The North Water (26 page)

Looking up through the hazy downfall, he sees a dead boy standing before him, grubby and barefooted, clad in a dhoti and blood-soaked tabard. He is holding a limp cabbage leaf in one hand and a tin cup of water in the other. The bubbling bullet wound in his chest goes all the way through to the other side now. A yellow, coin-sized patch of light is just visible where his heart should rightly be. It is like a narrow loophole in the thickness of a castle wall. Sumner raises his right hand in awkward greeting, but the boy offers no response. Perhaps he is angry with me, Sumner thinks. But no, the boy is weeping, and, seeing this, he starts to weep himself for sympathy and shame. The warm tears course down his cheeks and then harden and freeze amidst the tangled edges of his beard. As he sits and weeps, he feels himself liquefying, losing form, sliding away into a stew of sadness and regret. His body starts to shake and shudder. His breathing slows and his heartbeat becomes languid and unwilling. He senses death, feels its leaden presence, scents its fecal perfume on the whipping air. The boy reaches out for him, and Sumner sees, through the spy hole in his chest, another world in miniature: perfect, complete, impossible. He stares for a moment, captivated by the brilliance of its making, then turns away again. He grabs himself tightly, breathes in, and looks about. The child is gone: there is nothing in existence but the raging storm and, concealed somewhere inside it, the bear he must kill if he is to live. He pulls his legs up to his chest and hugs them for a moment. He stands up with difficulty and loads the rifle with numb and trembling fingers. When he is finished, he steps away from the boulder and shouts out into the freezing air.

“Come on out here now,” he yells. “Come on out here now, you baleful bastard, and let me shoot you dead.”

There is no response, nothing except the wind-driven snow and the silent slabs of rock and ice. He peers blindly forwards and yells again. The storm continues unabated; the high wind wails. He could be standing alone on the surface of some far-flung, bitter moon, ice-choked, sunless, and unpeopled. He yells a third time, and, like a sudden ghost, conjured against its will, the bear appears before him, less than thirty yards away, part veiled by thickly wafting snow but clearly visible. He sees the ragged edges of its shoulder wound, the thin white saddle of snow settled across its spine. The bear looks blankly back at him; steam leaks from its nostrils like smoke from a cooling campfire. Sumner raises his rifle and takes unsteady aim at its enormous chest. His head is clear. There is nothing left to decide or hope for. All that exists is this single moment, this event. He breathes in, then out again; his heart fills up with blood, then empties. He pulls the trigger, hears the powder catch and roar, and feels the recoil.

The bear drops down onto its knees, and then falls sideways. The report echoes off the high rocks—loud, then quieter, then quieter still. Sumner lowers the rifle and runs over to the body. He crouches down, puts both his palms on the bear's still-warm flank, and pushes his face and fingers deep into the fur. His lips are parted, and he is gasping. He takes a blubber knife from his belt, hones its edge with a whetstone, and tests the sharpness against his thumb. He makes the first incision near the groin, and then cuts up through the soft flesh of the belly until he meets the sternum. He starts sawing through bone until he reaches the throat. He cuts the windpipe, then jams his boot heel against one side of the severed rib cage, grips the other with both hands, and breaks it open. He feels the sudden kitchen-heat of the bear's inner organs and tastes the heady, carnal fetor that rises out of them. He drops the blubber knife onto the snow and pushes both his bare hands down into the dead bear's steaming guts. His frozen fingers feel like they might burst apart from the warmth. He grinds his teeth and pushes his hands in deeper. When the pain reduces, he pulls them out, dripping with red, rubs his face and beard with the hot blood, then picks up the knife again and begins to sever and remove the bear's innards. He tugs out the heart and lungs, the liver, intestines, and stomach. The deep cavity that remains is half-filled with a steaming pool of hot black liquid—blood, urine, bile. Sumner leans forwards and starts to drink it, ladling it up quickly into his open mouth with both hands. As he drinks, and as the bear's heat passes directly into him like an elixir—down his throat, into his empty stomach, and outwards—he starts to tremble, then twitch. After a minute he begins to spasm uncontrollably, his eyes roll back into his skull, and blackness overtakes him.

