by Rebecca Hunt
‘Never trust a fur seal, even when it’s sedated,’ Decker said, crackling with nervous adrenaline as he studied the seals. ‘The head snaps round like a pressurized hose and pulps your foot.’ He wagged a finger at them. ‘And the pups aren’t any safer. Yes, they look fluffy, yes, they look sweet. Let me tell you about a colleague who thought the same. His thumb was torn off.’
Preparation for siring the next fur seal generation started in early November. The bulls arrived on Everland first, followed a few days later by the cows. The mating season then occurred during two violent weeks in December, once pups conceived the year before were born and the cows briefly became fertile again. During those few vital days, war and gore and birth and creation turned the beaches into a red mire of chaos. Blood drenched the sand as bulls lacerated their competitors and battles for supremacy thundered down the shores.
And to be successful was itself devastating. For a bull to remain king he had to guard his harem from scores of challengers. It was a task which demanded such Herculean fury and vigilance he couldn’t rest, and so weakened; couldn’t eat, and so gradually starved. Since the heavily pregnant females were only a few days away from giving birth, this summer’s carnage was about to begin.
The cows were dwarfed by three bulls dozing at the edge of the group. Unlike the sleekly pretty females, the males were ragged and massive. They were lion-sized and couch-like, with thick brown ruffs which looked similar to matted old towelling. Instead of neat flippers, they lolloped about on huge leathery rudders.
‘So I’m going to aim for him there,’ Decker said about the nearest two-and-a-half-metre bull. ‘That thirty-stone piece of cake there.’
Jess looked warily at the syringe Decker was taping to the end of a pole. ‘Won’t that thing just break off when you stab him,’ she said.
Decker’s tenseness didn’t allow him to answer. He drew a measure of Valium derivative into a syringe and flicked at the needle, thinking of blood loss and bite marks with the diameter of a dinner plate. Thinking of his creaking knees and reduced agility. Thinking about how much easier this used to be even two years ago.
Bulls came into sexual maturity at seven years of age, but they only began mating at around ten, when they were tough enough to survive the punishment. It took a decade to be worthy of competing in this arena, and the honour quickly killed them. Although the cows lived to twenty, the bulls were dead by fourteen.
‘Hi buddy!’ The bull jogged up on its flippers as Decker skirted round, holding the pole like a bayonet. ‘Take it easy, buddy! Nobody’s going to hurt you.’
Exactly how much the bull was going to fail to cooperate became clear when it let out a low corrugated roar and pumped to its full height.
‘Not going to hurt you! Stay where you are,’ Decker said, and jabbed in the needle. He sprinted off along the beach with the seal pursuing him. Within seconds the bull had slowed to a halt. It rocked unsteadily and then fell down in sedation.
‘Quick, Brix. Hurry,’ Decker said.
They had about fifteen minutes before the bull revived. While Jess helped Decker with the microchip, Brix was attaching a plastic tag of identification to the rear flipper with a cattle-tagging applicator. It was a staple-gun type of machine which operated in the same way as an ear-piercing gun, a prong on the lower jaw punching through the skin to rivet the two sides of the tag together.
‘Quicker, Brix. Want your arm ripped off? Because that’s what’s going to happen if he wakes up and finds you driving a spike into his tail.’
Brix had become mesmerized by the flipper. It felt like a wetsuit, she thought. Heavy like a side of pork belly. She was aware of Jess watching her as she fastened the tag, anticipating a hilarious response. Pathetic squeamishness, maybe, or hand-flapping screechy pleas for assistance. Whatever Jess had expected, Brix didn’t give it to her. She’d drafted her first ever wild seal into service and was too elated to care.
Seal-wrangling the smaller yet equally aggressive cows required either Jess or Brix to snare the tail in a dog-catcher-style hoop on a stick and keep the cow steady until Decker fastened immobilizing wooden stocks around her neck. Each cow made scouring burp noises of protest as she received her microchip and had a satellite tag glued to the fur between her shoulders, where it would stay until it moulted off in March. The tag resembled a miniature walkie-talkie, and used a satellite-based navigation system to track where the cow went to feed. The pup she’d soon deliver would take four months to rear, and since the pups couldn’t survive without their mothers, it meant the cows were tied to the island. Unlike the males, who frequently disappeared, the females guaranteed a solid, reliable body of data.
