The North Water

by Ian McGuire

  Sumner looks at the distant crenelated line of bergs and land ice, the pale open sky, the dark impatient pitching of the sea. After he came to, he lay in his bunk a full week barely moving or speaking. His body was like a diagram, like a sketch that could be rubbed away and begun again, the pain and emptiness like hands molding and remolding him, knuckling and stretching out his soul.

  “I didn’t die in the water,” he says. “If I had died, I would be new somehow, but there’s nothing new about me.”

  * * *

  Short of Disko Island, the ship becomes lodged fast in a floe. They attach ice anchors to the raft of ice nearest to them and attempt to warp the ship forwards using thick lines reefed to the capstans. The capstan bars are double-manned, but even so it is slow and exhausting work. It takes them the whole morning to move a mere thirty feet, and after dinner Brownlee decides, reluctantly, to give it up and wait for the wind to change and a new lead to open.

  Drax and Cavendish take mattocks and descend to retrieve the anchors from the ice. The day is warm and cloudless. The ever-present arctic sun is high and throbbing out a dull, cantankerous kind of furnace heat. The two men, immune to it by now, cast off the warp ropes, hack out the wet ice around the anchors with their mattocks, and kick them free. Cavendish hefts the irons up onto his shoulder and begins to whistle “The Londonderry Air.” Drax, ignoring him, raises his right hand to shield his eyes against the sun and then, after another moment, points off landwards. Cavendish ceases whistling.

  “What is it?”

  “Bear,” Drax says. “The next floe over.”

  Cavendish shields his eyes and squats down to get a better look.

  “I’ll get a boat,” he says, “and a rifle.”

  They lower one of the whaleboats onto the ice, and Drax and Cavendish and two others drag it across to the open water. The floe is a quarter mile wide and hummocky. The bear is pacing at its northerly edge, snapping at the air and sniffing about for seals.

  Cavendish through his spyglass spots a trailing cub.

  “Mother and child,” he says. “Look see.”

  He hands the glass to Drax.

  “That babe’s worth twenty pounds alive,” he says. “We can skin the mother.”

  The four men discuss finances for a minute and then, having reached a satisfactory agreement, they pull slowly towards the floe. When they are fifty yards away, they stop rowing and steady the boat. Cavendish, with his knees braced against the bows, lines up his shot.

  “I’ve got a guinea in my locker says I’ll put one plumb in her eyeball,” he whispers. “Who’ll match it, now?”

  “If you’ve got a guinea in your locker, then my cock’s a cunt,” one of the men retorts.

  Cavendish snickers.

  “Now, now,” he says. “Now, now.”

  “Put it in the heart,” Drax says.

  “The heart it is,” Cavendish nods, “and here we go.”

  He scowls along the barrel one more time, then shoots. The bullet hits the bear high on the rump. There is a squirt of blood and a roar.

  “Fuck,” Cavendish says, looking suspiciously at the rifle. “The sight must be skewed.”

  The bear is circling wildly now, shaking its withers, howling and biting at the air as if fending off an imaginary foe.

  “Shoot her again,” Drax says, “before she runs.”

  Before Cavendish can reload, the bear sees them. Instead of running, she pauses a moment, as if thinking what to do, then drops off the ice edge and disappears into the sea. The cub follows her.

  The men row forwards, scanning the surface, waiting for the two bears to rise. Cavendish has his rifle at the ready; Drax is holding a looped rope to snickle the cub.

  “She could have gone back under that ice,” Cavendish says. “There are cracks and holes aplenty.”

  Drax nods.

  “It’s the babe I want,” he says. “That babe’s worth twenty pounds easy. I know a fellow at the zoo.”

  They circle slowly. The wind drops off, and the air about them settles. Drax snorts, then spits. Cavendish resists the urge to whistle. Nothing moves, there is silence all around, then, only a yard off the boat’s stern, the she-bear’s head, like the pale prototype of some archaic undersea god, rises up out of the dark waters. There is a moment of wild commotion, scrambling, shouting, cursing, then Cavendish takes aim and shoots again. The bullet hums past the ear of one of the oarsmen and slaps into the bear’s chest. The bear rears up shrieking. Its enormous clawed feet, broad and ragged as tree stumps, crash down on the whaleboat’s gunwales, raking and shredding the planks in a frenzied bid for purchase. The boat pitches wildly downwards and seems set to capsize. Cavendish is thrown forwards, dropping his rifle, and one of the oarsmen is tossed overboard.

