“Good,” the priest says. He scoops another piece of meat and does the same again. Sumner eats three more pieces but lets the fourth drop out onto the floor unchewed. The priest nods, then lowers Sumner’s head back down onto the blanket.
“We’ll try you with a mug of tea later on,” he says. “See how you do with that.”
After two days more, Sumner is able to sit up and eat by himself. The priest helps him into a chair, puts the blanket over his shoulders, and they sit together on two adjacent sides of the small wooden table.
“The men who found you consider you what they call an Angakoq,” the priest explains, “which means ‘wizard’ in the Esquimaux language. They believe that bears have great powers, and that certain, chosen men partake in them. The same thing is true of other animals too, of course — deer and walrus, seals, even certain seabirds, I believe — but in their mythology the bear is the most powerful beast by far. Men who have the bear as their genius are capable of the greatest magic — healing, divination, and so on.”
He glances at the stranger to see if there is any sign that he has understood, but Sumner looks impassively down at his food.
“I’ve seen some of their Angakoqs in action and they’re naught but conjurers and charlatans, of course. They dress themselves up in gruesome masks and other audacious gewgaws; they make a great song and dance in the igloo, but there’s nothing to it at all. It’s nasty heathenish stuff, the crudest kind of superstition, but they know no better and how could they? They’d never seen the Bible before I got here most of them, never heard the gospel preached in earnest.”
Sumner looks up at him briefly but doesn’t pause from his chewing. The priest smiles a little and nods encouragement, but Sumner doesn’t smile back.
“It’s slow and painful work,” the priest goes on. “I’ve been here alone since the early spring. It took months to win their trust — through gifts at first, knives, beads, needles, and so on, and then through acts of kindness, giving help when they needed it, extra clothes or medicines. They are kindly people, but they are very primitive and childlike, almost incapable of abstract thought or any of the higher emotions. The men hunt and the women sew and suckle children, and that forms the limit of their interests and knowledge. They have a kind of metaphysics, true, but it is a crude and self-serving one, and, so far as I can tell, many don’t even believe in it themselves. My task is to help them grow up, you might say, to develop their souls and make them self-aware. That is why I am making the translation of the Bible here.” He nods at the piles of books and papers. “If I can get it right, find the correct words in their language, then they will begin to understand, I’m sure. They are God’s creatures after all, in the end, just as much as you or I.”
The priest spoons up a piece of meat and chews it slowly. Sumner reaches for his mug of tea, picks it up, sips, then puts it back down on the table. For the first time in days he feels the words gathering inside him, dividing, accumulating, taking on strength and form. Soon, he knows, they will begin to rise up his throat and then they will spill out onto his bruised and ulcerated tongue, and then, whether he likes it or not, whether he wants it or not, he will speak.
The priest looks at him.
“Are you ill?” he asks.
Sumner shakes his head. He raises his right hand a moment, then opens his mouth. There is a pause.
“What medicines?” he says.
It comes out in a blurred mumble. The priest looks confused, but then smiles and leans eagerly forwards.
“Say that again,” he says. “I didn’t quite catch…”
“Medicines,” Sumner repeats. “What medicines do you have?”
“Oh, medicine,” the priest says. “Of course, of course.”
He stands up, goes into the storeroom at the rear of the cabin, and comes back with a small medicine chest. He places it down on the table in front of Sumner.
“This is all I have,” he says. “I’ve used the salts a good deal, of course, and the calomel for the native children when they have the flux.”
Sumner opens the box and begins taking out the bottles and jars, peering at the contents and reading the labels. The priest watches him do it.
“Are you a doctor?” he asks. “Is that what you are?”
Sumner ignores the question. He takes out everything in the chest, and then tips the chest upside down to make sure it is truly empty. He looks at the collection arrayed on the tabletop and shakes his head.
“Where’s the laudanum?” he says.
The priest frowns but doesn’t answer.
“The laudanum,” Sumner says again more loudly. “The fucking laudanum, where is it gone to?”
“We have none of that left,” the priest says. “I had one bottle but it’s used up already.”
Sumner closes his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again, the priest is putting the medicines carefully back into the chest.
“I see you can talk plain English after all,” he says. “For a while there I was fearing you were a Polack or Serb or some other strange denomination.”
Sumner takes up the bowl and spoon, and starts eating again as if nothing has happened.
“Where are you from?” the priest asks him.
“It doesn’t matter so much where I’m from.”
“Perhaps it doesn’t to you, but if a man is being fed and kept warm in a spot where he would likely die if left to fend for himself, you might expect a little courtesy is due to the people who are doing it for him.”
“I’ll pay you back for the food and the fire.”
“And when will you do that, I wonder?”
“In the spring, when the whaling ships come back.”
The priest nods and sits down again. He rakes his fingers through the edges of his gray beard, then scratches the point of his chin with his thumbnail. His cheeks are flushed, but he is struggling to remain charitable in the face of Sumner’s insults.
“Some might call it a kind of miracle what happened to you,” he says, after a pause, “being found preserved alive on the ice inside the body of a dead bear.”
“I wouldn’t call it that myself.”
“Then what would you call it?”
“Perhaps you should be asking the bear.”
The priest stares back at him for a moment, then yaps out a laugh.
“Oh, you’re a clever kind of fellow, I can see that,” he says. “Three days lying over there silent as the grave, not a single word from your lips, and now you’re up and making merry with me.”
“I’ll pay you back for the food and the fire,” Sumner says again flatly, “just as soon as I get another berth.”
“You’re sent here for a reason,” the priest says. “A man doesn’t just appear like that from nowhere. I don’t know what the reason is yet, but I know the Good Lord must have one.”
Sumner shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “Not me. I want no part of that rigmarole.”
* * *
Half a week later, a sledge arrives carrying two hunters the priest has not seen before. He pulls on his anorak and mittens and goes outside. The woman, whose Christianized name is Anna, comes out of the igloo at the same time, greets the men, and offers them food. They talk to her for several minutes, and then, speaking more slowly so he will understand them, they talk to the priest. They explain that they have found a ruined tent a day’s journey away with four dead white men lying frozen within it. They show him, as proof, the items they have salvaged — knives, ropes, a hammer, a grease-stained copy of the Bible. When he asks if they will go back there to retrieve the bodies so they can be buried with the proper rites, they shake their heads and say they must continue on with their hunting. They feed their dogs on walrus meat, then eat in the igloo and rest awhile but do not stay overnight. They try to sell him the Bible before they leave, but when he refuses to trade for it, they hand it to the woman Anna as a gift. After they have gone, Anna comes to the cabin and explains that the hunters told her they also found two dead Esquimaux at the white men’s camp. They were both stripped naked, she reports, and one had been murdered with a knife. She points to her own neck and indicates the location of the wounds.