The North Water (18 page)

“Drax is still alive and breathing.”

“He is down in the hold chained to the mainmast, bound hand and foot. He cannot escape. Set your mind at rest.”

“The corporal body is just one way of moving through the world. It's the spirit which truly lives.”

“You think a man like Henry Drax has any spirit worthy of the name?”

Otto nods. He looks, as he usually does, serious, eager, and faintly surprised by the nature of the world around him.

“I've encountered his spirit,” he says. “Met with it in other realms. Sometimes it takes the form of a dark angel, sometimes a Barbary ape.”

“You are a good fellow, Otto, but what you are saying is folly,” Sumner tells him. “We're not in danger anymore. Set your mind at ease and forget the fucking dream.”

*   *   *

During the night they enter Lancaster Sound. There is open water stretching to the south of them, but to the north a granular and monotone landscape of ice boulders and melt pools, sculpted smooth by wind in places but elsewhere cragged, roughened, and heaved upright into sharp-edged moguls by the alternations of the seasons and the dynamisms of temperature and tide. Sumner rises early and, as has become his habit, gathers a bucket of rinds, crusts, and scourings from the galley. He takes a large metal spoon and, crouching by the bear cub's cask, prods a portion of the cold and grease-bound mass between the grille-work. The bear sniffs, gobbles, then bites down fiercely on the empty spoon. Sumner, after twisting the spoon free, feeds him another portion. When the bear has emptied the bucket, Sumner refills it with fresh water and allows him to drink. He then heaves the cask upright, detaches the metal grille and, with a careful quickness born of practice and several previous near calamities, slips a loop of rope around the bear's neck and pulls it taut. He lowers the cask and allows the bear to dash forwards and across the deck, its black claws scarifying the wooden planking. Sumner secures the end of the leash to a nearby cleat and swills out the cask with seawater, chasing the accumulated bear shit out through the forechannels with a broom.

The bear, high-rumped and grimy-yellow at its haunches, growls, then settles itself against the lip of a hatchway. It is watched at a distance by the ship's dog, Katie, a bow-hipped Airedale. Every day for weeks now, dog and bear have rehearsed a similar pantomime of wariness and curiosity, closeness and retreat. The men enjoy this daily spectacle. They egg them on, shout encouragements, jab them forwards with boots and boat hooks. The Airedale is smaller but much lighter on her feet. She dashes forwards, stiffens a moment, then wheels away again, yelping with excitement. Probing and grandly tentative, the bear swaggers after her, its wedge-shaped head, tipped with blackness like a burned match, gauging the air. The dog is all eagerness and fear, all trembling alertness; the bear, stolid, earth-bound, heavy-limbed, feet like frying pans, moves as though the air itself is a barrier that must be slowly pushed through. They close to within a foot of each other, nose to nose, black eyes locked in ancient and wordless convocation. “I'll have thruppence on the bear,” someone hollers. The cook, leaning on the lintel of the galley door, amused, tosses a chunk of bacon between them. Bear and dog together lunge for it, collide. The Airedale, bunched up and squealing, spins across the deck like a top. The bear gobbles the bacon and looks about for more. Men laugh. Sumner, who has been leaning on the mainmast, straightens, unwraps the leash from its cleat, and prods the bear back towards the freshened cask with the bristle end of the broom. The bear, realizing what is happening, refuses for a moment, bares its teeth, and then accedes. Sumner pulls the cask upright, refastens the grille, and lays it back down on the deck.

All day the wind blows steadily from the south. The sky above is pale blue, but on the far horizon, dark clouds are racked in slender lines above the mountaintops. In the late afternoon, they spy a whale a mile off the port bow and lower two boats. The boats pull quickly away, and the
Volunteer
follows after them. Cavendish watches proceedings from the quarterdeck. He is wearing Brownlee's snuff-colored greatcoat and carrying his long brass spyglass. Now and then, he calls out a command. Sumner can see that he is taking a childish pleasure in his new authority. When the boats reach the whale they realize that it is dead already and has begun to bloat. They signal for the ship to come closer and then tow it across. Black is commanding the first boat, and he and Cavendish have a shouted conversation about the state of the carcass. Despite the signs of rot and depredation, they decide that there is still sufficient blubber left to make it worth their while to flense it.

