The Collector of Lost Things

by Jeremy Page

  I went to stand alongside him. Just a few feet below us the bird was still wedged with its head in the corner of the locker, the way animals tend to huddle when they sense death is near. Perhaps death materialises in the air, first, before making its approach, and to face a corner is to turn a back upon it? It felt appropriate to stand at the bow, in a form of vigil, a few feet above the great auk, and wait for what might happen. I filled my pipe and offered my tobacco pouch to the sailor on watch, before asking his name.

  ‘Ralph, sir,’ he replied.

  ‘You are from Ireland, also?’

  ‘Sligo.’

  ‘From a farm?’

  ‘Na. Me brothers are turf men. But it’s bad country, sir, it’s real bad country.’

  ‘The blight?’

  ‘Aye. It’s bad.’

  ‘I have heard.’

  He sucked on his pipe, hard, wincing in the sunlight.

  The ship was rounding a rocky promontory, following a wide sea channel between the coast and islands. Lit by a low sun, the coast of Greenland was intensely rich in its colours of loose brown earth and low-cropped meadow. Treeless, and virtually without sign of man, it was like a country which had been born overnight.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked, pointing to a distant area of the channel that appeared clogged with broken ice.

  ‘Ice field. It come from the glacier.’

  ‘Will we steer through it?’

  ‘Aye,’ he replied, patting his arrow in explanation. Above me I felt the sails loosing their hold of the wind as the helmsman prepared to tack. ‘There’s bay ice, sludge ice, field ice, all sorts of ice. This gut of sea is shorter by fifty miles.’

  ‘Is it harmless?’ I asked.

  ‘All things are harmless till they ain’t,’ he replied.

  The ice field resembled shattered glass flung across a darkened mirror. It was a peculiar and unnerving sight. And fairly soon we were among it, first individual blocks, then into more concentrated drifts. Blocks as small as a man’s fist bobbed furiously as the ship struck them, as buoyant as cork. Occasionally, much taller bergs passed, some as high as the lower rigging of the ship, sharp edged and cruelly solid in appearance, and it was these that Ralph alerted the helmsman to.

  ‘The captain told me at length about the ice beams he has had fitted, beneath us,’ I said.

  ‘As long as he don’t want to test them, we’ll be right.’

  ‘Is he known to be a cautious man?’ I asked.

  Ralph shrugged. ‘Can’t say, sir. But if you was in trouble, the only one I’d risk my life on would be Mr Talbot.’

  The glacier emerged beyond a promontory, its front edge a jagged collection of filthy white cliffs, perhaps two hundred feet high, with deep cracks and fissures stretching from the sea at its base to the very top. It filled the space between the mountains like a great tongue stretching tens of miles inland, roughened and misty across its surface, and ancient and brittle where it met the sea.

  As we passed, keeping our distance by about a mile or so, I marvelled at how strange it was. A thousand frozen rivers, congealed and piled, serpent-like, a back and spine that twisted and nestled into its own valley. It seemed capable of rushing towards us, a giant scythe that would sweep us away. Sounds of cracking resounded across the bay, as loud as cannon shots, every couple of minutes, making me feel that it was intensely, unnervingly alive. The air began to cool as the ship sailed closer. It was the very breath of the glacier, I realised, cooling the area as if we were entering a vast stone cellar.

  I watched in disbelief as one of the cliff edges slipped, a solid curtain of ice, sliding in a vertical plane straight into the sea. The section vanished, in perfect silence, among the litter of ice in front of the glacier, before rising again like a launched ship, while a great rolling crack of thunder swept across the bay.

  Gradually, as if time itself beat twice as slow in this frozen place, a bulge of water began to swell, stretch and roll across the channel, raising the floating blocks of ice as if the sea was merely a piece of silk being lifted by a breath from beneath. The wave rolled slowly towards us and, perhaps a minute after the ice cliff had fallen, the entire ship rose as it passed underneath. I felt as if something beyond my experience and scale had drifted through each and every one of us, as the shadow of a solar eclipse is said to cross the land, a glimpse of the mystery that lies at the heart of our world but beyond our view, revealing itself and disappearing, the ship, crew, even the dying auk beneath us. We all felt and were touched by its passing.

