The North Water (20 page)

“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.

After a few more hours, the storm appears to have steadied itself, to have reached an equilibrium which may presage its end, when, with a fearsome crash, the floe itself, the very surface they are sleeping on, jolts upwards. One pole of the tent collapses and the iron stove topples over, sending red-hot coals spilling out and setting blankets and peacoats alight. Sumner, bewildered, chest tight with alarm, pulls on his boots and dashes outside into the gloom. Through a stuttering veil of snow he sees at the floe edge a bluish iceberg, immense, chimneyed, wind-gouged, sliding eastwards like an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor. The berg is moving at a brisk walking pace, and as it moves its nearest edge grinds against the floe and spits up house-size rafts of ice like swarf from the jaws of a lathe. The floe shudders beneath Sumner's feet; twenty yards away a jagged crack appears, and he wonders for a moment if the entire plateau might crumble under the strain and everything, tents, whaleboats, men, be pitched into the sea. No one now remains in the second tent. The men that were inside it are either standing transfixed like Sumner or are busy pushing and dragging the whaleboats farther away from the edge in a desperate effort to keep them safe. Sumner feels, as he watches, that he is seeing something he shouldn't rightly see, that he is being made an unwilling party to a horrifying but elemental truth-telling.

As quickly as the chaos began, however, it ceases. The berg loses contact with the edge of the ice, and the shuddering cacophony of impact gives way to the remnant howling of the wind and the oaths and curses of the men. Sumner notices for the first time that snow is pelting against the left side of his face and gathering in his beard. He feels for a moment wrapped up, cocooned, made strangely private, by the fierceness of the weather, as if the world beyond, the real world, is separate and forgettable, and he alone inside the whirl of snow exists. Someone tugs his arm and points him backwards. He sees that the second tent is now ablaze. Mattresses, rugs, and sea chests are burning fiercely; what remains of the canvas is whipping about in the high wind and flaming like a tar barrel. The rump of the crew stare aghast, their helpless faces brightened by the high dancing flames. Cavendish, after kicking at the embers and bewailing his ill luck, yells for them to take refuge in the remaining whaleboats. Working rapidly but without method, they empty out the two boats, pack themselves inside like cargo, then pull the tarpaulins taut across the top. The resultant spaces are fetid and coffin-like. The air inside is sparse and pungent, and there is no light at all. Sumner is lying on bare, cold timbers, and the men arrayed around him are talking loudly and bitterly about the incompetence of Cavendish, the astonishing ill luck of Brownlee, and their desire above all and despite everything to get home alive. Exhausted but sleepless, his muscles and inner organs beginning to itch and agitate with the unmet need for opium, he tries again to forget where he is, to imagine he is somewhere better, happier, but he can't succeed.

*   *   *

In the morning, the storm has abated. The day is cool and damp with gray clouds overhead and flat bands of fog concealing the floe edge and lying like layered quartz across the dark faces of the distant mountains behind. They pull back the snow-laden tarpaulins and climb out of the whaleboats. The burned and blackened fragments of the second tent and most of what it contained are strewn untidily across the ice in front of them. Some of the spars, half sunk in pools of meltwater, are still smoldering. While the cook boils water and cobbles together a rough version of breakfast, the men pick and poke through the lukewarm embers for anything still usable and worth preserving. Cavendish strolls around amongst them, whistling and making ribald jokes. He carries an enameled mug of steaming beef tea in his left hand. Every now and then, he bends down like a gentleman fossil hunter to pick up a still-warm knife blade or a solitary boot heel. For a man who has just seen his ship crushed, and narrowly survived an iceberg and then a fire in the night, he appears, Sumner thinks, unusually good-humored and carefree.

After eating, they repack the whaleboats, then raise up the one surviving tent, weigh down its edges with provision casks, and settle inside with playing cards and pipe tobacco to wait for Black, Jones, and the others to return from the
Hastings
. After an hour or so, as the fog lifts, Cavendish goes outside with his telescope to check for signs of the returning party. After a while, he calls out for Otto, and, after a while longer, Otto calls out for Sumner.

Cavendish hands Sumner the telescope and points east without speaking. Sumner extends the telescope and looks through it. He is expecting to see, off in the distance, Black, Jones, and the rest of the crew tugging the four empty whaleboats across the ice towards them, but in fact he sees nothing at all. He lowers the telescope, squints into the distant emptiness, then raises the telescope to his eye and looks again.

“So where are they?”

Cavendish shakes his head, curses, and starts angrily rubbing the nape of his neck. His previous calmness and good humor has disappeared. He is pale-faced and tight-lipped. His eyes are wide open and he is breathing hard through his nose.

