Sometimes, if there are no birds to shoot or write about, he talks with Otto, the German harpooner. Despite his profession, Otto is a deep thinker and has a speculative, mystic bent. He thinks it probable that during the several hours Sumner was missing on the ice, his soul departed his material body and traveled out to the other, higher realms.
“Master Swedenborg describes a spirit place,” he explains, “a broad green valley surrounded by cliffs and mountains, where the dead souls gather before being separated out into the saved and the damned.”
Sumner doesn’t wish to disappoint him, but all he remembers is pain and fear, and then a long, dark, unpleasing kind of nullity.
“If there is such a fancy spot somewhere, I never saw sign of it,” he says.
“You may have gone direct up to heaven instead. That is possible too. Heaven is built entirely of light. The buildings, the parks, the people, everything is made of the divine light. There are rainbows everywhere. Multitudes of rainbows.”
“This is Swedenborg again?”
Otto nods.
“You would have met the dead and spoke to them there. Your parents, perhaps. Do you remember that?”
Sumner shakes his head, but Otto is undeterred.
“In heaven they would appear just the same as they did in this life,” he says, “but their bodies would be made from light instead of flesh.”
“And how can a body be made from light?”
“Because the light is what we truly are, that is our immortal essence. But only when the flesh falls away can the truth shine through.”
“Then what you describe is not a body at all,” he says, “but a soul.”
“Everything must have its form. The bodies of the dead in heaven are the forms that their particular souls have taken.”
Sumner shakes his head again. Otto is a mountainous, broad-chested Teuton with thick, fleshy features and fists like ham hocks. He can toss a harpoon out fifty yards without a grunt. It is strange to hear him expounding such flimsiness.
“Why would you believe such things?” he asks. “What good does it do you?”
“The world we see with our eyes is not the whole truth. Dreams and visions are just as real as matter. What we can imagine or think exists as truly as anything we can touch or smell. Where do our thoughts come from, if not from God?”
“They come from our experience,” Sumner says, “from what we’ve heard and seen and read, and what’s been told to us.”
Otto shakes his head.
“If that were true, then no growth or advancement would be possible. The world would be stagnant and unmoving. We would be doomed to live our lives facing backwards.”
Sumner looks at the distant crenelated line of bergs and land ice, the pale open sky, the dark impatient pitching of the sea. After he came to, he lay in his bunk a full week barely moving or speaking. His body was like a diagram, like a sketch that could be rubbed away and begun again, the pain and emptiness like hands molding and remolding him, knuckling and stretching out his soul.
“I didn’t die in the water,” he says. “If I had died, I would be new somehow, but there’s nothing new about me.”
* * *
Short of Disko Island, the ship becomes lodged fast in a floe. They attach ice anchors to the raft of ice nearest to them and attempt to warp the ship forwards using thick lines reefed to the capstans. The capstan bars are double-manned, but even so it is slow and exhausting work. It takes them the whole morning to move a mere thirty feet, and after dinner Brownlee decides, reluctantly, to give it up and wait for the wind to change and a new lead to open.
Drax and Cavendish take mattocks and descend to retrieve the anchors from the ice. The day is warm and cloudless. The ever-present arctic sun is high and throbbing out a dull, cantankerous kind of furnace heat. The two men, immune to it by now, cast off the warp ropes, hack out the wet ice around the anchors with their mattocks, and kick them free. Cavendish hefts the irons up onto his shoulder and begins to whistle “The Londonderry Air.” Drax, ignoring him, raises his right hand to shield his eyes against the sun and then, after another moment, points off landwards. Cavendish ceases whistling.
“What is it?”
“Bear,” Drax says. “The next floe over.”
Cavendish shields his eyes and squats down to get a better look.
“I’ll get a boat,” he says, “and a rifle.”
They lower one of the whaleboats onto the ice, and Drax and Cavendish and two others drag it across to the open water. The floe is a quarter mile wide and hummocky. The bear is pacing at its northerly edge, snapping at the air and sniffing about for seals.
Cavendish through his spyglass spots a trailing cub.
“Mother and child,” he says. “Look see.”
He hands the glass to Drax.
“That babe’s worth twenty pounds alive,” he says. “We can skin the mother.”
The four men discuss finances for a minute and then, having reached a satisfactory agreement, they pull slowly towards the floe. When they are fifty yards away, they stop rowing and steady the boat. Cavendish, with his knees braced against the bows, lines up his shot.
“I’ve got a guinea in my locker says I’ll put one plumb in her eyeball,” he whispers. “Who’ll match it, now?”
“If you’ve got a guinea in your locker, then my cock’s a cunt,” one of the men retorts.
Cavendish snickers.
“Now, now,” he says. “Now, now.”
“Put it in the heart,” Drax says.
“The heart it is,” Cavendish nods, “and here we go.”
He scowls along the barrel one more time, then shoots. The bullet hits the bear high on the rump. There is a squirt of blood and a roar.
“Fuck,” Cavendish says, looking suspiciously at the rifle. “The sight must be skewed.”
The bear is circling wildly now, shaking its withers, howling and biting at the air as if fending off an imaginary foe.
“Shoot her again,” Drax says, “before she runs.”
Before Cavendish can reload, the bear sees them. Instead of running, she pauses a moment, as if thinking what to do, then drops off the ice edge and disappears into the sea. The cub follows her.
The men row forwards, scanning the surface, waiting for the two bears to rise. Cavendish has his rifle at the ready; Drax is holding a looped rope to snickle the cub.
“She could have gone back under that ice,” Cavendish says. “There are cracks and holes aplenty.”
Drax nods.
“It’s the babe I want,” he says. “That babe’s worth twenty pounds easy. I know a fellow at the zoo.”
They circle slowly. The wind drops off, and the air about them settles. Drax snorts, then spits. Cavendish resists the urge to whistle. Nothing moves, there is silence all around, then, only a yard off the boat’s stern, the she-bear’s head, like the pale prototype of some archaic undersea god, rises up out of the dark waters. There is a moment of wild commotion, scrambling, shouting, cursing, then Cavendish takes aim and shoots again. The bullet hums past the ear of one of the oarsmen and slaps into the bear’s chest. The bear rears up shrieking. Its enormous clawed feet, broad and ragged as tree stumps, crash down on the whaleboat’s gunwales, raking and shredding the planks in a frenzied bid for purchase. The boat pitches wildly downwards and seems set to capsize. Cavendish is thrown forwards, dropping his rifle, and one of the oarsmen is tossed overboard.