  Drax pushes Cavendish aside and takes an eight-inch boat spade from the side rack. The bear, giving up on the boat, lunges for the thrashing oarsman. She clamps onto his elbow with her teeth, and then, with one dismissive shake of her enormous neck, rips away most of his right arm. Drax, standing upright in the still-rolling whaleboat, lifts up the boat spade and plunges its chisel edge hard down into the bear’s back. He feels the moment of resistance and then the inevitable and irretrievable give as the bear’s spine is split asunder by the milled steel edge. He pulls the spade out and brings it down again, and then again, stabbing deeper with each thrust. With the third blow, he pierces the bear’s heart and a great purple gout of blood comes steaming to the surface and spreads like India ink across her ragged white coat. The air is filled with a fetid blast of butchery and excrement. Drax feels pleasure at this work, arousal, a craftsman’s sense of pride. Death, he believes, is a kind of making, a kind of building up. What was one thing, he thinks, is become something else.

  The mutilated oarsman after some moments of screaming has passed out from his pain and is beginning to sink. The bloody remnants of his lost arm still depend from the dead bear’s tusks. Cavendish gets the boat hook and drags him back on board. They cut off a length of whale line and tourniquet his stump.

  “That’s what I call an almighty fuckup,” Cavendish says.

  “We still have the babe,” Drax says, pointing. “That’s twenty pounds right there.”

  The bear cub is swimming beside his mother’s corpse, mewing and nudging the body with his nose.

  “A man’s lost his fucking arm,” Cavendish says.

  Drax takes his looped rope and, using the boat hook, slips it over the bear cub’s head and pulls it tight. They bore a hole in the dead she-bear’s jaw, run a cord through the hole, and lash the other end of the cord to the bollard. It is a slow, hard pull back to the ship and before they get there, the oarsman expires from his injuries.

  “I’ve heard of such a thing,” Cavendish says. “But never seen it happen ere now.”

  “If you could shoot straight, he’d still be living,” Drax says.

  “I put two solid bullets into her, and she still had strength enough to take off a man’s arm. What kind of bear is that, I ask you?”

  “A bear is a bear,” Drax says.

  Cavendish shakes his head and sniffs.

  “A bear is a fucking bear,” he echoes, as though the thought had not occurred to him before.

  When they get back to the Volunteer they attach the dead bear to a block and tackle and haul her up out of the water until she is suspended over the deck, dangling, shabby and lifeless, from the yardarm drooling blood. Still down in the water, separated from his parent now, the cub becomes enraged, swimming hither and thither in a fierce, wild-eyed frenzy, snapping at the boat hook and pulling back against the rope collar. Drax, on his feet in the whaleboat, calls for an empty blubber cask and, with the help of Cavendish, tugs and prods the bear cub into it. The others toss down a net and haul the cask, filled now with a screaming, flailing bear cub, up onto the deck. Brownlee watches from the afterdeck as the cub tries, repeatedly, to escape out of the upright cask and Drax, armed with a stave, prods him down again.

&nbs
p; “Lower the mother’s body,” Brownlee calls out. “That’s the only way to quiet the beast.”

  Flat out on the deck, a hillock of bloodied fur, the she-bear steams like the gargantuan centerpiece of some barely imaginable banquet. Brownlee kicks over the cask, and the cub scurries out, his claws scrabbling and scraping on the wooden deck. There is a moment of panicked swiveling and disorientation (men, laughing, scramble up the rigging to escape), but then he sees his mother’s body and rushes to it. He nudges its flank with his nose and starts to helplessly lick the smeared and bloodied fur. Brownlee watches. The cub whimpers, sniffs, then settles itself in the lee of the mother’s corpse, flank to flank.

  “That cub’s worth twenty pounds,” Drax says. “I know a man at the zoo.”

  Brownlee looks at him.

  “The blacksmith will rivet you a grille so you can keep him in the cask,” he says. “More likely than not he will die before we get home, but, if not, every penny he fetches goes to the dead man’s people.”

