, pushing out as much of the remaining foulness as he can. It is hard to believe that the priest’s body could contain such an abundance of pus. He is not tall, and, stripped naked as he now is, he appears slight, bony, and almost boyish, yet it gurgles out of him like water from a rock. Sumner presses down and the brother wipes up the outflowings. They press and wipe, press and wipe, until eventually the stinking stream slows, then ceases altogether.

They carry the priest back to the bed and cover him over with blankets and a sheet. Sumner cleans and puts a dressing on the wound, then washes his hands with oil soap and opens the window. The air that rushes in is flecked with snow, odorless and starkly cold. It is dark outside and the wind is whistling in the eaves. He doubts the priest will live more than a day. With an abscess that severe, there is almost certain to be some form of perforation in the gut, he thinks, and once the shit starts leaking out, that is generally the end of it. He gathers the few medicines they have that might relieve or moderate the pain and instructs Anna how and when to use them. He lights his pipe and goes outside to smoke it.

That night, asleep in his own bed, he dreams he is afloat again on the iceless reaches of the North Water. He is alone and drifting in his pal Tommy Gallagher’s leaky old currach, its hull patched and its thwarts smoothed and worn to a shine by usage. He has no oars that he can see, and there is no sign of another vessel, but he doesn’t feel afraid. He spots an iceberg on his larboard side and standing, perched high on one of its ledges, clad in a green tweed suit and brown felt hat from Dames of Temple Bar, is William Harper the surgeon, the man who found him and took him in. He is smiling and waving. When Sumner calls out for him to come down, he laughs as if the very thought of swapping the majestic iceberg for the pathos of the currach is absurd. William Harper’s face appears quite normal, Sumner notices, and he is moving his right arm freely enough. There is no sign of paralysis or injury, no evidence of the hunting accident that drove him to the drink. He has been wholly restored, it seems, and now he is perfect again, entire. Sumner wishes, more than anything, to ask him how this remarkable feat was achieved, what methods were used, but the currach has drifted too far away, he realizes, and his voice is too weak to carry across the water.

In the morning, to his surprise, the priest is still breathing and he looks no worse than he did before. “You’re a tough old fucker, you are,” Sumner says to himself, as he removes the dressing and inspects the wound. “For a man who puts his faith in the life everlasting, it appears you’re awful keen to linger on amidst the toil and strife of this one.” He wipes around the incision with a rag, sniffs the seepage, then throws the old dressing into the bucket to be washed and makes up a new one. As he works, the priest opens his eyes a crack and looks up at him.

“What did you find inside me?” he asks. The voice is grainy and faint, and Sumner has to lean down to hear it.

“Nothing good,” he answers.

“Then best be rid of it, I’d say.”

Sumner nods.

“You try to get your rest now,” he tells him. “And if you need help, just call out for it or raise your hand. I’ll be seated at the table.”

“You’ll be watching over me, will you?”

Sumner shrugs.

“There’s precious little else to do around here until the spring arrives,” he says.

“I thought you might be off hunting seal with your new spear and anorak.”

“I’m not a seal hunter. I don’t have the patience for it.”

The priest smiles, nods, then closes his eyes. He seems to be drifting back to sleep, but then, a minute later, he opens his eyes again and looks up as if remembering something else.

“Why did you lie to me before?” he says.

“I never lied to you. Not once.”

“You’re a strange fellow though, aren’t you? And a source of great mystery to all who know you.”

“I’m a surgeon,” he tells him quietly. “A surgeon now, and that’s the all of it.”

The priest thinks awhile before he speaks again.

“I know you have suffered, Patrick, but you are not alone in that,” he says.

Sumner shakes his head.

“I’ve brought the sufferings on myself, I’d say. I’ve made mistakes aplenty.”

“Show me a man who hasn’t, and I will show you a saint or a great liar. And I haven’t met too many saints in my long lifetime.”

The priest looks at Sumner for a moment and smiles. There are green-gray clots of mucus in both corners of his mouth and his milky eyes look swollen in their sockets. He reaches out his hand, and Sumner holds on to it. It is cool to the touch and almost weightless. The skin is puckered above the joints, and at the fingertips it has the dull sheen of worn leather.

“You should rest,” Sumner tells him again.

“I will rest,” the priest agrees. “That’s what I will do.”