The North Water (25 page)

A week after the departure of Webster and the others, a fierce storm blows in off the bay, and the tent is lifted away from its moorings and ripped along one seam. They spend a wretched, bone-chilled night clustered together gripping the sagged and flapping remnants, and in the morning, as the weather clears, they commence, glumly, to make what repairs they can. With his jackknife, Otto whittles and bores some rough needles out of seal bone, hands them to the men, then commences pulling lines of thread from the frayed cuffs of one of the blankets. Sumner, stiff and dazed from lack of sleep, walks off in search of rocks suitable for reanchoring the edges of the tent. The wind is bitter and blustery, and in places he has to wade through thigh-deep drifts of snow. As he passes by the tip of the headland, with the rough ice stretching out before him and the wind whipping crystalline spindrift from its angled peaks, he notices Cavendish's gravesite in a state of ghastly disarray. The covering stones have been scattered and the corpse itself has been half-consumed by animals. All that is left is a grotesque and bloody gallimaufry of bones, sinew, and innards. Pieces of shredded undergarment are strewn about haphazardly. The right foot, gnawed off above the ankle but with toes intact, lies off to one side. The head is missing. Sumner comes closer and slowly crouches down. He takes his knife from his pocket and levers out a rib from the frozen mass. He pokes and peers at it awhile, touches its broken end with his fingertip, then looks off into the white distance.

When he gets back to the tent, he takes Otto to one side and explains what he has just seen. They talk together for a while, Sumner points, Otto crosses himself, then they walk across to where the snow house used to be and begin digging down into the icy ruins with their bare hands. When they reach the stiff and frozen bodies of the two Yaks, they pull them free and strip off the remains of their sealskin undergarments. Lifting the bodies up by the heels like wheelbarrows, they drag them farther away from the tent. When they judge the distance and angle is right, they place them down again. They are panting from the effort of the pull, and steam is rising up from their heads and faces. They stand talking awhile longer and then walk back to the ramshackle tent. Sumner loads the rifle, then explains to the other men that there is a hungry bear somewhere out on the ice and the dead Yaks are bait for it.

“There's enough good meat on a beast like that to last the five of us a month or more,” he says. “And we can use the hide for extra clothing.”

The men look back at him, empty-eyed, indifferent, strained beyond their limits. When he suggests they share the effort—that each man take the rifle for two hours at a time and keep a watch out for the bear while the others rest or repair the tent—they shake their heads.

“Dead Yaks int good bait for a bear,” they tell him, with a sureness which suggests they have tried such a thing before and found it disappointing. “Such a plan won't work.”

“Help me anyway,” he says. “What harm can it do?”

They turn away and begin to deal out the cards:
one, one, one; two, two, two; three, three, three
.

“A cockeyed plan like that won't work,” they say again, as if their gloomful confidence itself provides them comfort. “Not now, not ever.”

He sits at one side of the tent with the loaded rifle at his feet and peers out through a spy hole cut into the gray canvas. Once, while he is watching, a rook comes down and settles on the forehead of the elder Yak, pecks briefly at the matted tanglement of his frozen hair, and then extends its wings and jerks upwards and away. Sumner considers firing at it, but saves his powder. He is patient, hopeful. He is sure the bear is close. Perhaps it is asleep after its recent feasting, but when it wakes it will be hungry again. It will sniff the air and remember the treasures nearby. As it gets darker, Sumner hands the rifle across to Otto. He cuts a two-inch cube of seal meat from his cache of provender, skewers it on the point of his knife, and holds it over the blubber lamp to cook. The other three, without pausing from their endless game of euchre, observe him carefully. When he has eaten he lies down and covers himself.

After what seems like barely a moment, Otto nudges him awake again. There is ice on the outside of his blanket where the moisture from his breath has seeped through its weft. Otto tells him there is still no sign of any bear. Sumner shuffles across to the spy hole and looks out again. The moon is gibbous, the arcing sky garrulous with stars. The two dead bodies lie just as they were, exposed and recumbent, like the eerie
gisants
of a long-forgotten dynasty. Sumner props himself against the rifle and wills the bear to come to him. He tries to picture its arrival, its slow-footed emergence from the murk. He imagines its curiosity, its wariness: the smell of dead flesh pulling it forwards, a sense of strangeness, foreignness, holding it back.