  The following morning, having cleared the ice field, the Amethyst was in open water. A hunting party had assembled on deck after one of the spotters had seen a colony of walrus. I decided to accompany them, not wanting to miss the opportunity of seeing such exotic creatures. Even Bletchley, after being sullen and withdrawn for nearly a week, was standing among the men, donning his hunting attire and fox-fur hat with the tail hanging down the back of his neck. His face looked scrubbed clean and raw.

  ‘Walrus,’ he said to me, as if it was a magic word. As if out to prove his determination, he marched to the side of the ship and took a wild shot at a group of black guillemots that were rafting alongside. He missed. Instantly, the group dived, and we watched their white-tipped wings and red feet kicking underwater, a chain of pearls escaping each of their beaks.

  ‘They have nowhere to go so must come up,’ Bletchley said, eagerly reloading his rifle, the boast of the hunter he had once been. But when they surfaced, he didn’t take a second shot.

  We rowed in both whaleboats in a wide arc that took us downwind of the walrus colony.

  As the water shallowed, one of the men passed me a bucket with a glass pane fixed into the bottom. ‘You might want a look,’ he said, pointing over the side.

  I leant over and pressed the bucket into the water and gained a vivid view of the seabed, perhaps twenty feet below. Strange creatures covered the stones, moss-fringed molluscs at least eight inches long, next to soft corals in bright yellows and reds and an abundance of hydroids, sponges and starfish, the spokes of their limbs nearly as large as a pram’s wheel.

  ‘It’s so colourful,’ I said, enthusiastically, privileged to have this view of quite unexpected beauty. ‘The starfish are giants.’

  I continued to gaze as the occasional cuttlefish swam underneath with a languorous fanning of its rippling tail fin, aware that I must be the first person to have seen this particular sea garden.

  The smell and sound of the walruses began to reach us. Strange bellowing and grunts and snorts, much deeper than the familiar barking of the seals; and their scent was more pungent. As we approached, the animals lifted themselves, humping their way across the stones like sacks of flour coming to life. There were several hundred, dun-coloured and massive, lying in a disordered collection across the gravel bank. Tusks rose in the air, and the sounds of groaning and bellowing increased at our arrival, as if those tusks were the raised bows of an orchestra playing an infernal overture.

  The mist we had seen at sea rose from the backs of the walruses, added to by their breath which stank of a deep musky animal odour, like that smelt in a cattle shed but here with a horrid addition of fish and weed and the excrement that smeared the stones.

  We pulled the boats onto the shore and waded through the shallows, skirting the animals at a safe distance with several of the men raising their pikes and gaffs in case of attack.

  ‘See those,’ Connor Herlihy said, pointing out several carcasses, ‘they’ve been killed by a bear. A polar bear. It’s attacked the colony and killed two of the youngs.’

  I examined the bones. Connor was almost certainly right. The carcasses had been picked clean and neatly pulled apart in several places. It was the site of a feast: something large had eaten these animals without hurry, unconcerned about the colony so near by.

  Bletchley came to my side. ‘Is it a bear’s kill?’ he asked.

  ‘So I have been told.’

  He looked along the shore, then ou
t to sea, imagining the route of the attack. ‘It ate the pup in full view of the others,’ he said, fascinated. His tone intrigued me. From the look upon his face, it was clear he was searching for some revelatory fact among the bones.

  ‘It seems, Edward, that the Arctic is always this way,’ I said. ‘Despite all this emptiness and space, there is no room for ceremony or discretion. Animals are killed and disposed of wherever they are.’

  ‘First the bear, then the birds,’ he replied. ‘They have pecked the carcass clean.’

  The party of men stood in a loose group, close by, casually selecting animals from those at hand and deciding on their merits. A tureen of soup was passed around, of meat and potatoes and hard peas with toasted sippet, and several men sat among the stones to have their fill, before lighting their pipes. Talbot, in their centre, was retelling a story—among men and their weapons, ahead of a hunt, it was the only time I ever saw him animated. At all other times he was barely able to say a civil word.