‘Why are you wrenching out her teeth?’ Jess asked.
Decker had applied some local anaesthetic to the seal’s gums and was using pliers to remove a small tooth from behind one of her lower canines. His explanation was mostly drowned out by the seal’s now screamingly loud fury. ‘One tooth,’ they heard him say. ‘Single extraction.’
‘It’s to record her age,’ Brix said, ignored.
‘So why didn’t you take teeth from the bull seal?’ Jess asked Decker.
‘Don’t need to.’ Decker wiped the freed tooth on his trousers and let it rattle into a Kilner jar. ‘You’ll see why in about a month,’ he said, and then saw that Jess wasn’t listening.
Being upset didn’t make Jess soften, it made her harder. Both her hands were in fists, and her eyes were fixed with an angry intensity on something beyond Decker at the edge of the beach. ‘We’ve got to help,’ she said with her jaw clenched.
The seal had injuries consistent with an orca attack. Its side was split to show tissue and a white waxy rind of blubber, with deeper wounds revealing a mass of tubes. The giant petrels surrounding the seal temporarily withdrew in loping, hopping steps as the seal thrashed its head. These were vulturous birds whose large beaks could strip a carcass, or gash rents through thick hide. They danced back when the seal lunged, and then regrouped to tear dangling red scraps from the open places, eating it alive.
‘How many expeditions have you done, Jess? Five?’ Decker said. ‘So you know what helping the seal means. What it is we can realistically offer.’
‘I wouldn’t ask if I could do it myself,’ Jess said. No one was less likely to delegate or refuse a job on the basis of its unpleasantness than she was. It didn’t matter whether it involved dismantling oil-blackened engines, shifting drums of fuel, clearing snowdrifts from Aegeus’s runway, or scrubbing out the industrial freezers. She would dig or carry or build or clean for as long as it took to get the work done, but she wasn’t able to do this. Something in her just couldn’t. She had the will to end an animal’s suffering. What she didn’t have, and had never had, was the ability to actually do it.
‘Jess, it isn’t fair to intervene,’ Decker said, because the petrels’ behaviour was part of the cycle of existence. However uncomfortable, however sad, it needed to be tolerated. ‘Right, Brix?’ he said, his tone urging her to agree. ‘We shouldn’t intervene?’
‘I’m not sure, I think maybe we should.’ It occurred to Brix that leaving the seal to its torturous death wasn’t about any reverence for nature as much as convenience. Whilst mercy could be granted in one minute of ugliness, the guilt of denying that relief seemed likely to last through tonight, and the next day, and the next, probably for weeks, possibly for months. ‘I think we should,’ she said again.
‘Decker, I’m asking,’ Jess said. ‘Please. We can’t leave it.’
Yes, we can, thought Decker. Or rather he thought, I can, since it was he who’d have to do it. He knew from experience that he’d feel sickened for hours afterwards, and there was still a whole afternoon of exhaustion ahead of him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I genuinely am, but no. Jess, turn away. We’re not getting involved.’
The momentum of having made the decision pro
pelled Brix into finding what she gauged to be a large enough rock. And then, before she could think, she’d started to walk. She was actually doing it. ‘Don’t watch this,’ she said to Jess, crunching across the snow towards the seal.
20
April 1913
The search party men had reboarded the ship and were trooping down the narrow stairs. Among the hot bread and coffee smells which billowed from the galley was a less pleasant smell. Someone nudged Coppers in the ribs. ‘Kidney soup!’
Coppers puckered his lips, sickened.
The Kismet had departed from Cardiff on a rainy October morning in 1910 with the sponsorship of around eighty companies, in exchange for a promotional photograph of their products being enjoyed in Antarctica. Since Coppers despised kidney soup, it was naturally he who’d been forced into posing with it. He’d sat on a branded box, holding an open can with a spoonful of the kidney poison raised to his mouth. The instant the pictures were taken he’d jumped up. ‘Only time you’ll ever find me grinning over that filth,’ he’d ranted, the can somehow kicked empty despite instructions not to waste it.