He falls asleep while seated. He dreams of trout fishing on Bilberry Lough: it is summer and he is wearing shirtsleeves and a boater, above and below him is a blue expanse of sky and water, and all around the lake is edged with elms and oak. He is empty-headed, happy. When he wakes, he sees movement in the distance. He wonders if it is the wind against the snow or if the ice is shifting out in the bay, but then he sees the bear, starkly white against the ashen darkness. He watches it approach the dead bodies, moving, low-headed and rhythmical, without eagerness or urgency. He pushes the tent flap slowly to one side with one hand, checks the percussion cap, cocks the rifle, and raises it partway up to his shoulder. The bear is tall and broad but spindle-shanked and gaunt around the ribs. He watches it sniff at the two bodies, then raise its paw and place it atop the chest of the elder. No one else is awake. Otto is snoring softly. Sumner kneels. He rests his left elbow on his knee and presses the rifle stock into the softness of his right shoulder. He raises the sight and looks along the barrel. The bear is a rag of whiteness in the larger dark. He breathes in once, exhales, then fires. The bullet misses the head but hits high on the shoulder. Sumner grabs the bag of cartridges and rushes out of the tent. The snow is deep and uneven and he stumbles twice, then rights himself. When he reaches the bodies he sees a large patch of blood and then a spattered trail leading onward. The bear is nearly a quarter mile ahead now, running lopsidedly, favoring the right foreleg, as if the left is maimed or numb. Sumner runs after it. He is sure it cannot escape, that soon it will either collapse and die or turn around to fight.

Away to the east, the sky is faintly whitening. Narrow pearlescent fissures open in the dark ranks of close-packed cloud; the taut and featureless horizon turns gray, then brown, then blue. As he reaches the tip of the headland, Sumner's lungs and gullet are aching from the cold; he is panting, and the blood is thrumming in his ears. The bear passes the desecrated gravesite without pause and then veers north out onto the ice field. Sumner loses sight of it briefly, then sees it again emerging from behind the heaped-up rubble of a pressure ridge. He clambers after, up and over, slipping and scrambling as he goes, dropping his rifle, then picking it up again. He follows the deep-set tracks, the blood spots. His leg aches, and his heart is thumping, but he tells himself it is a matter of time only, that every minute that passes weakens the bear a little more. He wades on through the snow. On either side, high, hard-frozen shards rear up like the pitched roofs of a half-drowned village. Grainy shadows gather in their lee, then spill out sideways.

The bear, despite the wound, moves steadily and surely, as though set on a course plotted long before. The sky is filled by narrow rolls of cloud, gray and brown on top, gilded below by the breaching sun. They move on, man and animal in primitive procession, through a landscape so smashed up and uneven, it might have been constructed by a simpleton from the shattered pieces of some previous intactness. After an hour, the ice flattens into a mile-wide plain, its surface gently ribbed like the palate of a hound. Halfway across, as if suddenly aware of its new environment, the bear slows, then stops and turns about. Sumner can see the smear of red blazoned on its flank and the gouts of steam rising from its muzzle. After a moment's pause, he takes a waxed paper cartridge from his pocket, bites off the end, and pours the black powder into the bore of the rifle; he pushes the ball end of the cartridge in also, tears off the excess paper, and presses it home with the ramrod. His hands are trembling as he does this. He is dripping sweat, and he can feel his lungs wheezing and roaring inside his chest like bellows in an iron forge. He fumbles in his pocket for a percussion cap, finds one and fits it over the steel nipple. He paces forwards slowly until the gap between them is no more than three hundred feet, then lowers himself down onto the ridged ice. He feels its coldness against his stomach and thighs. His head is wreathed in steam. The bear watches carefully but does nothing. Its flanks are heaving. Strings of drool are dripping down from its jaw. Sumner raises and adjusts the sights, cocks the hammer, and, remembering the previous shot, aims a foot to the left. He blinks the sweat away from his eyes, squints, and pulls the trigger. There is the sharp crack of the percussion cap exploding but no recoil. The bear snorts at the sudden noise, then wheels about and starts to run again. Scuds of snow spume out from under it. Sumner, cursing the misfire, scrambles to his feet, tosses the old percussion cap away, and fits another one. He steadies himself, takes aim again, and shoots, but the bear is too far gone and the shot falls shy. He watches it awhile, then re-shoulders the rifle and begins to follow after.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Beyond the ice plain's edge another pressure ridge rears up, brown-edged and haggard at the peaks, its steep flanks bermed and bastioned like an antique siegework. The bear tracks west until it finds a gap, then leaps up into it and clambers through. The risen sun, smeared by cloud, gives off no noticeable heat. Sumner's sweat drips down into his beard and eyebrows and freezes into hard spangles. The bear has slowed down to a walk now, but so has Sumner. As he follows it up and across the ridge and onto another undulant snowfield, the gap between them barely alters. He gains twenty yards, then loses it again. The aching in his legs and chest is sharp and hot but regular. He thinks of turning back but doesn't. The chase has found a rhythm already, a pattern he can't easily disrupt. When he is thirsty, he reaches down and eats the snow; when he is hungry, he lets the feeling rise, peak, then pass away. He breathes, he walks, the bear precedes him always, badged high with blood, steam-bound, its tracks as broad and round as soup bowls.