  ‘You had better stand back,’ he instructed Bletchley and myself in a loud commanding voice. The men put their bowls down and stood alongside him, as he pointed out various positions.

  As the men crouched, preparing for the hunt, the walruses turned away. The men advanced, using gaffs to hook an animal and try to drag it from the others. The walruses were a sea of overcoats, like a crowd of large men pushing each other. The chosen one turned several times, lunging angrily at the men with its flared tusks. A great sound resounded from its throat, a gutteral cough and bellow that mixed with the clamour that was rising among the colony as the panic spread.

  The colony acting as one was an impressive spectacle. Several large individuals had herded the cubs into a protected corral, while the rest of the walruses massed and rose in height, creating a formidable and impenetrable wall of bodies. But the men worked relentlessly with hooks and lances, trying to gain purchase on their animal. Several times the hooks merely bounced off the thick whorls of blubber, and it was only when two of the gaffs were secured through the tail flippers that this animal decided to turn and fight.

  It twisted, a limbless bull, and swung its head at the men, its tusks stabbing and plunging in open air. Behind it, the colony continued to roll back, until the animal was isolated. The men jabbed it from all sides with the points of their lances. It bucked at them, raising and rolling and throwing itself with incredible vigour and weight. Several times the lances were slapped out of the men’s grip. But other lances found their mark, and were driven into the walrus with little discrimination, as if they were attempting to puncture it. The animal roared horribly, the insides of its mouth a wet livid pink.

  One by one the men ran at the walrus to club it across the head with hakapiks or rocks. It reacted with surprise, turning towards the spot where the man had attacked, but already someone was coming at it from a different angle. Agility and speed gave the men an advantage, as they effectively hunted in a pack. Still, the animal’s sheer weight made it a contest that could not be called. The thickness of the skin, blubber and skull was immense.

  The assault went on for the best part of ten minutes, then without any overt sign of wounding, the walrus lowered its head to the stones in apparent submission. It looked strangely peaceful, as if withdrawing from the violence or falling into a deep sleep. Once or twice it moaned, lifting its head, but gradually its motions lessened.

  ‘That’ll be it, lads,’ Talbot said. ‘Well done. He was a big ’un.’

  The men looked on with a little wonderment at the prey they had slain. They were sweaty and ragged and this had been a tough life to extinguish. Yet the animal was clearly still alive. The seal has no heart, the captain had said to Bletchley during that first meal of the voyage, and perhaps the same was true of the walrus. Despite the invasions of the lances, despite the clubbing from the hakapiks and hammers, that great heart had still not been found.

  ‘The axe,’ Talbot said.

  Now, I thought, they are going to hack the head off this dying animal right in front of my eyes. They will swing an axe as if they are felling a tree trunk, and I will be able to do nothing but wait until the job is completed. I sat on the stones, on the putrid shore, while the axe was raised for the beheading. I wanted no memory of this. But even with my eyes firmly shut I felt each awful blow as the axe was sunk into the flesh, searching for the neck bone. It took the best part of several minutes, the axe being passed from one man to another, for them to share the burden.

  When I opened my eyes, the shoreline was slick with the most vivid red blood imaginable, poured thickly over the stones as one might do a sauce or preserve. The men were drenched in this same butchery from their hands to their shoulders. On first impression, it looked as though they had reached into the very body of the walrus in the search for the twist of the bone that would bring it apart, the lock that would unhinge this great animal.

  All that was left of the walrus was a folded stump of oak, still bleeding. Headless, but with a force of pressure inside that brought blood to the severed end of the animal with constant welling. I have never seen a creature bleed so much—or be so full of blood—in all my life. And I doubt I ever shall, again, God willing.

  And all of this for the two tusks that I could see being held by a couple of the men as they eased the great head, as large as a cannon ball, into a canvas sack. The tusks were very valuable, I had been told, as they could be sold at a high price to dentists in Liverpool for the manufacture of false teeth.