They attach the decomposing body of the whale to the ship's gunwales, where it dangles like a vast and wholly rotten vegetable. Its tar-black skin is flaccid and intermittently abscessed; pale and cankerous growths mottle its fins and tail. The men who are cutting in wear dampened neckerchiefs across their faces and puff strong tobacco against the stench. The blocks of blubber they slice and peel away are miscolored and gelatinous—much more brown than pink. Swung up onto the deck, they drip not blood, as usual, but some foul straw-colored coagulation like the unspeakable rectal oozings of a human corpse. Cavendish strides about shouting instructions and generalized encouragement. Above him seabirds gather, wheeling and cacophonous, in the noisome air, while below in the grease-stained water, drawn in by the mixed aromas of blood and decay, Greenland sharks gnaw and tug at the whale's loose kiltings.

“Give them sharks a knock or two on the bonce,” Cavendish shouts down to Jones-the-whale. “Don't want them swallowing our profits now, do we?”

Jones nods, takes a fresh blubber spade from the malemauk boat, waits for one of the sharks to come close enough, and then stabs at it, opening up a foot-long gash in its side. A loose-knit garland of entrails, pink, red, and purple, slurps immediately from the wound. The injured shark thrashes for a moment, then bends backwards and starts urgently gobbling its own insides.

“Christ, those sharks are fucking beasts,” Cavendish says.

Jones finally kills it with a second spade-blow to the brain, then kills another one the same quick way. The two gray-green bodies, blunt and archaic, pumping out cloudy trails of blood, are further savaged before they sink by the attentions of a third and smaller animal, who leaves them gnawed and ragged as apple cores, then slips away before Black can dispatch him also.

When the flensing is half completed, they sever the whale's enormous lower lip and raise it onto the deck, exposing one side of the head bone. Otto, like a woodsman attacking a fallen oak, sets to the bone with an ax and a handspike. It is almost two feet thick and elegantly beaded at the extremities like a skirting board. When both sides of the bone are severed, they attach the bone-geer, crack off the upper jaw in one complete piece, and maneuver it carefully with block and tackle so it hangs tentlike above the deck with the black strips of baleen drooping from it like bristles of a gigantic mustache. The baleen is then detached from the jaw with spades and separated into smaller sections for stowing. What remains of the upper jawbone is stowed in the hold.

“By Christmas, the bones of this dead and gruesome stinker will be nestling in the delicately perfumed corsets of some as yet unfucked lovely dancing the Gay Gordons in a ballroom on the Strand. That's a thought to fairly make your head spin, is it not, Mr. Black?” Cavendish says.

“Behind every piece of sweet-smelling female loveliness lies a world of stench and doggery,” Black agrees. “He's a lucky man who can forget that's true or pretend it isn't.”

After another hour, the job is all but done, and the bloated and filthy-smelling krang is cut free. They watch it drift away amongst a shrieking cloud of gulls and petrels. Balanced on the rim of the western horizon, the narrow arctic sun glows and fades like a breathed-on ember.

Sumner sleeps easily that night and in the morning rises again to feed the bear. When the slops bucket is empty, he lassoes a rope about the bear's neck and secures the rope end while he rinses out the cask. Although the wind is freshening and the deck has been washed clean, there is a lingering smell of decay from yesterday's flensing. Instead of settling down as usual, the bear paces back and forth and sniffs the air. When the dog approaches him, he wheels away, and when she nudges him gently he growls. The dog wanders off awhile, lingers at the galley door, and then returns. She wags her tail and steps closer. They stand for a moment watching each other, then the bear pulls back, stiffens, raises its right front paw, and in one fluid downward movement rakes its fossil claws along the dog's shoulder blade, ripping open the sinew and muscle to the bone and dislocating the shoulder joint. A watching crewman whoops and cheers. The dog screams abominably and skitters sideways, spraying out blood onto the deck. The bear lunges forwards, but Sumner grabs the rope leash and pulls it back. The Airedale is squealing, and blood is pumping out from its open wound. The blacksmith, watching on from his forge, selects a heavy hammer from the rack, walks over to where the dog is lying, trembling and pissing itself in a pool of blood, and strikes it once, hard, between the ears. The squealing stops.

“You want I should kill the bear too?” the blacksmith asks. “I'll do it happily enough.”

Sumner shakes his head.

“It's not my bear to kill,” he says.

The blacksmith shrugs.

“You're the one as feeds it every day, so I'd say it's yours as much as anyone's.”

Sumner looks down at the bear still straining at its rope end, still gasping and growling and scratching at the deck in a primitive and implacable fury.

“We'll let the vicious fucker be,” he says.