  Drax stares back at Brownlee for a moment as if readying himself to disagree, then nods and turns aside.

  Later, after the dead oarsman has been stitched up in sailcloth and slid, with gruff and minimal ceremony, over the side, Cavendish skins the she-bear with a hatchet and a flensing knife. The cub, secured now in its cask, watches on, trembling, as Cavendish hacks, cuts, and tugs away.

  “Can a bear be eaten?” Sumner asks him.

  Cavendish shakes his head.

  “Bear meat is foul-tasting, and the liver is downright poisonous. All that a bear is truly good for is the skin.”

  “For ornament then?”

  “Some rich man’s drawing room. It would have been better for the price if Drax had been less eager with the boat spade, but I suspect the gash can be repaired.”

  “And the cub will be sold to the zoological gardens if it lives?”

  Cavendish nods.

  “A full-grown bear is a sight of fearsome beauty. People will pay a ha’penny a time to see a full-grown bear and think it cheap at that price.”

  Sumner crouches down and peers into the darkness of the cask.

  “This one might die of heartbreak before we get him home,” he says.

  Cavendish shrugs and pauses from his work. He looks back at Sumner and grins. His arms are dyed bright red up to the elbows and his waistcoat and trousers are stippled with gore.

  “He will forget the dead one soon enough,” he says. “Affection is a passing thing. A beast is no different from a person in that regard.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  They come to him with wounds and bruises, headaches, ulcers, hemorrhoids, stomachaches, and swollen testicles. He gives them poultices and plasters, ointments and balms: Epsom salts, calamine, ipecac. If nothing else works, he bleeds or blisters them, he induces painful vomiting, explosive diarrhea. They are grateful for these attentions, these signs of care, even when he is causing them discomfort or worse. They believe he is an educated man and that he must, therefore, know what he is about. They have a kind of faith in him—foolish and primitive perhaps, but real.

  To Sumner, the men who come to him are bodies only: legs, arms, torsos, heads. Their flesh forms the front and rear of his concern. Towards the rest of them—their moral characters, their souls—he remains solidly indifferent. It is not his task, he thinks, to educate or move them towards virtue, nor is it his task to judge, soothe, or befriend them. He is a medical man, not a priest or a magistrate or a spouse. He will heal their lesions, remedy, where it is possible, their maladies and disease, but beyond that they have no call on him, and he, reduced in spirits as he currently is, has no comforts available to give.

  One evening, after supper has concluded, Sumner is visited in his cabin by one of the ship’s boys. His name is Joseph Hannah. He is thirteen years old, slightly built with dark hair, a broad, pale brow, and gloomy, sunken eyes. Sumner has noticed him before and remembers his name. He looks, as the ship’s boys do, grubby and disarranged, and he appears, as he stands in the doorway, to be suffering from an attack of shyness. He is twisting his cap in his hands and wincing every now and then, as if even the thought of addressing the surgeon is painful.

  “Do you wish to speak to me, Joseph Hannah?” Sumner asks him. “Are you feeling ill?”

  The boy nods twice and blinks before responding.

  “My stomach is bad,” he confesses.

  Sumner, who is seated at the narrow fold-down shelf which serves him as a desk, gets to his feet and beckons the boy forwards.

  “When did this problem begin?” Sumner asks him.

  “Yesterday night.”

  “And can you describe the pain to me?”

  Joseph frowns and looks perplexed.

  “How does it feel?” Sumner asks.

  “It hurts me,” he says. “It hurts me a good deal.”

  Sumner nods and scratches the dark nub of frostbitten tissue at the end of his nose.

  “Climb onto the bunk,” he says. “I will examine you there.”

  Joseph doesn’t move. He looks down at his feet and shudders slightly.

  “The examination is a simple one,” Sumner explains. “I just need to check for the source of the pain.”

  “My stomach is bad,” Joseph says, looking up again. “I need a dose of pepperine.”

  Sumner snorts at the boy’s presumption and shakes his head.

  “I’ll decide what it is you need or don’t need,” he says. “Now lie down on the bunk, if you please.”

  Joseph reluctantly does as he is asked.

