Out on the ocean, terrifyingly close, was the wildly screaming crescent of the walrus herd. There were more than a hundred and seventy of them in all, not counting the young, and they were swimming with slow, unshakeable, terrifying purpose towards the floe. Suddenly, behind them, a great black and white shape reared up out of the water, a great scream echoed even through the terrible noise, and the killer hurled itself forward.
They opened up. Ross, on one knee, had the carbine on automatic and was spraying the walruses, trying to turn them. Job, however, was shooting deliberately, like a marksman, with the Weatherby. After each whipcrack of his rifle, a head would sprout a brief aura of red, and begin to sink. Simon was doing the same with the Remington, but there were fewer red auras, fewer deaths. Kate put her carbine on single-shot and began to shoot smoothly and accurately.
The herd hesitated. One or two turned, only to turn back again. Ross snapped the carbine off automatic and threw away the first empty clip. It took him several moments to fit the second, and he cursed Simon under his breath – he had practised with enough rifles to be able to shoot and reload them as smoothly and easily as a man with two hands, but this carbine was different. Eventually he held it upside down under his left arm and wedged the curving clip in with his right hand.
When he brought it up again the walruses were very much closer. He glanced down at Kate. She was standing, legs spread, torso turned a little, mittens hanging like spare hands, leaning into her shots like a professional. He nodded, smiled, slammed his own carbine back to his shoulder. He squeezed off short bursts of three or four bullets at a time. He swung his sights down the lines of bobbing heads, squeezing the trigger and passing on, each target exploding into a shapeless mess, tusks falling like trees. He threw away his second clip and his mind came out of the gun for long enough to realise there were tears on his face. He felt sick. Great God, this was a terrible thing they were doing. Had they the right, even in these circumstances, to slaughter these strange, ungainly, oddly beautiful animals? His conscience doubted, but his hands did not. Even as he wondered, his body without pause or hesitation turned the carbine upside down and reloaded it. By the time his mind came to a pause in its train of thought, the stock of the carbine was at the shoulder again and his right forefinger had squeezed the trigger.
Kate’s mind was a blank. She had never killed anything, nor ever wanted to. She felt guilty even about her anger against the whales. And yet, there she was, shooting like a seasoned warrior. Why was she doing it? To survive? To protect herself? To protect Colin? The thought hit her right between the eyes. Her faced jerked towards him; his jerked towards her, and their eyes met.
The walrus exploded out of the water and slammed its tusks into the ice with the force of a pile-driver three feet from Kate’s right boot. She screamed, stumbled back, fell. Colin, swinging smoothly from the waist, blew its head open. Kate picked herself up, and went back into the war. She put the rifle to her shoulder again, but she had to point it almost straight down before she found anything to shoot at. The walruses were there beneath her feet! Panic ran up her spine.
The rope jerked at her waist. Colin was falling back; she went with him. One moment there was just one walrus at the edge of the ice, its corpse like a lone sentinel frozen into position; then, all at once, there were twenty, and the floe was juddering as they erupted in unison and crashed their huge tusks into the ice. The sound was terrifying. Colin had the rifle at his hip and was spraying them wildly with bullets. She swung herself back to the hulking maroon-brown wall with the great yellow-white bars of the tusks. Many of them were on the move, humping forward, raising their tusks to drive them in again, their great flippers gripping the ice, pulling them forward.
The first row of walruses were still half in and half out of the water – many of them slowed down by gunshot wounds – when a second row arrived and, totally panicked, hurled themselves up out of the water, and – as there was no clear ice – drove their tusks into the backs of the creatures before them. Then they too began to hump forward as fast as they could.
Ross and Kate froze. The second row hauled themselves over the first – and just as they did so a third arrived and also drove their tusks indiscriminately into ice and quivering flesh before they humped up out of the sea. The noise grew, as the outer row screamed in panic, and the inner two – those still alive – screamed in agony.
By the time Colin and Kate started firing again there were more than fifty walruses on the ice before them, lumbering forward in confusion, but with terrible purpose.
Simon and Job were more fortunate. The beginning of that small hill from which Doctor Warren had fallen swept down along their edge of the floe, not only giving them an excellent vantage point to shoot from, but also presenting the walruses with a crystal wall which they had no chance of climbing. As soon as they began to come up where Colin was at the north of the floe, Job fell back to cover the other edges of the ice, but Simon, carried away with bloodlust, did not notice the Eskimo’s movement, and would not answer the urgent tugs on the rope round his waist. Perhaps they could have stopped them coming up at the bottom of the floe if Quick had moved faster; perhaps not. In any case, by the time they got to the south of the tents, what was happening on the north of the floe in front of Colin and Kate was happening there, within ten yards of the camp.
Colin was still cursing Simon for taking the Remington, as he wedged the carbine under the club of his left arm and began fitting the clip. It wouldn’t go in! He breathed three times deeply and began again. When the rope jerked, the long shape of the gun went skidding away over the ice, and the clip arced away through the air. He knew better than to look at Kate. He swung towards the walruses and saw a bull charging, tusks on a level with his chest, ready to tear him to pieces. The bull was perhaps seventeen feet long. It stood more than six feet from flippers to head. Its tusks were four feet long. It weighed a little less than two tons, and it was going to kill him.
His mind shifted smoothly into top gear. He jerked the axe from the rope belt round his waist, and began to run forward towards the walrus. At the last moment before the dripping tusks tore him open, he dived to one side, feet skidding crazily on the ice, swung round, and buried the axe in its neck with all the strength in his arm, shoulder and back, intending to sever the spine between its shoulders and head. But the ice, treacherous under his boots, spoiled his aim, and the deadly blade turned in his hands and smashed into its shoulder, doing little damage. Ross jerked it free as the creature turned and charged again. This time he did not throw himself aside. The axe was four feet long; his arm well over two feet long – he had two more feet of reach than the walrus’s tusks. He met the charge head on, bringing the axe down between its eyes with almost insane force, screaming as he did so. The bull collapsed on the spot, its tusks driving again into the ice, inches from his boots. He jerked the haft of the axe, but the blade remained buried in the walrus’s massive forehead. He jerked it again. Nothing.
He went back to the end of the haft to exert the maximum amount of leverage. The cliff of walruses nearly ten feet high hulked unsteadily over him. He stooped to tug at the axe again.
The first of the killers hurled itself out of the water on to the pile of walruses, snapping and tearing. The floe rocked and settled further. Ross’s feet skidded again and he fell. Kate was back thirty feet from him, keeping the rope taut, and she was pulled on to her knees as he fell, but, with the genius which comes to some people under pressure, she drove the carbine into the soft floe, belayed the rope round it and held it firm with her full weight. Ross stopped sliding. The killer fell back into the water.