‘But that’s the joke!’ Smith had said. ‘Don’t you get it? You hate kidney soup, yes, but to the countless people who will see the image you love kidney soup. What you actually feel is overruled by what the majority believes you feel, so you’ll be seen as the kidney soup-loving man for the rest of time. Isn’t it funny?’
No. And it was even less funny now, after months of stupid kidney soup jibes. In the Officers’ Mess, Castle made a loud, rattling sigh at his empty mug. He was sitting beside Smith at a purposefully deserted end of the table. The men weren’t bothered about Smith, but advertised their coolness towards Castle with subtle yet deliberate physical snubs. Shoulders were angled, lofty non-seeing sweeps of the gaze to avoid eye contact. The sense of division on the Kismet had hardened as winter set in around them. It was difficult to claim fence-sitting opinions on the First Mate without being taken as a member of the leprous pro-Napps party. Smith could mope for Napps without fear of recrimination, since he was viewed as a boyish oddity. Similarly, Addison was a doctor so could behave how he wanted. But for everyone else, remaining safe meant treating Napps, and anyone who defended Napps, with suspicion and doubt. As a sailor under Napps’s command, Millet-Bass attracted a different type of scrutiny. Because he was no genius, was he? Poor simple Millet-Bass, in many ways wasn’t he a lot like the ponies and dogs? You just told him what to do and he did it, without the mental capacity to evaluate a decision as either right or wrong.
If Castle noticed that his loyalty to Napps was making it increasingly risky to be associated with him, he didn’t appear to care. It was a problem for many of the crew, as they were bored of pretending not to like his company.
Castle said, ‘Who do I have to fight around here to get another brandy?’
‘You’ve had your quota, that’s all you’ll get,’ said Jennet, the ship’s cook.
‘Good! I didn’t enjoy the first one,’ Castle said, and then kissed the gold crucifix hung on a chain round his neck. ‘Except I felt it was my duty to raise a glass in tribute to my grandmother, bless her soul. Today would have been her birthday.’
The cook on any ship had to be vigilant about guarding the supplies, and Jennet wasn’t a man to test. Every packet and tin was protected, down to the last dried lentil. In Jennet’s definition of crime there was no moral distinction between stealing a sugar cube or the ship’s entire hoard of frozen mutton. Food was food, the food was his, and the loss of anything, however small, was thuggishly avenged. The thief would be grabbed in a scalp-hold and sent splintering through one of the chairs before he could even begin to apologize.
Jennet unfolded his massive arms. ‘Then why didn’t you toast her with the drink you just finished?’ Deceased Castles always sprang out of nowhere whenever alcohol appeared. And here was another, some dead old woman leaping from the grave to rob Jennet’s precious stockroom.
‘I forgot the date,’ Castle said. ‘But then her spirit came to remind me.’ The crucifix was pressed to his lips again in thanks.
This practice of his, kissing the crucifix and deferring to it for protection, had started ironically, as had his practice of signing the cross over his head. Recently, however, Castle found himself sleeping with the cross in his hand at night, because these dangerous days had triggered a hunger for reassurance in whatever form.
Even the most cynical among the men had started to believe in rituals, charms and symbols. The divine significance of weather was suddenly both accepted and trusted. Wind was a sign, sleet and types of cloud cover were signs, thunder was obviously a sign. Animals were the mouthpiece of a newly talkative God whose voice was now heard daily in the scores of fish and birds he used to communicate.
The hostility towards Castle was postponed in order to mutter congratulations to him as Jennet stumped off to fetch more grandmother-toasting brandy.
Lawrence drained his mug. ‘And if we needed another reason to celebrate, we’re homeward bound tomorrow.’
McValley held a hand over his coughing, slapping his chest.
Lawrence nodded at McValley. ‘Uplifting news, isn’t it?’
