Out on the ice, Drax works alone, moving back and forth, patient and relentless, from one group to the next, shooting and clubbing as he goes. The young ones shriek at him and try to waddle away but are too slow and stupid to escape. The older ones he puts a bullet in. When he has killed a seal, he turns it over, cuts round the hind flippers, then slashes it open from the neck to the genitals. He pushes the edge of his knife into the gap between the meat and the blubber and begins to cut and prize away the outer layers. When he is finished, he hooks the severed skin onto a line for dragging and leaves the blood-sodden and meat-streaked krang, like a gruesome afterbirth on the snow, to be pecked at by gulls or eaten by bear cubs. After hours of this, the ice pack is as spattered and filthy as a butcher’s apron, and each of the five whaleboats is laden with a reeking pile of sealskins. Brownlee signals the men back. Drax hauls his last load, stretches himself, then leans and dips his flensing knife and club in the salt water to rinse off the accumulated gobs of blood and brain matter.
As they are winched on board in dripping bunches, Brownlee counts the sealskins and calculates their value. Four hundred skins will yield up nine tons of oil, he estimates, and each ton at market will bring in, with luck, some forty pounds. They have made a good beginning but must press on. The seal pack is beginning to divide and scatter, and there is a small flotilla of other whaling ships, Dutch, Norwegian, Scotch, and English, gathered at wide intervals along the floe edge, all competing for pieces of the same prize. Before the light fails, he ascends the crow’s nest with a telescope and decides on the most promising spot for the next day’s hunt. The pack is unusually large this year and the ice, though uneven and thin in places, is still navigable. Fifty tons would be within his grasp if he had a passable crew and, even with the slender bunch of shitwicks he has been given by Baxter, he believes he can net thirty easily, possibly thirty-five. He will send another boat out tomorrow, he decides, a sixth boat. Any cunt who’s breathing and can hold a rifle will be out there killing seals.
It is light at four, and they lower the boats again. Sumner is sitting in the sixth boat with Cavendish, the steward, the cabin boy, and several of the more persistent malingerers. There is eighteen degrees of frost outside, it is blowing a light breeze, and the sea is the color and consistency of London slush. Sumner, who fears frostbite, is wearing his Ulan cap and a knitted muffler. He is holding his rifle clamped between his knees. After rowing southeast for a half hour, they see a dark patch of seals off in the middle distance. They anchor the boat to the ice and disembark. Cavendish, whistling “The Lass of Richmond Hill,” leads the way and the rest follow after him in a straggly single file. When they get within sixty yards of the seals, they spread out and commence shooting. They kill three adult seals and club to death six infants, but the rest escape unharmed. Cavendish spits and reloads his rifle, then climbs to the top of a pressure ridge and looks around.
“Over there,” he shouts out to the others, pointing off in different directions, “over there, and over there.”
The cabin boy stays behind to flense the dead seals, and the rest separate. Sumner walks east. Above the constant creak and whine of moving ice, he can hear the occasional crump of distant gunfire. He shoots two more seals and skins them as best he can. He makes eyelets in the skins with his knife, reeves a rope through the eyelets, ties them together, then starts back with the rope over his shoulder.
By noon, he has killed six more seals, and he is a mile from the whaleboat, dragging a hundred pounds of ragged sealskin across a succession of broad, loose ice floes. He is groggy with fatigue. His shoulders are raw and aching from the friction of the rope, and the freezing air is savage in his lungs. When he looks up, he sees Cavendish a hundred yards ahead and, farther off to the right, another man, darkly clad, walking in the same direction and also pulling skins. He calls out, but the wind whips away his voice and neither one stops or looks about. Sumner presses on, thinking, as he trudges, of the warmth and shelter of his cabin and of the five short-necked bottles of laudanum lined up in the medical chest like soldiers on parade. He takes twenty-one grains now every evening after supper. The others believe he is working on his Greek and mock him for it, but really, while they are playing cribbage or discussing the weather, he is lying on his bunk in a state of unstructured and barely describable bliss. At such times he can be anywhere and anyone. His mind slides back and forth through the mingled purlieus of time and space—Galway, Lucknow, Belfast, London, Bombay—a minute lasts an hour, and a decade flows past in barely an instant. Is the opium a lie, he sometimes wonders, or is it the world around us, the world of blood and anguish, tedium and care, that is a lie? He knows, if he knows nothing else, that they cannot both be true.
Arriving at a yard-wide gap between two floes, Sumner stops a moment. He tosses the end of the rope across to the other side, then takes a step backwards and readies himself to make the short leap. It is snowing now, and the snow fills the air all around and whips against his face and chest. It is better, he has learned from experience, to take off from his bad leg and land on his good one. He takes a short step forwards and then a bigger, quicker one. He bends his knee and pushes upwards, but his standing foot slips sideways on the ice: instead of jumping easily across he pitches forwards, clown-like and ludicrous—headforemost, arms spinning—into the black and icy waters.
For a long, bewildering moment, he is submerged and sightless. He thrashes himself upright, then flings one arm out and gains purchase on the ice’s edge. The ferocious drench of coldness has knocked all the breath from his body; he is gasping for air, and the blood is roaring in his ears. He grabs on with the other hand also and tries to heave himself out of the water, but can’t. The ice is too slippery, and his arms are too weak from the morning’s pulling. The water is up to his neck, and the snow is falling more heavily. He hears the ice around him creak and yawn as it shifts about in the low swell. If the floes move together he knows he will be crushed between them. If he stays too long in the water, he will likely lose consciousness and drown.
He retakes his grip and strains to pull himself up a second time. He dangles in motionless agony for a moment, neither fully in nor out, but both his hands slip off the ice and he crashes backwards. Seawater fills his mouth and nostrils; spitting and harrumphing, he kicks himself afloat. The downwards tug of his sodden clothes seems suddenly gigantic. His belly and groin have already begun to throb from the cold, and his feet and legs are going numb. Where the fuck is Cavendish? he thinks. Cavendish must have seen him fall. He calls out for help, then calls again, but no one appears. He is alone. The rope is within reach, but he knows the skins on the end of it are not heavy enough to bear his weight. He must pull himself up by his own power.
He grabs the edge of the ice for a third time and, kicking harder with both legs, tries to urge himself upwards. He hooks his right elbow up onto the surface, then his left palm. He digs the elbow in and, gasping and groaning with the ungodly effort, he forces himself farther up until, first his chin and neck, and then a small section of his upper chest, rise above the floe’s edge. He presses down again as hard as he can with his left hand, using his elbow as a pivot, and gains an extra inch or two. He believes for a brief moment that the balance is shifting in his favor and he is about to succeed, but as soon as he thinks this, the floe he is pressing on jolts sideways, his right elbow slips away, and his jaw slams down hard onto the sharp angle of the ice. For a brief moment, he gazes up at the white and harrowed sky, and then, dazed and helpless, he slumps backwards into the dark water and away.