The North Water(70)

They sleep, all together, on a platform built up of snow and covered over with branches and hides. There are no distinctions or barriers between them, no attempt to create privacy or hierarchy or enclosure of any kind. They are like cattle, he thinks, lying together in a cattle shed. Sometime in the night, he wakes and hears two people fucking. The noises they make suggest not pleasure or release but a kind of unwilling and guttural need. In the morning, he is woken early and given water by Punnie, one of Urgang’s two wives—a square-shouldered, stocky woman with a broad face and a fierce expression. Urgang and Merok are already outside preparing the sledge for the hunting. When he goes to join them, he notices they are quieter and less boisterous than before, and he guesses they are nervous. Probably they have boasted wildly about the white man’s magical powers, and they are wondering if they have said too much.

When everything is ready, Sumner gets onto the sledge again and they drive it out onto the sea ice. They track along the coastline for several miles before stopping at a place which seems to Sumner no different from the hundred others they have already seen and passed without pausing. They take the spears off the sledge and tip the sledge over, jamming it hard down into the snow to prevent the dogs pulling it away, then they unharness one of the dogs and let it loose to sniff around for a breathing hole. Sumner watches them and follows after, but they pay him no attention and he wonders after a while if they have already discounted him, whether something he has done or said already has made them doubt his supernatural influence. When the dog starts circling, then barking, Merok grabs it by the mane and pulls it away. Urgang gestures for Sumner to stay where he is; then, holding the spear upright in one hand like a pilgrim’s staff, he slowly approaches the breathing hole. When he gets close to it, he kneels down and scrapes away the covering of snow with his knife. He peers into the hole, tilts his head to listen, then pushes the snow back on top, closing the gap he has just made. He takes a piece of sealskin from inside his anorak, lays it down on the ice, and stands on top of it. He bends his knees and leans towards the hole with his hands holding the long iron-tipped spear horizontal against his thighs and his body tilted forwards.

Sumner lights his pipe. For a long time, Urgang stands motionless, then suddenly, as if stirred into action by the silent hailing of some mystical and Quakerish inner voice, he straightens up and in one rapid and indivisible flash of movement raises the spear and plunges it down through the loose-packed snow and into the body of the seal that has just risen to breathe. The barbed iron head, with a looped line reeved to it, detaches from the spear shaft. Urgang grips the line with both hands, digs his heels into the snow, and yanks up against the hidden downward thrashings of the wounded seal. As they wrestle each other, spumes of water pulsate upwards through the cleft in the ice. The water is clear at first, then pink, then bright red. When the seal finally dies, a gout of its blood, thick and dark, rises up out of the breathing hole and spatters across the ice at Urgang’s feet. He kneels down and, keeping hold of the line with one hand, takes his knife in the other and chips away at the sides of the hole. Merok runs across and helps to pull the dead seal out onto the surface of the ice. When it is clear, they push the iron spearhead out through the underside of the seal’s body, reattach it to the shaft, and then plug the open wounds with ivory toggles to avoid losing any more of the precious blood. The seal is large, a giant, almost twice as big as the norm. The hunters’ movements as they work around it are urgent and joyful. Sumner senses their elation, but also their wish to subdue it, to ensure that their pleasure does not confuse the purity of this moment. As the three of them walk back to the sledge together across the corrugated surface of the ice, with the dead seal dragging along behind like a sack of bullion, he feels, deep in his chest, as if in answer to an unasked question, the flickering warmth of an unearned victory.

Later, while the two hunters butcher the seal and pass out portions of the meat and blubber to the other families in the camp, the children gather round Sumner where he stands, tugging at his bearskin pantaloons, touching and rubbing themselves against his thighs and knees as if hoping for a share of the good luck he has brought. He tries to shoo them away but they ignore him, and it is only when the women come out of the igloos that they disperse. The size of the seal, it seems, has confirmed his status. They believe he has magic powers, that he can conjure the animals up from the depths and draw them onto the hunters’ spears. He is not a full-blown god, he supposes, but he is a kind of minor saint at least: he assists and intercedes. He thinks of the chromolithograph of Saint Gertrude hung on the parlor wall in William Harper’s house in Castlebar—the golden halo, the quill pen, the sacred heart lying like a holy beetroot on the flat of her outstretched palm. Is this any more absurd or improbable, he wonders, any more sinful even? The priest would have a thing or two to say on the matter, of course, but he hardly cares. The priest is in another world altogether.

Later, under the deer hides, Punnie presses herself up into him, rump against groin. He thinks at first that she is only rearranging herself, that she must be asleep like the others are, but then, when she does it again, he understands what is intended. She is short and thick-limbed, broad in the hips and no longer young. Her square-topped head reaches only up to his chest and her hair smells of dirt and seal grease. When he reaches out to touch her shallow breasts she doesn’t speak or turn around. Now that she is sure he is awake, she lies there waiting for him, the way her husband waited for the seal earlier out on the ice, poised but without expectation, both desirous and cleansed of all desire, like everything and nothing held together in silent balance. He hears her breathing and feels the soft heat her body radiates. She twitches once, then settles again. He thinks of saying something, then realizes there is nothing he can say. They are two creatures coupling. The moment has no greater meaning, no further implications. When he pushes into her, his mind empties out and he feels a purifying surge of inner blankness. He is muscle and bone, blood and sweat and semen, and, as he jerks and jitters to a rapid and inelegant conclusion, he needs and wants to be nothing else.