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

About midday, the wind veers suddenly from south to north and the loose pack of drift ice which clogs the middle of the sound, and which previously posed no danger begins to move gradually towards them. Cavendish moors the ship to the edge of the southerly land floe and orders the men to cut out an ice dock for protection and be quick about it. Equipment is brought up from the hold—ice saws, gunpowder, ropes, and poles—and the men leap over the gunwales and down onto the ice. Their dark silhouettes move urgently across the unmarked surface of the floe. Black paces off the dock's required length and breadth, then drives boarding pikes into the ice to mark the angles and midpoints of each side. The men are divided into two teams to make the first long cuts. They erect wooden tripods with pulleys at the apex. They reeve ropes through each of the pulleys and attach a fourteen-foot steel ice saw to each end. Eight men are attached to each rope to deliver the upward cutting stroke and another four take hold of wooden handles on the saw end to drive it down again. The ice is six feet thick and the dock's sides are two hundred feet in length. Once the two sides are cut, they cut across the end, and then cut again from one corner to the midpoint of the right-hand side. From there, they cut another diagonal line in the opposite direction from the midpoint to the ice's edge. After two hours' labor, a final horizontal cut across the middle of the dock leaves the floe divided into four separate triangles, each one several tons in weight. The men are sweating and gasping from their work. Their heads steam like puddings on a plate.

From the quarterdeck, Cavendish watches the pack advance towards him. As it continues to approach, blown on by the wind, the breaches in it heal and what was previously a loose agglomeration of separate floes and fragments becomes a seamless field of solid-seeming ice moving imperceptibly but unstoppably down upon them. In the middle distance, enormous blue-white icebergs loom like broken and carious monuments. The thinner ice around their bases rumples and tears like paper. He checks the
Hastings
's position with Brownlee's brass telescope, sniffs, then lights his pipe and spits across the rail.

Out on the ice, Black pushes charges of gunpowder down into the nearest diagonal cut and lights the fuse. After a few seconds' pause, there is a dull thud, a high plume of water, and then a broader cascade of shattered ice. The large triangular blocks divide and break apart, and the men in teams drag the several fragments out of the dock with grappling hooks. When the dock is entirely cleared of ice, they warp the ship into it—tugging the bows in first, then swinging the stern round to straighten. They moor her to the floe with ice anchors, then climb back on board wet and exhausted. Handfuls of coal are thrown into the cabin stoves and a round of grog is served. Sumner, who has assisted with the cutting, and feels weak and wretched from the effort, eats his tea in the mess, then takes a dose of laudanum and settles in his cabin to rest. Although he drops into sleep easily enough, he is woken intermittently by the great percussions of the ice field, the thunderous explosion of one floe meeting another one. He thinks of artillery, of the fifteen-pounders thumping on the ridge, the sickening overhead roar of shell and cannonball, then stuffs his ears with cotton wool and reminds himself that their ship is safe enough and that the dock they have made for it is strong and secure.

In the early hours of the morning, with the wind still gusting hard from the north and the sky a luminant, unstarred smear of mauve and purple, one large corner of the ice dock fractures under the pressure of the pack and the broken-off segment is driven hard onto the
Volunteer
's sternpost, propelling the ship forwards and sideways. The bows are driven into the other end of the ice dock, and, with an enormous wail of strained and splitting wood, the ship is viciously squeezed between the land ice and the moving pack. The timbers screech, the vessel spasms upwards. Sumner, torn from his tranquil dreams, hears Cavendish and Otto hollering down the hatchway. As he scrambles to get into his sea boots, he feels the ship shudder and dislocate, the boards beneath his feet begin to tremble and separate, his books and medicines cascade down from the shelves, the door lintel shatters. On deck there is uproar. Cavendish is loudly ordering the evacuation of the ship. The whaleboats are being lowered onto the ice, men are frantically gathering their possessions and hauling provisions and equipment up from the holds. Chests, bags, and mattresses are pitched over the bulwarks; provision casks are rolled down the gangway onto the floe, seized upon, and rolled away. A sail is spread on the ice, and the bedding and mattresses are thrown onto it. The whaleboats are filled with food, fuel, rifles, ammunition, then covered with tarpaulins and dragged a safe distance from the groaning ship. Cavendish bellows commands and imprecations, and every now and then joins in—kicking a cask across the deck or tossing a sack of coal out onto the ice. Sumner runs back and forth from the ship to the floe, then back again, hauling and carrying, taking what is given to him and leaving it wherever he is told. His head is in a ferment. He understands from snatched conversations with Black and Otto that their situation is perilous: when the ice dock fractured the ship was most likely stoved in fore or aft, and it is only the upward pressure of the ice that is presently stopping her from sinking completely.