The North Water (22 page)

“You really think all this is His doing? The murders? The wrecks? The drownings?”

“I know it must be someone's,” Otto says. “And if not the Lord, who else?”

While it burns, the bonfire elevates the crewmen's spirits; its startling brightness gives them hope. As they watch it rage and fork and spit out sparks, they feel sure that somewhere out there other men are also watching, that boats will soon be lowered, help dispatched. They throw the last fragments of wood on the raucous blaze and wait expectantly for their rescuers to arrive. They smoke their pipes and squint eagerly out into the murky distance. Their talk is of women and children, of houses and fields they might still live to see again. Every minute, as the flames gradually reduce and daylight increases around them, they anticipate a boat, but none appears. After an hour more of fruitless waiting, they begin to feel their optimism curdle, and something rank and bitter take its place. Without a ship to shelter in, without enough firewood and food, how can anyone live through the winter in a place like this one? When Cavendish walks down from his seat on the cliff, holding the closed telescope in one hand and a rifle in the other, his expression remote, disgraceful, his eyes turned away, they know for certain that the plan has failed.

“Where are the boats?” someone shouts to him. “Why don't they come?”

Cavendish ignores the questions. He goes inside the tent and starts counting up their remaining provisions. Even reducing everyone to half rations, two pounds of bread a week and the same of salt meat, there is barely enough to last past Christmas. He shows Otto, then calls the remaining crewmen together and explains that they will need to hunt for their food if they want to survive until the spring. Seals will do, he says, foxes, loons, auks, any kind of bird. As he speaks, it starts to snow outside and the wind picks up and shakes the canvas walls like a prelibation of the coming winter. No one answers him, and no one volunteers to hunt. They look back at him silently, and when he has finished they curl up in their blankets and drift to sleep, or sit about playing euchre with a pack of cards so ancient, limp, and filthy, they might have been cut from the rags of a lazar.

The snow falls steadily outside for the remainder of the day: heavy, wet flakes that sag the tent and clump like barnacles against the remaining whaleboat's upturned hull. Sumner is racked and shuddering; his bones ache and his eyeballs itch and throb. He cannot sleep or piss although the desire for both is fierce within him. As he lies there, immobile, garbled fragments of
The Iliad
pass through his beleaguered mind—the black ships, the broken barricade, Apollo as a vulture, Zeus seated on a cloud. When he leaves the tent to shit, it is dark outside and the air is bitter cold. He crouches, pulls apart his raddled arse cheeks, and lets the hot, green liquid sluice out from him. The moon's light is blurred by lines of cloud; snow sweeps across the outstretched bay, gathering on the extant floes and dissolving down into the black waters between. The cold air clamps and shrivels his bollocks. Sumner refastens his britches, turns, and sees, fifty yards away along the gravel shore, a bear.

The bear's sharp, snakelike head is upraised; its broad body, heavy-shouldered and vast across the withers, stands fixed and certain. Sumner, shielding his eyes from the falling snow, takes a slow step forwards, then stops. The bear is unconcerned. It sniffs the ground, then turns in a slow pacing circle, ending where it began. Sumner stands and watches. The bear comes closer, but he doesn't move away. He can see the texture of its coat now, the dark semi-quadrants of its claws against the snow. The bear yawns once, bares his fangs, and then, without warning or obvious purpose, rears upwards on its hind limbs like a circus animal and dangles for a moment, suspended like a limestone obelisk against the pelting, moon-stained sky.

From behind him, blowing down off the mud-brown cliffs, Sumner hears a sudden uprearing bellow, a vast symphonic howl, pained, primeval, yet human nonetheless, a cry beyond words and language it seems to him, choral, chthonic, like the conjoined voices of the damned. Filled with a moment's terror, he turns around to look, but there is nothing there except the falling snow, the night, and the enormous, empty land off to the west, scarred and unimaginable, wrapping like bark around the planet's darkened bole. The bear stays poised upright a moment longer, then flops down onto its front paws, swivels, and begins, implacably and without dispatch, to walk away.

 

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.