The four men depart shortly afterwards, without ceremony or extended farewell. Sumner gives them each their share of the frozen seal meat, and Otto hands Webster a rifle and a handful of cartridges. They shake hands quickly but neither party attempts to speak or soften the dread implications of their leaving. As they watch them walk away, their dark outlines shrinking into the general blankness, Sumner turns to Otto.
“If Henry Drax isn’t the Devil, I can’t claim to know just what he is. If there’s a word been coined for a man like him, I don’t believe I’ve learned it.”
“Nor will you learn it,” Otto says, “not from any human book, at least. A fellow like him won’t be caged in or fixed by words.”
“By what then?”
“Faith alone.”
Sumner shakes his head and laughs unhappily.
“You dreamt we’d die, and now it’s coming true,” he says. “It’s getting colder every day, and we have three weeks’ food at most and no hope of help or rescue. Those four bastards just gone are good as dead already.”
“Miracles occur. If great evil exists, why not great good the same?”
“Signs and fucking wonders,” Sumner says. “Is that the best that you can offer me?”
“I don’t offer you anything at all,” Otto answers calmly. “It’s not in my power to do so.”
Sumner shakes his head again. The three remaining men have retreated into the tent for warmth. It is too cold to linger outside for long, but he cannot bear the thought of returning to their dreary, hopeless company, so instead he sets off walking east, past Cavendish’s new-dug grave and out onto the frozen bay. The sea ice has been cracked by winds, buckled, and then refrozen into a rubbled landscape of crazed and tilted blocks fissured and motionless. Black mountains, gargantuan and sumptuous, rise off in the distance. The dangling sky is the color of milky quartz. He walks until he is breathless and his face and feet are numb, and then turns about. The wind is blowing against him as he begins to walk back. He feels it seeping through his layers of clothing, nudging and chilling his chest, groin, and thighs. He thinks of Webster and the others walking west and feels suddenly sickened and wretched at his core. He stops, groans, then leans over and vomits out gobbets of half-digested seal meat onto the frozen snow beneath. He feels a sharp pain like a lance jabbing in his stomach and releases an involuntary squirt of shit into his trousers. For a moment, he cannot breathe at all. He closes his eyes and waits, and the feeling passes. The sweat is frozen on his brow, and his beard is hard now with saliva and bile and fragments of tooth-ground meat. He looks up at the snow-packed sky and opens wide his mouth, but no sounds or words come out of it, and, after a short while longer, he closes it again and walks on silently.
* * *
They divide up evenly the scanty rations that remain and allow each man to cook and eat them as and when he pleases. They take turns to feed and tend the fitful blubber lamp. The remaining rifle lies near the entrance of the tent for anyone who wishes to hunt with it, but although they pass to and fro to shit and piss and bring back snow to melt for water, no one picks it up. There is no one in command any longer: Otto’s authority has gone, and Sumner’s role as surgeon, without his medicines, means nothing. They sit and wait. They sleep and play cards. They tell themselves that Webster and the others will send help, or that the Yaks themselves will surely come out searching for the two who are dead. But no one arrives, and nothing changes. The only book they have is Otto’s Bible and Sumner refuses to read from it. He cannot bear its certainties, its rhetoric, its all-too-easy hope. Instead, he silently recites The Iliad. Whole sections return to him at night, unbidden, near-complete, and in the morning, he tells them over line by line. When the other men see him mumbling to himself like that they assume he is at prayer, and he doesn’t seek to disabuse them since this is as close to honest prayer as he is ever likely to come.
A week after the departure of Webster and the others, a fierce storm blows in off the bay, and the tent is lifted away from its moorings and ripped along one seam. They spend a wretched, bone-chilled night clustered together gripping the sagged and flapping remnants, and in the morning, as the weather clears, they commence, glumly, to make what repairs they can. With his jackknife, Otto whittles and bores some rough needles out of seal bone, hands them to the men, then commences pulling lines of thread from the frayed cuffs of one of the blankets. Sumner, stiff and dazed from lack of sleep, walks off in search of rocks suitable for reanchoring the edges of the tent. The wind is bitter and blustery, and in places he has to wade through thigh-deep drifts of snow. As he passes by the tip of the headland, with the rough ice stretching out before him and the wind whipping crystalline spindrift from its angled peaks, he notices Cavendish’s gravesite in a state of ghastly disarray. The covering stones have been scattered and the corpse itself has been half-consumed by animals. All that is left is a grotesque and bloody gallimaufry of bones, sinew, and innards. Pieces of shredded undergarment are strewn about haphazardly. The right foot, gnawed off above the ankle but with toes intact, lies off to one side. The head is missing. Sumner comes closer and slowly crouches down. He takes his knife from his pocket and levers out a rib from the frozen mass. He pokes and peers at it awhile, touches its broken end with his fingertip, then looks off into the white distance.
When he gets back to the tent, he takes Otto to one side and explains what he has just seen. They talk together for a while, Sumner points, Otto crosses himself, then they walk across to where the snow house used to be and begin digging down into the icy ruins with their bare hands. When they reach the stiff and frozen bodies of the two Yaks, they pull them free and strip off the remains of their sealskin undergarments. Lifting the bodies up by the heels like wheelbarrows, they drag them farther away from the tent. When they judge the distance and angle is right, they place them down again. They are panting from the effort of the pull, and steam is rising up from their heads and faces. They stand talking awhile longer and then walk back to the ramshackle tent. Sumner loads the rifle, then explains to the other men that there is a hungry bear somewhere out on the ice and the dead Yaks are bait for it.
“There’s enough good meat on a beast like that to last the five of us a month or more,” he says. “And we can use the hide for extra clothing.”
The men look back at him, empty-eyed, indifferent, strained beyond their limits. When he suggests they share the effort — that each man take the rifle for two hours at a time and keep a watch out for the bear while the others rest or repair the tent — they shake their heads.
“Dead Yaks int good bait for a bear,” they tell him, with a sureness which suggests they have tried such a thing before and found it disappointing. “Such a plan won’t work.”
“Help me anyway,” he says. “What harm can it do?”
They turn away and begin to deal out the cards: one, one, one; two, two, two; three, three, three.
“A cockeyed plan like that won’t work,” they say again, as if their gloomful confidence itself provides them comfort. “Not now, not ever.”
He sits at one side of the tent with the loaded rifle at his feet and peers out through a spy hole cut into the gray canvas. Once, while he is watching, a rook comes down and settles on the forehead of the elder Yak, pecks briefly at the matted tanglement of his frozen hair, and then extends its wings and jerks upwards and away. Sumner considers firing at it, but saves his powder. He is patient, hopeful. He is sure the bear is close. Perhaps it is asleep after its recent feasting, but when it wakes it will be hungry again. It will sniff the air and remember the treasures nearby. As it gets darker, Sumner hands the rifle across to Otto. He cuts a two-inch cube of seal meat from his cache of provender, skewers it on the point of his knife, and holds it over the blubber lamp to cook. The other three, without pausing from their endless game of euchre, observe him carefully. When he has eaten he lies down and covers himself.