After what seems like barely a moment, Otto nudges him awake again. There is ice on the outside of his blanket where the moisture from his breath has seeped through its weft. Otto tells him there is still no sign of any bear. Sumner shuffles across to the spy hole and looks out again. The moon is gibbous, the arcing sky garrulous with stars. The two dead bodies lie just as they were, exposed and recumbent, like the eerie gisants of a long-forgotten dynasty. Sumner props himself against the rifle and wills the bear to come to him. He tries to picture its arrival, its slow-footed emergence from the murk. He imagines its curiosity, its wariness: the smell of dead flesh pulling it forwards, a sense of strangeness, foreignness, holding it back.
He falls asleep while seated. He dreams of trout fishing on Bilberry Lough: it is summer and he is wearing shirtsleeves and a boater, above and below him is a blue expanse of sky and water, and all around the lake is edged with elms and oak. He is empty-headed, happy. When he wakes, he sees movement in the distance. He wonders if it is the wind against the snow or if the ice is shifting out in the bay, but then he sees the bear, starkly white against the ashen darkness. He watches it approach the dead bodies, moving, low-headed and rhythmical, without eagerness or urgency. He pushes the tent flap slowly to one side with one hand, checks the percussion cap, cocks the rifle, and raises it partway up to his shoulder. The bear is tall and broad but spindle-shanked and gaunt around the ribs. He watches it sniff at the two bodies, then raise its paw and place it atop the chest of the elder. No one else is awake. Otto is snoring softly. Sumner kneels. He rests his left elbow on his knee and presses the rifle stock into the softness of his right shoulder. He raises the sight and looks along the barrel. The bear is a rag of whiteness in the larger dark. He breathes in once, exhales, then fires. The bullet misses the head but hits high on the shoulder. Sumner grabs the bag of cartridges and rushes out of the tent. The snow is deep and uneven and he stumbles twice, then rights himself. When he reaches the bodies he sees a large patch of blood and then a spattered trail leading onward. The bear is nearly a quarter mile ahead now, running lopsidedly, favoring the right foreleg, as if the left is maimed or numb. Sumner runs after it. He is sure it cannot escape, that soon it will either collapse and die or turn around to fight.
Away to the east, the sky is faintly whitening. Narrow pearlescent fissures open in the dark ranks of close-packed cloud; the taut and featureless horizon turns gray, then brown, then blue. As he reaches the tip of the headland, Sumner’s lungs and gullet are aching from the cold; he is panting, and the blood is thrumming in his ears. The bear passes the desecrated gravesite without pause and then veers north out onto the ice field. Sumner loses sight of it briefly, then sees it again emerging from behind the heaped-up rubble of a pressure ridge. He clambers after, up and over, slipping and scrambling as he goes, dropping his rifle, then picking it up again. He follows the deep-set tracks, the blood spots. His leg aches, and his heart is thumping, but he tells himself it is a matter of time only, that every minute that passes weakens the bear a little more. He wades on through the snow. On either side, high, hard-frozen shards rear up like the pitched roofs of a half-drowned village. Grainy shadows gather in their lee, then spill out sideways.
The bear, despite the wound, moves steadily and surely, as though set on a course plotted long before. The sky is filled by narrow rolls of cloud, gray and brown on top, gilded below by the breaching sun. They move on, man and animal in primitive procession, through a landscape so smashed up and uneven, it might have been constructed by a simpleton from the shattered pieces of some previous intactness. After an hour, the ice flattens into a mile-wide plain, its surface gently ribbed like the palate of a hound. Halfway across, as if suddenly aware of its new environment, the bear slows, then stops and turns about. Sumner can see the smear of red blazoned on its flank and the gouts of steam rising from its muzzle. After a moment’s pause, he takes a waxed paper cartridge from his pocket, bites off the end, and pours the black powder into the bore of the rifle; he pushes the ball end of the cartridge in also, tears off the excess paper, and presses it home with the ramrod. His hands are trembling as he does this. He is dripping sweat, and he can feel his lungs wheezing and roaring inside his chest like bellows in an iron forge. He fumbles in his pocket for a percussion cap, finds one and fits it over the steel nipple. He paces forwards slowly until the gap between them is no more than three hundred feet, then lowers himself down onto the ridged ice. He feels its coldness against his stomach and thighs. His head is wreathed in steam. The bear watches carefully but does nothing. Its flanks are heaving. Strings of drool are dripping down from its jaw. Sumner raises and adjusts the sights, cocks the hammer, and, remembering the previous shot, aims a foot to the left. He blinks the sweat away from his eyes, squints, and pulls the trigger. There is the sharp crack of the percussion cap exploding but no recoil. The bear snorts at the sudden noise, then wheels about and starts to run again. Scuds of snow spume out from under it. Sumner, cursing the misfire, scrambles to his feet, tosses the old percussion cap away, and fits another one. He steadies himself, takes aim again, and shoots, but the bear is too far gone and the shot falls shy. He watches it awhile, then re-shoulders the rifle and begins to follow after.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Beyond the ice plain’s edge another pressure ridge rears up, brown-edged and haggard at the peaks, its steep flanks bermed and bastioned like an antique siegework. The bear tracks west until it finds a gap, then leaps up into it and clambers through. The risen sun, smeared by cloud, gives off no noticeable heat. Sumner’s sweat drips down into his beard and eyebrows and freezes into hard spangles. The bear has slowed down to a walk now, but so has Sumner. As he follows it up and across the ridge and onto another undulant snowfield, the gap between them barely alters. He gains twenty yards, then loses it again. The aching in his legs and chest is sharp and hot but regular. He thinks of turning back but doesn’t. The chase has found a rhythm already, a pattern he can’t easily disrupt. When he is thirsty, he reaches down and eats the snow; when he is hungry, he lets the feeling rise, peak, then pass away. He breathes, he walks, the bear precedes him always, badged high with blood, steam-bound, its tracks as broad and round as soup bowls.
Every minute he expects the bear to fail, to weaken, to begin to die, but it never does so. It persists. Sometimes he feels a fierce and violent hatred for it, at other times a sickly kind of love. Rump muscles roil beneath the bear’s slack fur. Its giant legs lift and fall like drop hammers. They pass by a berg embedded in the floe — two hundred feet high, half a mile long, starkly vertical and flat-topped like the rhomboid plug of an extinct volcano. Its steep and shear-marked sides are veined with blue and gaitered at their base with drifted snow. Sumner has no pocket watch but guesses it is now past noon. He realizes he has come too far, that even if he kills the bear he will not be able to carry its meat back to camp. This truth disturbs him for a moment, but then, as he walks onwards, its power thins and fades, and all he is aware of is the lift and press of his feet across the snow and the hollow roar of his own quick breathing.