The North Water(25)

“Lower the mother’s body,” Brownlee calls out. “That’s the only way to quiet the beast.”

Flat out on the deck, a hillock of bloodied fur, the she-bear steams like the gargantuan centerpiece of some barely imaginable banquet. Brownlee kicks over the cask, and the cub scurries out, his claws scrabbling and scraping on the wooden deck. There is a moment of panicked swiveling and disorientation (men, laughing, scramble up the rigging to escape), but then he sees his mother’s body and rushes to it. He nudges its flank with his nose and starts to helplessly lick the smeared and bloodied fur. Brownlee watches. The cub whimpers, sniffs, then settles itself in the lee of the mother’s corpse, flank to flank.

“That cub’s worth twenty pounds,” Drax says. “I know a man at the zoo.”

Brownlee looks at him.

“The blacksmith will rivet you a grille so you can keep him in the cask,” he says. “More likely than not he will die before we get home, but, if not, every penny he fetches goes to the dead man’s people.”

Drax stares back at Brownlee for a moment as if readying himself to disagree, then nods and turns aside.

Later, after the dead oarsman has been stitched up in sailcloth and slid, with gruff and minimal ceremony, over the side, Cavendish skins the she-bear with a hatchet and a flensing knife. The cub, secured now in its cask, watches on, trembling, as Cavendish hacks, cuts, and tugs away.

“Can a bear be eaten?” Sumner asks him.

Cavendish shakes his head.

“Bear meat is foul-tasting, and the liver is downright poisonous. All that a bear is truly good for is the skin.”

“For ornament then?”

“Some rich man’s drawing room. It would have been better for the price if Drax had been less eager with the boat spade, but I suspect the gash can be repaired.”

“And the cub will be sold to the zoological gardens if it lives?”

Cavendish nods.

“A full-grown bear is a sight of fearsome beauty. People will pay a ha’penny a time to see a full-grown bear and think it cheap at that price.”

Sumner crouches down and peers into the darkness of the cask.

“This one might die of heartbreak before we get him home,” he says.

Cavendish shrugs and pauses from his work. He looks back at Sumner and grins. His arms are dyed bright red up to the elbows and his waistcoat and trousers are stippled with gore.

“He will forget the dead one soon enough,” he says. “Affection is a passing thing. A beast is no different from a person in that regard.”





CHAPTER NINE

They come to him with wounds and bruises, headaches, ulcers, hemorrhoids, stomachaches, and swollen testicles. He gives them poultices and plasters, ointments and balms: Epsom salts, calamine, ipecac. If nothing else works, he bleeds or blisters them, he induces painful vomiting, explosive diarrhea. They are grateful for these attentions, these signs of care, even when he is causing them discomfort or worse. They believe he is an educated man and that he must, therefore, know what he is about. They have a kind of faith in him—foolish and primitive perhaps, but real.

To Sumner, the men who come to him are bodies only: legs, arms, torsos, heads. Their flesh forms the front and rear of his concern. Towards the rest of them—their moral characters, their souls—he remains solidly indifferent. It is not his task, he thinks, to educate or move them towards virtue, nor is it his task to judge, soothe, or befriend them. He is a medical man, not a priest or a magistrate or a spouse. He will heal their lesions, remedy, where it is possible, their maladies and disease, but beyond that they have no call on him, and he, reduced in spirits as he currently is, has no comforts available to give.

One evening, after supper has concluded, Sumner is visited in his cabin by one of the ship’s boys. His name is Joseph Hannah. He is thirteen years old, slightly built with dark hair, a broad, pale brow, and gloomy, sunken eyes. Sumner has noticed him before and remembers his name. He looks, as the ship’s boys do, grubby and disarranged, and he appears, as he stands in the doorway, to be suffering from an attack of shyness. He is twisting his cap in his hands and wincing every now and then, as if even the thought of addressing the surgeon is painful.

“Do you wish to speak to me, Joseph Hannah?” Sumner asks him. “Are you feeling ill?”

The boy nods twice and blinks before responding.

“My stomach is bad,” he confesses.

Sumner, who is seated at the narrow fold-down shelf which serves him as a desk, gets to his feet and beckons the boy forwards.

“When did this problem begin?” Sumner asks him.

“Yesterday night.”

“And can you describe the pain to me?”

Joseph frowns and looks perplexed.

“How does it feel?” Sumner asks.

“It hurts me,” he says. “It hurts me a good deal.”

Sumner nods and scratches the dark nub of frostbitten tissue at the end of his nose.

“Climb onto the bunk,” he says. “I will examine you there.”

Joseph doesn’t move. He looks down at his feet and shudders slightly.

“The examination is a simple one,” Sumner explains. “I just need to check for the source of the pain.”

“My stomach is bad,” Joseph says, looking up again. “I need a dose of pepperine.”