The North Water(55)
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.