  It was only then, with the violence of the hunt receding, that we noticed Edward Bletchley, sitting in the blood, his palms pressed into the stones and tears streaming down his face. He was moaning in apparent grief and, when all the men had stopped to look at him, he raised his hands up, covered in blood, for them to see.

  Talbot stood squarely in front of him, a scolding father above an infuriating child.

  ‘Lift this man from the slick and get him to the boat,’ he said.

  Back on the Amethyst, Bletchley was taken to his cabin and laid down on his bunk. I tended to him, helped by Simao and a couple of the men. We removed his bloodstained clothes and helped him into his nightshirt. I noticed how pale and thin his legs were, and how surprisingly weak his chest looked. Tremors ran through his forearms and flicked at his fingers. During the return journey he had not spoken, and didn’t speak then, in his cabin. But as I was about to leave, he grabbed hold of my wrist. I bent my ear to his mouth.

  ‘My flask!’ he whispered, in a hot breath. I gestured for the others to leave. Alone with him, I quickly found his personal hip flask and filled a glass with the odd green liquor. He drank it feverishly, then turned away from me to face the wall of his cabin. He fell into an immediate sleep.

  I felt deeply shaken, and kept looking at Bletchley’s flask and its promise of instant relief. I tried to recall its strange taste and the drowsy sensation of swallowing it. Some remained in the glass, left in his haste to consume it. I took a breath, filled the glass to the top, and drank it in one go.

  Clara was waiting for me outside his door, upset. ‘You must tell me what happened,’ she insisted. I took hold of her hand and led her directly to my cabin, where I shut the door behind us.

  ‘I think he will sleep now,’ I said, gesturing for her to sit by me on the bunk. The taste of the drink burnt in my throat. My head felt strange. I told her what had occurred that morning. How Bletchley had been exposed to a sight of slaughter that was too much for him to accept. I described how he had sat, childlike, in the blood of the dead walrus and how he had taken on the responsibility for what had happened. I hoped he was peaceful now. I didn’t describe the delirium tremens that had run through his arms.

  Clara sat, deep in thought. Her ringlets hung to the side of her face, so gentle, so feminine, so at odds with all that I had witnessed a few hours earlier.

  ‘I will go now, Eliot.’

  I nodded. Already my vision was beginning to spin.

  I’ll never let you go, I replied. I’m s
ure I said it, as I lay down on my bunk and turned to face the wall, unable to fight the wave of tiredness. A sense of dread overwhelmed me.

  Huntsman appeared, agitated, pacing the cabin back and forth, so tall that he had to angle his neck to one side. I smelt the stink of his clothes and listened to the brush of the rough sealskin along the edge of my bunk. Wringing his hands angrily, he kept stopping, trying to listen, occasionally lifting a finger as if he had heard something and needed to alert me. I lay on the bed, moaning. He refused to look me in the eye, but began to pace once more, touching the walls of the cabin and attempting to peep through the cracks in the wood. His manner was utterly caged, utterly feral; he seemed determined to peer through every wooden plank of the ship if he had to.

  I cried out, shielding my eyes and pushing past him to reach the door. I crossed the saloon and went straight to Clara’s cabin.

  ‘Clara?’ I whispered. ‘Open the door.’

  Almost immediately she was there, as if she’d been waiting for me.

  ‘I’m so afraid,’ I said, reaching out to hold her. She put her arms around me and guided my head onto her shoulder.

  ‘Shh,’ she whispered, consoling. ‘I know, Eliot. I know.’

  ‘I’m so weary, with all the hunting and slaughter.’

  ‘We try, Eliot, it is all we can do. We try and we believe. I feel it working, don’t you? If we believe in each other we can overcome everything.’ She put a finger to my lips. ‘Amor vincit omnia,’ she whispered: ‘love conquers all. See, you must calm.’ After a prolonged moment she placed her hand on my chest, near my heart.

  ‘Do you feel that?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  She nodded, her lips becoming taut and thin as she smiled. ‘And I feel connected to the bird we have saved, Eliot. If we are strong, it will recover. Do you feel that now?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘It is,’ she underlined. ‘We are able to save it.’ She nestled against me and brushed a cool cheek against mine.