When the fit passes, Sumner is lying prone and half-covered by drifting snow. His beard is stiff with ursine gore, both hands are dyed dark red, and the arms of his peacoat are soaked up to the elbows. His mouth, teeth, and throat are caked with blood, both animal and human. The tip of his tongue is missing. He pulls himself to his feet and looks about. The wind howls, and the air is dense with close-set waves of gusting ice. He can no longer see the cliffs, or the scree slope, or the boulder where he sheltered previously. He looks down at the bear's eviscerated corpse, its split and opened rib cage yawning like an empty tomb.

He pauses a moment, considers, then, as if stepping into a bath, he bends and lowers himself down into the striated crimson cavity. The severed bones close over him like teeth. He feels the stiffened muscle compress and spread beneath him. There is the clean wet smell of butchery, a faint but marvelous residue of animal warmth. He tucks his sea boots up into the hollowed-out abdomen and pulls the dead flesh tight around him like an overcoat. He hears the howling wind still but doesn't feel it. He is enclosed, encoffined, in a tight and vasculated darkness. Lying there, his mutilated tongue begins to swell inside his mouth; blood and saliva bubble out from his lips and dribble down into his beard. He wishes to pray, to speak, to make himself known somehow. He remembers Homer—a hero's corpse, the funeral games, the armor bent and broken—but when he tries to murmur out the opening dactyls, instead of words what burbles from his brutalized mouth are the inchoate grunts and gaspings of a savage.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The stranger is covered in blood, drenched and laved in it from head to foot. He resembles a skinned seal or a stillborn child newly pushed from his mother's womb. He is breathing, just, but his blood-caked eyes are closed up and he is half-frozen. They drag his body off to the side and leave it there while they skin and butcher the bear, then pack the meat and hide onto the sledge. One hunter takes the stranger's rifle, and the other takes his knife. They debate whether to kill him where he lies or take him back to the camp. They argue awhile, then agree to take him back. Whatever else he is, they reason, he is a lucky bastard, and a man who is that lucky deserves another chance. They pick him up and lay him on the sledge. He groans a little. They prod and shake him but he doesn't wake. They push snow into his mouth, but the snow merely melts on his ravaged tongue and drools out onto his chin in pinkened rivulets.

At the winter camp, the wives give him water and warmed seal blood to drink. They wash his face and hands, and pull off his blood-stiffened garments. When word gets out of what has been found, the children come to stare. They peer and prod and giggle. If he opens his eyes, they squeal and run away. Soon the rumors begin. Some say he is an
Angakoq
, a spirit guide, sent direct from Sedna to help with their hunting, while others say he is an evil ghost, a shabby
tupilaq
, whose touch will kill and whose very presence causes sickness. The hunters consult the shaman, who advises them that the stranger will not recover until he is returned to his own people. They should take him south, the shaman says, to the new mission on Coutts Inlet. They ask him if the stranger is lucky, as they supposed he must be, and whether any of his luck will pass to them. The shaman tells them that he is indeed lucky, as they supposed, but that his luck is of a particular, alien kind.

They carry him, wrapped in hides and palely shivering, back onto the sledge and take him south, past the frozen lake and the summer hunting grounds, to the mission. The red painted cabin is set on a shallow rise, with the frozen sea below it and the tall mountains behind. There is a large igloo standing adjacent, with a line of black smoke rising through the opening in the roof, and a set of tethered sledge dogs curled asleep in front. The hunters are greeted on their arrival by the priest, a bright-eyed, wiry Englishman with graying hair and beard and an expression earnest but fiercely skeptical. They point to Sumner and explain where they found him and how. When the priest looks doubtful, they trace a map of the shoreline with their fingers in the snow and point to the place. The priest shakes his head.

“A man can't just appear from nowhere,” he says.

They explain that, in that case, he is most likely an
Angakoq
and that, until now, he has been living in a house at the bottom of the sea with Sedna the one-eyed goddess and her father, Anguta. At this, the priest becomes irritable. He starts telling them again (as he always does) about Jesus, and then goes into the cabin and brings out the green book. They stand by their sledges and listen to him read in clumsy Inuktitut. The words make a kind of sense, but they find the stories far-fetched and childlike. When he's finished, they smile and nod.

