The North Water(49)
Drax sits back down and smiles at him.
“There int too terribly much to know,” he says. “You int as complicated as you think. But what little there is to know, I’d say I know it well enough.”
Sumner leaves the tent and walks across to one of the whaleboats to check that his medicines and sea chest have been safely stowed for the next day’s journey across the ice. He unfixes the tarpaulin and scans the casks, boxes, and rolled-up bedding squeezed inside. Even after shifting things about and peering into the gaps, he can’t see what he is looking for. He replaces the tarpaulin and is about to go over to the other boat to check there when Cavendish calls to him. He is standing by a pile of rigging and the two severed masts. The bear, asleep in his cask, is lying next to him.
“You need to shoot that fucking bear,” he says, pointing down. “If you do it now you’ll have time enough to skin him before we leave in the morrow.”
“Why not take him with us? There’ll be room enough on the Hastings surely.”
Cavendish shakes his head.
“Too many mouths to feed already,” he says. “And I int about to ask the men to drag that fucker four miles across the ice. They have enough to haul as it is. Here”—he gives him a rifle—“I’d gladly do it myself except I hear you’ve grown fond of the beast.”
Sumner takes the rifle and crouches down to look into the cask.
“I won’t shoot him when he’s sleeping like that. I’ll take him over yonder and let him wander about a little first.”
“Do it howsoever you like,” Cavendish says. “Just so long as he’s gone by morning.”
Sumner attaches a rope to the metal grille, and, with Otto’s assistance, begins to move the cask. When he estimates they are far enough from the edge of the makeshift camp, they stop and Sumner unhooks the latch, kicks the grille open, and retreats. The bear ambles out onto the ice. He is almost twice as large now as when they caught him. He has grown plump from Sumner’s regular morning feedings, and his previously grubby fur is bright and clean. They watch him ambling about, heavy pawed, phlegmatic, sniffing the cask, then nudging it twice with his snout.
“He can’t survive on his own even if we let him go,” Sumner says to Otto. “I’ve spoiled him with feeding. He wouldn’t know how to hunt.”
“Better to shoot him now,” Otto agrees. “I know a furrier in Hull will give you a fair price for the skin.”
Sumner loads the rifle and takes his aim. The bear stops moving and turns sideways, exposing his broad flank, as if offering himself to Sumner as the easiest possible target.
“Just behind the ear is quickest,” Otto says.
Sumner nods, tightens his grip on the stock, and lines up the shot. The bear turns calmly to look at him. His thick white neck, his garnet eye. Sumner wonders for a moment what the bear must be thinking and immediately wishes he hadn’t. He lowers the rifle and hands it to Otto. Otto nods.
“An animal has no soul,” he says. “But some love is possible nonetheless. Not the highest form of love, but still love.”
“Just fucking shoot him,” Sumner says.
Otto checks the rifle, then lowers onto one knee to set himself. Before he can take aim, however, the bear, as if sensing something important has altered, stiffens suddenly, then wheels heavily around and starts running, his broad columnar legs thudding against the ice and his claws kicking up brief clods of loose snow. Otto fires quickly at his retreating hindquarters but misses, and by the time he reloads the bear has disappeared behind a pressure ridge. The two men chase after him but they cannot match the bear’s speed across the ice. They get to the top of the ridge and fire off another hopeful shot, but the distance is already too large and the bear is moving too rapidly. They stand where they are, with the wreck behind them and the snow-clad cordillera ahead, and watch his galloping, rhythmical, whiteness fade gradually into the broader and more static whiteness of the floe.
That night the wind veers from north to west, and a violent storm blows up. One of the makeshift tents is ripped from its moorings, the framework of spars and booms that holds it up collapses, and the men inside, exposed suddenly to frigid blasts of wind and snow, are forced to chase the loose and cartwheeling canvas out across the ice. Eventually, when it snags on a hummock, they wrestle it down and drag it, writhing and flapping, back to the camp. The gale makes repairs impossible, so instead they secure what they can with ropes and ice anchors, and seek shelter in the second tent. Sumner, who cannot sleep because he has no laudanum, helps them drag inside what remains of their dampened bedding and make space on the floor. The noise outside is enormous. The ice is moving again, and Sumner can hear, below the shrill descant of the wind and the rattling and straining of the canvas, an occasional dull and vast concussion as the pack roves and breaches.
Otto and Cavendish venture out to check the safety of the whaleboats and come back shivering and wreathed in snow. The men wrap themselves in blankets and cluster round the feeble heat of a small iron stove up on bricks in the middle of the tent. Sumner, on the fringes, curls up on himself, pulls his cap down over his eyes, and tries to sleep but can’t. He is sure now that the medicine chest containing his supply of opium has been transferred to the Hastings already, that it was included in error, along with his sea chest, in the supplies carried by the first party. One night without opium, he thinks, is easy enough, but if this storm persists and they are forced to stay on the ice a second night, he will begin to sicken. He curses himself for not paying closer attention to his necessaries, and he curses Jones for not being more careful about what was packed in the boats. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine he is elsewhere, not Delhi this time but Belfast, sitting in Kennedy’s drinking whiskey, rowing on the Lagan, or in the dissecting rooms with Sweeney and Mulcaire, smoking cheap shag and gabbing about the girls. He falls, after a while, into a murky restless kind of drowse, not fully asleep but not awake either. The rest of the men coagulate into a dark and snoring heap beside him, the collective warmth of their pressed-together bodies clinging to them briefly, then dissipating upwards in the chill and swirling air.