The North Water(24)
Cavendish through his spyglass spots a trailing cub.
“Mother and child,” he says. “Look see.”
He hands the glass to Drax.
“That babe’s worth twenty pounds alive,” he says. “We can skin the mother.”
The four men discuss finances for a minute and then, having reached a satisfactory agreement, they pull slowly towards the floe. When they are fifty yards away, they stop rowing and steady the boat. Cavendish, with his knees braced against the bows, lines up his shot.
“I’ve got a guinea in my locker says I’ll put one plumb in her eyeball,” he whispers. “Who’ll match it, now?”
“If you’ve got a guinea in your locker, then my cock’s a cunt,” one of the men retorts.
Cavendish snickers.
“Now, now,” he says. “Now, now.”
“Put it in the heart,” Drax says.
“The heart it is,” Cavendish nods, “and here we go.”
He scowls along the barrel one more time, then shoots. The bullet hits the bear high on the rump. There is a squirt of blood and a roar.
“Fuck,” Cavendish says, looking suspiciously at the rifle. “The sight must be skewed.”
The bear is circling wildly now, shaking its withers, howling and biting at the air as if fending off an imaginary foe.
“Shoot her again,” Drax says, “before she runs.”
Before Cavendish can reload, the bear sees them. Instead of running, she pauses a moment, as if thinking what to do, then drops off the ice edge and disappears into the sea. The cub follows her.
The men row forwards, scanning the surface, waiting for the two bears to rise. Cavendish has his rifle at the ready; Drax is holding a looped rope to snickle the cub.
“She could have gone back under that ice,” Cavendish says. “There are cracks and holes aplenty.”
Drax nods.
“It’s the babe I want,” he says. “That babe’s worth twenty pounds easy. I know a fellow at the zoo.”
They circle slowly. The wind drops off, and the air about them settles. Drax snorts, then spits. Cavendish resists the urge to whistle. Nothing moves, there is silence all around, then, only a yard off the boat’s stern, the she-bear’s head, like the pale prototype of some archaic undersea god, rises up out of the dark waters. There is a moment of wild commotion, scrambling, shouting, cursing, then Cavendish takes aim and shoots again. The bullet hums past the ear of one of the oarsmen and slaps into the bear’s chest. The bear rears up shrieking. Its enormous clawed feet, broad and ragged as tree stumps, crash down on the whaleboat’s gunwales, raking and shredding the planks in a frenzied bid for purchase. The boat pitches wildly downwards and seems set to capsize. Cavendish is thrown forwards, dropping his rifle, and one of the oarsmen is tossed overboard.
Drax pushes Cavendish aside and takes an eight-inch boat spade from the side rack. The bear, giving up on the boat, lunges for the thrashing oarsman. She clamps onto his elbow with her teeth, and then, with one dismissive shake of her enormous neck, rips away most of his right arm. Drax, standing upright in the still-rolling whaleboat, lifts up the boat spade and plunges its chisel edge hard down into the bear’s back. He feels the moment of resistance and then the inevitable and irretrievable give as the bear’s spine is split asunder by the milled steel edge. He pulls the spade out and brings it down again, and then again, stabbing deeper with each thrust. With the third blow, he pierces the bear’s heart and a great purple gout of blood comes steaming to the surface and spreads like India ink across her ragged white coat. The air is filled with a fetid blast of butchery and excrement. Drax feels pleasure at this work, arousal, a craftsman’s sense of pride. Death, he believes, is a kind of making, a kind of building up. What was one thing, he thinks, is become something else.
The mutilated oarsman after some moments of screaming has passed out from his pain and is beginning to sink. The bloody remnants of his lost arm still depend from the dead bear’s tusks. Cavendish gets the boat hook and drags him back on board. They cut off a length of whale line and tourniquet his stump.
“That’s what I call an almighty fuckup,” Cavendish says.
“We still have the babe,” Drax says, pointing. “That’s twenty pounds right there.”
The bear cub is swimming beside his mother’s corpse, mewing and nudging the body with his nose.
“A man’s lost his fucking arm,” Cavendish says.
Drax takes his looped rope and, using the boat hook, slips it over the bear cub’s head and pulls it tight. They bore a hole in the dead she-bear’s jaw, run a cord through the hole, and lash the other end of the cord to the bollard. It is a slow, hard pull back to the ship and before they get there, the oarsman expires from his injuries.
“I’ve heard of such a thing,” Cavendish says. “But never seen it happen ere now.”
“If you could shoot straight, he’d still be living,” Drax says.
“I put two solid bullets into her, and she still had strength enough to take off a man’s arm. What kind of bear is that, I ask you?”
“A bear is a bear,” Drax says.
Cavendish shakes his head and sniffs.
“A bear is a fucking bear,” he echoes, as though the thought had not occurred to him before.
When they get back to the Volunteer they attach the dead bear to a block and tackle and haul her up out of the water until she is suspended over the deck, dangling, shabby and lifeless, from the yardarm drooling blood. Still down in the water, separated from his parent now, the cub becomes enraged, swimming hither and thither in a fierce, wild-eyed frenzy, snapping at the boat hook and pulling back against the rope collar. Drax, on his feet in the whaleboat, calls for an empty blubber cask and, with the help of Cavendish, tugs and prods the bear cub into it. The others toss down a net and haul the cask, filled now with a screaming, flailing bear cub, up onto the deck. Brownlee watches from the afterdeck as the cub tries, repeatedly, to escape out of the upright cask and Drax, armed with a stave, prods him down again.