‘Beautif—’ McValley choked out a word. ‘Beautiful.’
‘What did Addison make of the bag?’ Smith asked.
McValley recovered. ‘What is there to make of an empty bag? I told him where I’d found it, told him about the photograph. He identified the woman as Dinners’s wife, Elizabeth, just as I had.’
‘I don’t care what you found,’ Coppers said, tired enough of everything to speak bluntly. ‘I don’t care if it was the severed head of Elizabeth herself as long as it means we can go home.’
‘Ah, how sympathetic you sound.’ McValley snorted. ‘How very like Napps.’
‘Yes, let’s keep it civil,’ Lawrence said as Coppers was heckled. The vanished party were always smouldering beneath any conversation, and it took only the slightest mention for debate to flare up again. The subject turned to Napps and his famous capacity for rage.
Remember Napps’s rage when someone was late for breakfast or untidy for the Sunday service? Or his rage when an order was met with a cheeky remark?
Matthews, the source of that particular anecdote, said rapidly to Lawrence: ‘Cheeky, sir, but, swear on my life, innocent.’
‘He instructed you to go bail out the engine rooms and you replied by telling him to go break his neck.’
‘I told him to break my neck,’ Matthews said.
‘Mm,’ Lawrence said, not believing a word of it.
‘You’re smiling, sir. Does it mean I’m forgiven?’
‘Mm,’ Lawrence said again. ‘No.’
The stories had a noticeable tendency for underlying resentments to accidentally, or perhaps artfully, slip in. Lawrence acted as though he disapproved. Since it was improper for him to visibly relish the men’s criticisms of Napps, he declared himself appalled. He was careful to make sure his proclamations were firm enough to be acknowledged, but never so accusatory that they actually succeeded in discouraging the men.
The conversation had switched to McValley’s case of scurvy. He’d become unwell during an expedition around the Ross Barrier that had been one long nightmare for everyone involved. From being a mostly forgotten episode, the explosion of speculation triggered by Everland meant McValley’s scurvy was now treated as an issue which deserved incredible attention.
‘Oh, be decent,’ Castle objected, causing Smith to whisper nervously to him.
The problematic Ross Barrier trip was notorious for two reasons. The first was that Napps and McValley had realized they hated each other more than anything else in existence. McValley was a man who actively tended grudges and sought revenge in small malicious ways, which was exactly the type of man Napps delighted in bullying. The second reason was the crisis which struck towards the end of the expedi
tion.
Birch grinned with resentment. He and Matthews were the unlucky sailors who’d been in the Ross Barrier sledging team with McValley and Napps. ‘Well, you all know my opinion on the matter,’ he said to boisterous noises of agreement.
Castle raised his voice above them. ‘If you could only hear yourselves.’
McValley’s health had deteriorated in the expedition’s final weeks. He’d struggled on with painfully swollen joints even as he started to pass blood and faint. When he became too ill to haul they’d let him totter along beside the sledge. When he became too ill to walk they’d towed him on the sledge, his teeth grinding in agony. And one morning Napps had decided upon a hazardous plan, announcing that he and Matthews would cover the last forty miles alone to get help, while Birch remained behind with McValley.
‘Oh, trust me, he’d made up his mind,’ Birch said, recounting the heartless speed in which Napps had overruled his pleas for them to stay together.
The truth was that a solid argument could have been made for either option. Although continuing with McValley on the sledge was desperate work for three weakened men, dividing the group and their meagre resources meant gambling on clear weather and a swift return. For Birch it meant becoming as incapacitated as his scurvy patient, with no way of leaving the camp or being found if Napps and Matthews failed to reach the hut and alert a rescue party. That the outcome was successful and Napps went with Addison’s team to save McValley was enough to dispel most of the controversies. The matter would have lain dormant if it wasn’t for the interesting new details which had begun to surface in Everland’s aftermath.
For example, although Matthews couldn’t remember the precise wording, he’d definitely remember the moment for the rest of his life. They’d been marching to get help when Napps had suddenly turned to him and said it would have been better for the team if McValley had died.