  Sumner unbuttons the boy’s jacket and shirt, and tugs up his flannel vest. The abdomen, he notes, is not distended and there is no sign of discoloration or swelling.

  “Does this hurt?” Sumner asks. “Or this?”

  Joseph shakes his head.

  “So where is the pain?”

  “Everywhere.”

  Sumner sighs.

  “If it is not here or here or here,” he says, prodding the boy’s belly impatiently with his fingertips, “then how can it be everywhere, Joseph?”

  Joseph doesn’t answer. Sumner sniffs suspiciously.

  “Any vomiting?” he asks. “Any diarrhea?”

  Joseph shakes his head.

  There is a dank, fecal odor arising from the boy’s scrawny midsection which suggests that he is lying. Sumner wonders if he is touched in the head or merely more stupid than average.

  “Do you know what diarrhea means?” he asks.

  “The flux,” Joseph says.

  “Remove your trousers, please.”

  Joseph gets to his feet, unlaces and removes his boots, then unbuckles his belt and shrugs off his gray worsted trousers. The unpleasant odor increases in strength. Outside the cabin, Black shouts and Brownlee coughs enormously. The boy’s knee-length drawers, Sumner immediately notes, are stained and stiffened at the breech with blots of blood and shit.

  Piles, for God’s sake, Sumner thinks. The boy clearly doesn’t know the difference between his stomach and his arsehole.

  “Take those off too,” he says, pointing, “and be sure not to touch anything else with them as you do so.”

  Joseph reluctantly pulls off his reeking drawers. His shanks are slight, almost muscleless; there is a faint black arc of hair around the otherwise pale purity of his cock and balls. Sumner instructs him to turn around and put his elbows on the bunk. He would normally be too young to develop piles, but Sumner assumes that the crude shipboard diet of salt junk and biscuits has done for him.

  “I will give you some ointment,” he says, “and a pill. You will feel better soon enough.”

  Sumner parts the boy’s arse cheeks and glances in for confirmation. He stares for a few seconds, stands back, then looks again.

  “What is this?” he says.

  Joseph doesn’t move or speak. He is shivering intermittently as if the cabin (which is warm) is bitterly cold. After a minute’s thought, Sumner steps out into the gangway and calls up to the cook for a b
owl of warm water and a rag. When they arrive, he washes between the boys cheeks and applies a mixture of camphor and lard to his lesions. The sphincter is distorted and torn in places. There are signs of ulceration.

  He dries the boy with a towel and gives him a pair of clean undergarments from his own cabinet. He washes his hands with what remains of the water.

  “Put your things back on now, Joseph,” he says.

  The boy dresses slowly, making sure as he does so not to catch the surgeon’s eye. Sumner goes to his medicine cabinet, selects a bottle labeled No. 44 and shakes out a small blue pill.

  “Swallow this now,” he says. “Then come back tomorrow and I will give you another one.”

  Joseph scowls at the taste, then swallows it with a gulp. Sumner looks at him carefully—his sunken cheeks, his narrow, twiny neck, his hazy and faraway eyes.

  “Who did this to you?” he asks.

  “No one.”

  “Who did this to you, Joseph?” he asks again.

  “No one did it to me.”

  Sumner nods twice, then scratches his cheekbone hard.

  “You may go now,” he says. “And I’ll see you tomorrow for the other blue pill.”

  After the boy leaves, Sumner goes back out into the empty mess cabin, opens the iron stove, and pushes the stained underwear far back onto the banked and glowing coals. He watches it catch, then closes the stove and returns to his stateroom. He pours a dose of laudanum but doesn’t drink it. Instead he takes down his copy of The Iliad from the shelf above the desk and tries to read. The ship jolts upwards; the timbers grate and whimper. He feels, despite himself, a tightening in his throat and a warm, liquid accumulation in his chest like the beginnings of a sob. He waits a minute longer, then closes the book and goes back out into the mess room. Cavendish is standing by the stove smoking a pipe.

  “Where is Brownlee?” Sumner asks him.

  Cavendish nods sideways towards the captain’s cabin.

  “Snoozing, most likely,” he says.

  Sumner knocks anyway. After a pause, Brownlee calls for him to enter.