Every minute he expects the bear to fail, to weaken, to begin to die, but it never does so. It persists. Sometimes he feels a fierce and violent hatred for it, at other times a sickly kind of love. Rump muscles roil beneath the bear's slack fur. Its giant legs lift and fall like drop hammers. They pass by a berg embedded in the floe—two hundred feet high, half a mile long, starkly vertical and flat-topped like the rhomboid plug of an extinct volcano. Its steep and shear-marked sides are veined with blue and gaitered at their base with drifted snow. Sumner has no pocket watch but guesses it is now past noon. He realizes he has come too far, that even if he kills the bear he will not be able to carry its meat back to camp. This truth disturbs him for a moment, but then, as he walks onwards, its power thins and fades, and all he is aware of is the lift and press of his feet across the snow and the hollow roar of his own quick breathing.

An hour or so later, they reach a long line of high black bluffs, their dark faces soilless and switchbacked with pale gray threads of ice. The bear pads steadily alongside, until it reaches a narrow, shadow-draped breach in the cliff face. It glances rearwards once, then turns sharply and disappears from sight. Sumner follows after. When he reaches the opening, he turns as the bear turned and sees before him a long, narrow, ice-choked fjord, steep-sided and without apparent egress. To the left and right, high gray rocks gashed with couloirs grope up towards the pallid sky. The ice underfoot is flat and pure as marble. Sumner, pausing at the threshold and looking about, senses he has been here before, that this place is already known to him somehow. Prefigured in a dream perhaps, he thinks, or in some opiated flight of fancy. He steps across the threshold and continues walking forwards.

Along the bone-white valley floor, between looming walls of gneiss and granite, beast and man proceed in loose-knit tandem—separate yet eerily conjoined—as if along a corridor or hallway paved with snow and canopied with sky. Sumner feels the weight of the rifle pulling down against his shoulder and the stubborn ache of his mal-united leg. He is light-headed now and sorely weakened by hunger. Presently, it starts to snow: light at first, but then thicker and more forceful.

As the wind and cold increase, and the snow drops down in dense diagonal gusts, Sumner loses sight of the bear. It appears, then disappears from his view in awkward, flickering glimpses, like an image in a zoetrope. Its outline blurs, then complicates, and finally dissolves. Soon, the sky and the cliffs disappear also, and all he can see is the blizzard's ashen iterations—everything swirling and shifting—nothing clear or separate or distinct. Enclosed in this bewildering mesh, he loses all sense of time and direction. He staggers back and forth, witless and nearing exhaustion, for what feels like hours but could be only minutes or even seconds. Eventually, by chance, he stumbles onto the rumbled scree slope and takes shelter in the lee of a brindled boulder. Waves of fear and panic gather and break inside him as he crouches there. He is shuddering with cold, and he feels his sweat-soaked clothes beginning to harden around him like a suit of mail. He has no sensation left in either feet or hands. Snow gathers along the creases of his face and lips but doesn't melt. He has walked much too far, he knows it now: he has strayed from his true purposes, he is lost and bewildered, and his failure is complete.