“You will be killed by a bear—when the rest of us are already dead,” Otto says. “Eaten, swallowed up somehow.”
”After what’s happened here, your fears are understandable,” Sumner says. “But don’t confuse them with our destiny. All that’s behind us now. We’re safe.”
“Drax is still alive and breathing.”
“He is down in the hold chained to the mainmast, bound hand and foot. He cannot escape. Set your mind at rest.”
“The corporal body is just one way of moving through the world. It’s the spirit which truly lives.”
“You think a man like Henry Drax has any spirit worthy of the name?”
Otto nods. He looks, as he usually does, serious, eager, and faintly surprised by the nature of the world around him.
“I’ve encountered his spirit,” he says. “Met with it in other realms. Sometimes it takes the form of a dark angel, sometimes a Barbary ape.”
“You are a good fellow, Otto, but what you are saying is folly,” Sumner tells him. “We’re not in danger anymore. Set your mind at ease and forget the fucking dream.”
*
During the night they enter Lancaster Sound. There is open water stretching to the south of them, but to the north a granular and monotone landscape of ice boulders and melt pools, sculpted smooth by wind in places but elsewhere cragged, roughened, and heaved upright into sharp-edged moguls by the alternations of the seasons and the dynamisms of temperature and tide. Sumner rises early and, as has become his habit, gathers a bucket of rinds, crusts, and scourings from the galley. He takes a large metal spoon and, crouching by the bear cub’s cask, prods a portion of the cold and grease-bound mass between the grille-work. The bear sniffs, gobbles, then bites down fiercely on the empty spoon. Sumner, after twisting the spoon free, feeds him another portion. When the bear has emptied the bucket, Sumner refills it with fresh water and allows him to drink. He then heaves the cask upright, detaches the metal grille and, with a careful quickness born of practice and several previous near calamities, slips a loop of rope around the bear’s neck and pulls it taut. He lowers the cask and allows the bear to dash forwards and across the deck, its black claws scarifying the wooden planking. Sumner secures the end of the leash to a nearby cleat and swills out the cask with seawater, chasing the accumulated bear shit out through the forechannels with a broom.
The bear, high-rumped and grimy-yellow at its haunches, growls, then settles itself against the lip of a hatchway. It is watched at a distance by the ship’s dog, Katie, a bow-hipped Airedale. Every day for weeks now, dog and bear have rehearsed a similar pantomime of wariness and curiosity, closeness and retreat. The men enjoy this daily spectacle. They egg them on, shout encouragements, jab them forwards with boots and boat hooks. The Airedale is smaller but much lighter on her feet. She dashes forwards, stiffens a moment, then wheels away again, yelping with excitement. Probing and grandly tentative, the bear swaggers after her, its wedge-shaped head, tipped with blackness like a burned match, gauging the air. The dog is all eagerness and fear, all trembling alertness; the bear, stolid, earth-bound, heavy-limbed, feet like frying pans, moves as though the air itself is a barrier that must be slowly pushed through. They close to within a foot of each other, nose to nose, black eyes locked in ancient and wordless convocation. “I’ll have thruppence on the bear,” someone hollers. The cook, leaning on the lintel of the galley door, amused, tosses a chunk of bacon between them. Bear and dog together lunge for it, collide. The Airedale, bunched up and squealing, spins across the deck like a top. The bear gobbles the bacon and looks about for more. Men laugh. Sumner, who has been leaning on the mainmast, straightens, unwraps the leash from its cleat, and prods the bear back towards the freshened cask with the bristle end of the broom. The bear, realizing what is happening, refuses for a moment, bares its teeth, and then accedes. Sumner pulls the cask upright, refastens the grille, and lays it back down on the deck.
All day the wind blows steadily from the south. The sky above is pale blue, but on the far horizon, dark clouds are racked in slender lines above the mountaintops. In the late afternoon, they spy a whale a mile off the port bow and lower two boats. The boats pull quickly away, and the Volunteer follows after them. Cavendish watches proceedings from the quarterdeck. He is wearing Brownlee’s snuff-colored greatcoat and carrying his long brass spyglass. Now and then, he calls out a command. Sumner can see that he is taking a childish pleasure in his new authority. When the boats reach the whale they realize that it is dead already and has begun to bloat. They signal for the ship to come closer and then tow it across. Black is commanding the first boat, and he and Cavendish have a shouted conversation about the state of the carcass. Despite the signs of rot and depredation, they decide that there is still sufficient blubber left to make it worth their while to flense it.
They attach the decomposing body of the whale to the ship’s gunwales, where it dangles like a vast and wholly rotten vegetable. Its tar-black skin is flaccid and intermittently abscessed; pale and cankerous growths mottle its fins and tail. The men who are cutting in wear dampened neckerchiefs across their faces and puff strong tobacco against the stench. The blocks of blubber they slice and peel away are miscolored and gelatinous—much more brown than pink. Swung up onto the deck, they drip not blood, as usual, but some foul straw-colored coagulation like the unspeakable rectal oozings of a human corpse. Cavendish strides about shouting instructions and generalized encouragement. Above him seabirds gather, wheeling and cacophonous, in the noisome air, while below in the grease-stained water, drawn in by the mixed aromas of blood and decay, Greenland sharks gnaw and tug at the whale’s loose kiltings.
“Give them sharks a knock or two on the bonce,” Cavendish shouts down to Jones-the-whale. “Don’t want them swallowing our profits now, do we?”
Jones nods, takes a fresh blubber spade from the malemauk boat, waits for one of the sharks to come close enough, and then stabs at it, opening up a foot-long gash in its side. A loose-knit garland of entrails, pink, red, and purple, slurps immediately from the wound. The injured shark thrashes for a moment, then bends backwards and starts urgently gobbling its own insides.
“Christ, those sharks are fucking beasts,” Cavendish says.
Jones finally kills it with a second spade-blow to the brain, then kills another one the same quick way. The two gray-green bodies, blunt and archaic, pumping out cloudy trails of blood, are further savaged before they sink by the attentions of a third and smaller animal, who leaves them gnawed and ragged as apple cores, then slips away before Black can dispatch him also.
When the flensing is half completed, they sever the whale’s enormous lower lip and raise it onto the deck, exposing one side of the head bone. Otto, like a woodsman attacking a fallen oak, sets to the bone with an ax and a handspike. It is almost two feet thick and elegantly beaded at the extremities like a skirting board. When both sides of the bone are severed, they attach the bone-geer, crack off the upper jaw in one complete piece, and maneuver it carefully with block and tackle so it hangs tentlike above the deck with the black strips of baleen drooping from it like bristles of a gigantic mustache. The baleen is then detached from the jaw with spades and separated into smaller sections for stowing. What remains of the upper jawbone is stowed in the hold.