Drax pushes Cavendish aside and takes an eight-inch boat spade from the side rack. The bear, giving up on the boat, lunges for the thrashing oarsman. She clamps onto his elbow with her teeth, and then, with one dismissive shake of her enormous neck, rips away most of his right arm. Drax, standing upright in the still-rolling whaleboat, lifts up the boat spade and plunges its chisel edge hard down into the bear’s back. He feels the moment of resistance and then the inevitable and irretrievable give as the bear’s spine is split asunder by the milled steel edge. He pulls the spade out and brings it down again, and then again, stabbing deeper with each thrust. With the third blow, he pierces the bear’s heart and a great purple gout of blood comes steaming to the surface and spreads like India ink across her ragged white coat. The air is filled with a fetid blast of butchery and excrement. Drax feels pleasure at this work, arousal, a craftsman’s sense of pride. Death, he believes, is a kind of making, a kind of building up. What was one thing, he thinks, is become something else.
The mutilated oarsman after some moments of screaming has passed out from his pain and is beginning to sink. The bloody remnants of his lost arm still depend from the dead bear’s tusks. Cavendish gets the boat hook and drags him back on board. They cut off a length of whale line and tourniquet his stump.
“That’s what I call an almighty fuckup,” Cavendish says.
“We still have the babe,” Drax says, pointing. “That’s twenty pounds right there.”
The bear cub is swimming beside his mother’s corpse, mewing and nudging the body with his nose.
“A man’s lost his fucking arm,” Cavendish says.
Drax takes his looped rope and, using the boat hook, slips it over the bear cub’s head and pulls it tight. They bore a hole in the dead she-bear’s jaw, run a cord through the hole, and lash the other end of the cord to the bollard. It is a slow, hard pull back to the ship and before they get there, the oarsman expires from his injuries.
“I’ve heard of such a thing,” Cavendish says. “But never seen it happen ere now.”
“If you could shoot straight, he’d still be living,” Drax says.
“I put two solid bullets into her, and she still had strength enough to take off a man’s arm. What kind of bear is that, I ask you?”
“A bear is a bear,” Drax says.
Cavendish shakes his head and sniffs.
“A bear is a fucking bear,” he echoes, as though the thought had not occurred to him before.
When they get back to the Volunteer they attach the dead bear to a block and tackle and haul her up out of the water until she is suspended over the deck, dangling, shabby and lifeless, from the yardarm drooling blood. Still down in the water, separated from his parent now, the cub becomes enraged, swimming hither and thither in a fierce, wild-eyed frenzy, snapping at the boat hook and pulling back against the rope collar. Drax, on his feet in the whaleboat, calls for an empty blubber cask and, with the help of Cavendish, tugs and prods the bear cub into it. The others toss down a net and haul the cask, filled now with a screaming, flailing bear cub, up onto the deck. Brownlee watches from the afterdeck as the cub tries, repeatedly, to escape out of the upright cask and Drax, armed with a stave, prods him down again.
“Lower the mother’s body,” Brownlee calls out. “That’s the only way to quiet the beast.”
Flat out on the deck, a hillock of bloodied fur, the she-bear steams like the gargantuan centerpiece of some barely imaginable banquet. Brownlee kicks over the cask, and the cub scurries out, his claws scrabbling and scraping on the wooden deck. There is a moment of panicked swiveling and disorientation (men, laughing, scramble up the rigging to escape), but then he sees his mother’s body and rushes to it. He nudges its flank with his nose and starts to helplessly lick the smeared and bloodied fur. Brownlee watches. The cub whimpers, sniffs, then settles itself in the lee of the mother’s corpse, flank to flank.
“That cub’s worth twenty pounds,” Drax says. “I know a man at the zoo.”
Brownlee looks at him.
“The blacksmith will rivet you a grille so you can keep him in the cask,” he says. “More likely than not he will die before we get home, but, if not, every penny he fetches goes to the dead man’s people.”
Drax stares back at Brownlee for a moment as if readying himself to disagree, then nods and turns aside.
Later, after the dead oarsman has been stitched up in sailcloth and slid, with gruff and minimal ceremony, over the side, Cavendish skins the she-bear with a hatchet and a flensing knife. The cub, secured now in its cask, watches on, trembling, as Cavendish hacks, cuts, and tugs away.
“Can a bear be eaten?” Sumner asks him.
Cavendish shakes his head.
“Bear meat is foul-tasting, and the liver is downright poisonous. All that a bear is truly good for is the skin.”
“For ornament then?”
“Some rich man’s drawing room. It would have been better for the price if Drax had been less eager with the boat spade, but I suspect the gash can be repaired.”
“And the cub will be sold to the zoological gardens if it lives?”
Cavendish nods.
“A full-grown bear is a sight of fearsome beauty. People will pay a ha’penny a time to see a full-grown bear and think it cheap at that price.”
Sumner crouches down and peers into the darkness of the cask.
“This one might die of heartbreak before we get him home,” he says.
Cavendish shrugs and pauses from his work. He looks back at Sumner and grins. His arms are dyed bright red up to the elbows and his waistcoat and trousers are stippled with gore.
“He will forget the dead one soon enough,” he says. “Affection is a passing thing. A beast is no different from a person in that regard.”
CHAPTER NINE
They come to him with wounds and bruises, headaches, ulcers, hemorrhoids, stomachaches, and swollen testicles. He gives them poultices and plasters, ointments and balms: Epsom salts, calamine, ipecac. If nothing else works, he bleeds or blisters them, he induces painful vomiting, explosive diarrhea. They are grateful for these attentions, these signs of care, even when he is causing them discomfort or worse. They believe he is an educated man and that he must, therefore, know what he is about. They have a kind of faith in him — foolish and primitive perhaps, but real.
To Sumner, the men who come to him are bodies only: legs, arms, torsos, heads. Their flesh forms the front and rear of his concern. Towards the rest of them — their moral characters, their souls — he remains solidly indifferent. It is not his task, he thinks, to educate or move them towards virtue, nor is it his task to judge, soothe, or befriend them. He is a medical man, not a priest or a magistrate or a spouse. He will heal their lesions, remedy, where it is possible, their maladies and disease, but beyond that they have no call on him, and he, reduced in spirits as he currently is, has no comforts available to give.
One evening, after supper has concluded, Sumner is visited in his cabin by one of the ship’s boys. His name is Joseph Hannah. He is thirteen years old, slightly built with dark hair, a broad, pale brow, and gloomy, sunken eyes. Sumner has noticed him before and remembers his name. He looks, as the ship’s boys do, grubby and disarranged, and he appears, as he stands in the doorway, to be suffering from an attack of shyness. He is twisting his cap in his hands and wincing every now and then, as if even the thought of addressing the surgeon is painful.
“Do you wish to speak to me, Joseph Hannah?” Sumner asks him. “Are you feeling ill?”