“The
Hastings
is gone,” Otto says.

“Gone where?”

“Most likely, she ventured out into the pack last night to escape from the bergs,” Cavendish says sharply. “That's all there is to it. She will find her way back to the floe edge soon enough. Campbell knows just where we are. All we need to do is wait for him here. Show a bit of faith and a bit of fucking patience.”

Sumner looks through the telescope again, sees, again, nothing but sky and ice, then looks at Otto.

“Why would a ship unmoor in the midst of a storm?” he asks. “Wouldn't she be safer remaining where she was?”

“If a berg is bearing down, the captain does what's needed to save the ship,” Otto says.

“Exactly,” Cavendish says. “Whatever you have to do, you do it.”

“How long might we have to wait here?”

“That all depends,” Cavendish says. “If she finds open water it could be today. If not…”

He shrugs.

“I don't have my medicine chest,” Sumner says. “It was taken across already.”

“Is any man here sick?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Then I'd say that's about the least part of our fucking worries.”

Sumner remembers watching the iceberg through the gray veil of flailing snow: many-storied and immaculate, moving smoothly and unstoppably forwards with the frictionless non-movement of a planet.

“The
Hastings
could be sunk,” he realizes. “Is that what you mean?”

“She int sunk,” Cavendish tells him.

“Are there other ships that can rescue us?”

Otto shakes his head.

“Not near enough. It's too late in the season and we're too far north. Most of the fleet have left Pond's Bay by now.”

“She int sunk,” Cavendish repeats. “She's somewhere out there in the sound, that's all. If we wait here, she'll come back right enough.”

“We should go out with the whaleboats to search,” Otto says. “It was a fierce wind last night. She could have been blown miles off to the east. She could be stoved in, nipped, rudderless, anything at all.”

Cavendish frowns, then nods reluctantly, as if eager to think of some better, easier solution, but utterly unable to do so.

“We'll find her soon enough when we go out there,” he says quickly, snapping shut the brass telescope and shoving it into his greatcoat pocket. “She won't be far off, I'd say.”

“What if we don't find her?” Sumner asks. “What then?”

Cavendish pauses and looks at Otto, who stays silent. Cavendish tugs his earlobe and then answers in a ludicrous music hall brogue.

“Den I hope you brought your swimming togs along widje, Paddy,” he says. “'Cause it's an awful long focking way to anywhere else from hereabouts.”

They spend the rest of the day out in the whaleboats, rowing first east along the edge of the land ice, then turning north towards the center of the sound. The storm has broken up the pack, and they move without difficulty through the irregular fragments of drift and brash ice, steering around them when necessary or poking them aside with the blades of their long oars. Otto commands one boat and Cavendish the other. Sumner, who has been promoted to steersman, imagines every moment that they will sight the
Hastings
on the horizon—like a single dark stitch against the coarse, gray blanket of the sky—and that the fear that is aching inside him, that he is struggling to contain, will dissolve like mist. He senses amongst the crewmen an anxiety edged with bitterness and anger. They are searching for someone to blame for this perilous string of misfortunes and Cavendish, whose promotion to the captaincy is unearned and tainted with unnaturalness and violence, is the most deserving and obvious candidate.

They return to the ramshackle and burned-over camp, weary, bone-chilled, and low in spirits, having pulled hard all day and seen no sign of the
Hastings
nor found any indication of her possible fate. The cook builds a fire from barrel staves and sawed-up sections of the mizzenmast and fashions a sour-tasting stew of salt beef and ancient, woody turnips. After the eating is over, Cavendish taps a cask of brandy and has a ration served to each man. They sullenly drink down their allotted portions and then, without asking further permission, begin taking more until the cask is emptied and the atmosphere inside the tent is liquorous and unstable. Soon, after a period of drunken and cantankerous arguing, a fight breaks out and a knife is drawn. McKendrick, a mere onlooker, is slashed deeply in the forearm, and the blacksmith is knocked senseless. When Cavendish tries to intervene, his head is split open with a belaying pin, and Sumner and Otto have to step in to save him from a worse beating. They pull him outside for safety. Otto goes back to try to calm the men but is himself abused and then threatened with the knife. Cavendish, back on his feet, cursing foully, face gruesomely checkered with his own blood, takes two loaded rifles from the whaleboats, gives a third to Otto, and ventures back inside the tent. He fires once down into the ice to gain their attention and then declares that he will gladly put the second bullet into any cunt who fancies his chances.