“John Peyton,” his father shouted between strikes. “Get to work, for the love of man.”
The killing went on for more than half an hour. When they knelt exhausted and bent their heads to catch their breath, almost fifty seals lay dead across half a mile of ice. John Senior slowly got to his feet. “We got to get them bled now,” he said. “The pelts are worthless if they gets burnt.” He smiled across at Cassie and nodded his head, like someone not entirely unhappy to have been proved wrong. Peyton watched her too with the same surprised, conflicted pride.
He and Cassie spent a few minutes observing John Senior as he made a circular cut about the neck of a seal and a second longitudinal cut down the belly to the tail. He gripped the thick layer of fat and fur and sculped it free of the flesh with quick passes of the blade, turning the bloody carcass out of the hide like a sleeper being tipped out of bedsheets. Then they made their own halting, awkward attempts to imitate him. The sleeves of their shirts were soaked in blood and the blood froze solid in the cold air. Blood seeped into the inviolate white of the ice pans. The stripped carcasses were the same dark red as the granite headlands of the coastline, a tightly clustered constellation of ruined stars. The pelts weighed up to fifty pounds apiece and they bulked them in piles of three or four, as many as could be dragged back to shore in one trip. It would take them the rest of that afternoon and all the light of the following day to haul them off the ice.
They hadn’t eaten since dawn and had brought only cakes of hard tack with them out onto the ice field. They were all exhausted and freezing and ravenously hungry by the time John Senior worked his knife up the belly of the last seal. He used the heel of his boot to crack the exposed breastbone and then opened the chest cavity to cut the large fist of its heart free. He held it in his hand, the organ still hot to the touch, and he brought it to his mouth, biting into it as he would an apple. He offered it to Cassie and then to Peyton, and they ate the raw flesh together, licking the blood from their lips and wiping their chins with the bloodied sleeves of their shirts. He watched his father and Cassie watching each other. They both seemed immensely pleased with themselves, with the day, with the heat of the dead seal’s heart moving in them.
Peyton stared across the fire at Cassie where she now lay sleeping. The shape of her body under the blankets reminded him of those stripped carcasses on the ice, inert, emptied of the energy of the animate. He sat smoking and tending the fire as the stars wheeled overhead. A she-moon rose and set behind them, a shallow crescent on its back. Cassie woke and asked for water and the two of them stared into the dark without speaking until she said, “Tell me a story, John Peyton.”
“There’s no fun to be found in any of this, Cassie.”
“I’m just feeling lonely,” she said and lifted herself on her elbows to watch the fire waver and shift in its place. “I can tell you about fire,” she said. “I can tell you how we learned the use of fire.”
He nodded and stretched a leg and then folded it back underneath himself. “All right,” he said.
It was a Greek story, she said, one told to her by her father when she was a girl and too young to understand certain aspects. She said it was an old, old tale about times before our times and the times of the Greeks besides, when fire belonged to the gods alone. Prometheus, she said, and she paused and said the name again. Prometheus was a Titan, and the Titans were a race of giants. He and his brother were entrusted with the creation of the earth’s creatures by Zeus, father of the gods. Feathers and claws and talons and shells and fangs were passed out to the animals as they were formed from the clay and when it came time to create people nothing remained to give them. They were left naked, defenceless, scavenging around without a way to cook food or keep warm, it was a sad time to be alive, she said. Prometheus took pity on humanity, and he conspired to steal the secret of fire from Mount Olympus and passed it down to the miserable creatures we were. Cassie stopped for a moment and lay back on the ground. “Are you listening?” she asked.
She said the sad part of the story was this. It was something she couldn’t conceive of when she was a youngster. Zeus was a jealous, wretched god, as all the gods of those times were. When he discovered the theft, he punished Prometheus by having him chained to a rock and carrion birds came to him where he lay stretched out and helpless and they pecked his liver from his side and ate it. And every day his liver grew back and the carrion returned and pecked it out and ate it.
Cassie’s voice was so slight that Peyton could barely hear her speaking. The fire popped and a large flanker landed on his sleeve. He shook it off into the snow where the cinder winked to ash.