“Then perhaps he is an angel,” they say.

The priest looks at Sumner and shakes his head.

“He's not an angel,” he says. “I will guarantee you that.”

They carry Sumner inside and lay him on a cot near the stove. The priest covers him in blankets, then crouches down and tries to shake him awake.

“Who are you?” he says. “What ship do you come from?”

Sumner half-opens one eye but doesn't attempt to answer. The priest frowns, then leans forwards and examines Sumner's frost-blackened countenance more closely.

“Deutsch?” he asks him. “Dansk? Ruski? Scots? Which one is it now?”

Sumner gazes back at him for a moment without interest or recognition, then closes his eye again. The priest stays crouching beside him for a moment, then nods and stands up.

“You lie there awhile and rest yourself,” he says, “whoever you are. We'll talk more after.”

The priest makes coffee for the hunters and asks them more questions. When they have gone, he feeds Sumner brandy with a teaspoon and rubs lard into his frostbite. When Sumner is settled, the priest sits at a table by the window and writes in the green book. There are three other thick leather-bound volumes by his elbow and now and then he opens one, looks into it, and nods. Later, an Esquimaux woman comes in with a pan of stew. She is wearing a deerskin anorak cut longer at the rear and a black wool hat; she has V-shaped blue lines tattooed in parallel across her forehead and the back of both hands. The priest takes two thick white bowls from the shelf above the door and pushes back his papers and books. He spoons half the stew into one bowl and half into the other, then gives the pan back to the woman. The woman points at Sumner and says something in her native language. The priest nods, then says something in reply which makes her smile.

Sumner, lying motionless, smells the hot food. Its soft scent reaches him through the nerveless weft of his exhaustion and indifference. He is not hungry, but he is beginning to remember what hunger might be like, the particular, hopeful nature of its aching. Is he ready to return to all that? Does he want to? Could he? He opens his eyes and looks around: wood, metal, wool, grease; green, black, gray, brown. He turns his head. There is a gray-haired man sitting at a wooden table; on the table there are two bowls of food. The man closes the book he is reading, murmurs out a prayer, then stands up and brings one of the bowls over to where Sumner is lying.

“Will you eat something now?” he asks him. “Here, let me help you.”

The priest kneels down, puts his hand behind Sumner's head, and raises it up. He scoops a piece of meat onto the spoon and brings the spoon to Sumner's lips. Sumner blinks. A wave of feeling, dense and unnameable, sweeps through his body.

“I can feed you better if you'd open up your mouth a little,” the priest says. Sumner doesn't move. He understands what is being asked of him but makes no effort to comply.

“Come on now,” the priest says. He puts the very tip of the metal spoon onto Sumner's lower lip and gently presses down. Sumner's mouth opens a little. The priest tips the spoon up quickly, and the meat slides onto Sumner's lacerated tongue. He lets it sit there a moment.

“Chew,” the priest tells him, making a chewing motion himself and pointing up at his jaw so Sumner is sure to see. “You won't get any of the goodness out if you don't chew it right.”

Sumner closes his mouth. He feels the meat's taste seeping into him. He chews it twice, then swallows. He feels a sharp pain and then a duller ache.

“Good,” the priest says. He scoops another piece of meat and does the same again. Sumner eats three more pieces but lets the fourth drop out onto the floor unchewed. The priest nods, then lowers Sumner's head back down onto the blanket.

“We'll try you with a mug of tea later on,” he says. “See how you do with that.”

After two days more, Sumner is able to sit up and eat by himself. The priest helps him into a chair, puts the blanket over his shoulders, and they sit together on two adjacent sides of the small wooden table.

“The men who found you consider you what they call an
Angakoq
,” the priest explains, “which means ‘wizard' in the Esquimaux language. They believe that bears have great powers, and that certain, chosen men partake in them. The same thing is true of other animals too, of course—deer and walrus, seals, even certain seabirds, I believe—but in their mythology the bear is the most powerful beast by far. Men who have the bear as their genius are capable of the greatest magic—healing, divination, and so on.”