“Don’t tell me that,” Sumner says. “Not now.”
“I don’t fear death,” Otto says. “I never have. We none of us have any idea of the riches that await.”
Sumner coughs violently twice, then retches onto the icy ground. The men gather the broken wood into a pyre and light it. The wind catches the flames and blows them sparkling upwards into darkness.
“You’re the one who survives,” Otto tells him. “Out of all of us. Remember that.”
“I said before, I don’t believe in prophecies.”
“Faith is not important. God doesn’t care whether we believe in Him or not. Why should He care?”
“You really think all this is His doing? The murders? The wrecks? The drownings?”
“I know it must be someone’s,” Otto says. “And if not the Lord, who else?”
While it burns, the bonfire elevates the crewmen’s spirits; its startling brightness gives them hope. As they watch it rage and fork and spit out sparks, they feel sure that somewhere out there other men are also watching, that boats will soon be lowered, help dispatched. They throw the last fragments of wood on the raucous blaze and wait expectantly for their rescuers to arrive. They smoke their pipes and squint eagerly out into the murky distance. Their talk is of women and children, of houses and fields they might still live to see again. Every minute, as the flames gradually reduce and daylight increases around them, they anticipate a boat, but none appears. After an hour more of fruitless waiting, they begin to feel their optimism curdle, and something rank and bitter take its place. Without a ship to shelter in, without enough firewood and food, how can anyone live through the winter in a place like this one? When Cavendish walks down from his seat on the cliff, holding the closed telescope in one hand and a rifle in the other, his expression remote, disgraceful, his eyes turned away, they know for certain that the plan has failed.
“Where are the boats?” someone shouts to him. “Why don’t they come?”
Cavendish ignores the questions. He goes inside the tent and starts counting up their remaining provisions. Even reducing everyone to half rations, two pounds of bread a week and the same of salt meat, there is barely enough to last past Christmas. He shows Otto, then calls the remaining crewmen together and explains that they will need to hunt for their food if they want to survive until the spring. Seals will do, he says, foxes, loons, auks, any kind of bird. As he speaks, it starts to snow outside and the wind picks up and shakes the canvas walls like a prelibation of the coming winter. No one answers him, and no one volunteers to hunt. They look back at him silently, and when he has finished they curl up in their blankets and drift to sleep, or sit about playing euchre with a pack of cards so ancient, limp, and filthy, they might have been cut from the rags of a lazar.
The snow falls steadily outside for the remainder of the day: heavy, wet flakes that sag the tent and clump like barnacles against the remaining whaleboat’s upturned hull. Sumner is racked and shuddering; his bones ache and his eyeballs itch and throb. He cannot sleep or piss although the desire for both is fierce within him. As he lies there, immobile, garbled fragments of The Iliad pass through his beleaguered mind — the black ships, the broken barricade, Apollo as a vulture, Zeus seated on a cloud. When he leaves the tent to shit, it is dark outside and the air is bitter cold. He crouches, pulls apart his raddled arse cheeks, and lets the hot, green liquid sluice out from him. The moon’s light is blurred by lines of cloud; snow sweeps across the outstretched bay, gathering on the extant floes and dissolving down into the black waters between. The cold air clamps and shrivels his bollocks. Sumner refastens his britches, turns, and sees, fifty yards away along the gravel shore, a bear.
The bear’s sharp, snakelike head is upraised; its broad body, heavy-shouldered and vast across the withers, stands fixed and certain. Sumner, shielding his eyes from the falling snow, takes a slow step forwards, then stops. The bear is unconcerned. It sniffs the ground, then turns in a slow pacing circle, ending where it began. Sumner stands and watches. The bear comes closer, but he doesn’t move away. He can see the texture of its coat now, the dark semi-quadrants of its claws against the snow. The bear yawns once, bares his fangs, and then, without warning or obvious purpose, rears upwards on its hind limbs like a circus animal and dangles for a moment, suspended like a limestone obelisk against the pelting, moon-stained sky.
From behind him, blowing down off the mud-brown cliffs, Sumner hears a sudden uprearing bellow, a vast symphonic howl, pained, primeval, yet human nonetheless, a cry beyond words and language it seems to him, choral, chthonic, like the conjoined voices of the damned. Filled with a moment’s terror, he turns around to look, but there is nothing there except the falling snow, the night, and the enormous, empty land off to the west, scarred and unimaginable, wrapping like bark around the planet’s darkened bole. The bear stays poised upright a moment longer, then flops down onto its front paws, swivels, and begins, implacably and without dispatch, to walk away.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The sea is beginning to refreeze. New ice, thin as glass, is forming between the existing floes, gluing them together. Soon enough, the bay will form into a solid white mass, rough-surfaced, immoveable, and they will be locked in until the spring thaw arrives. The men sleep, smoke, play cards. They eat their meager rations but make no efforts to improve their lot or prepare for the brutal winter to come. As the temperature falls, and the nights lengthen, they burn driftwood washed in from the wreck of the Hastings and finish the final bags of coal they salvaged from the Volunteer. In the evenings, after supper, Otto reads drearily from the Bible, and Cavendish leads them all in ribald song.
Since the night he saw the bear, Sumner’s symptoms have been gradually reducing. He still has headaches and night sweats, but the nausea is not so frequent and his stool is firmer. Freed to this degree from the hectoring tyrannies of his own body, he is better able to notice the condition of those around him. Without the usual healthful rigor of their shipboard duties, they have grown listless and pale. If they are to have enough strength and will to live through the depredations of the coming winter, to fend off the effects of cold and hunger, it occurs to him that they must be made to move about somehow, to invigorate themselves with exercise and labor. If not, then their current mood of melancholy will likely harden into despair and a more deadly lassitude will overtake them all.
He speaks to Cavendish and Otto, and they agree that the men should be divided into two roughly equal watches and that each morning, so long as the weather allows it, one watch will take the rifles and climb the cliffs to hunt for food and the other will spend an hour at least outside the tent tramping up and down the strand as a way of maintaining their vigor. The men, when they are told this, show little enthusiasm for the scheme. They appear unconcerned when Sumner explains that if they remain immobile and torpid their blood will thicken and clot inside their veins and their organs will become flaccid and eventually fail. It is only when Cavendish bellows at them and threatens to reduce the rations still further if they don’t comply that they sourly give in.
Once begun, the daily hunting produces little that is edible — some small birds, occasionally a fox — and the trudging back and forth is much resented. After less than a month, these Spartan regularities are interrupted by two days of unceasing horizontal snow and pounding gales. Afterwards, there are drifts five feet deep all around the camp, and the temperature has dropped so low that it is painful to inhale. The men refuse to hunt or walk in such conditions and when Cavendish ventures out alone, in spite of them, he returns an hour later empty-handed, exhausted, and frostbitten. That same night they start to break up the second whaleboat for fuel, and, as the brutal cold persists and deepens, they burn more and more of it every day, until Cavendish is forced to take control of the remaining wood supply and begin to ration its use. The fire, already meager, becomes for most of the day little more than a small pile of faintly glowing embers. A layer of ice forms on the inside of the tent and the very air itself feels viscous and gelid. All night, triple-layered in wool, flannel, and oil skin, clustered together like the victims of a sudden massacre, men shudder and spasm and jolt themselves awake.