“By Christmas, the bones of this dead and gruesome stinker will be nestling in the delicately perfumed corsets of some as yet unfucked lovely dancing the Gay Gordons in a ballroom on the Strand. That’s a thought to fairly make your head spin, is it not, Mr. Black?” Cavendish says.
“Behind every piece of sweet-smelling female loveliness lies a world of stench and doggery,” Black agrees. “He’s a lucky man who can forget that’s true or pretend it isn’t.”
After another hour, the job is all but done, and the bloated and filthy-smelling krang is cut free. They watch it drift away amongst a shrieking cloud of gulls and petrels. Balanced on the rim of the western horizon, the narrow arctic sun glows and fades like a breathed-on ember.
Sumner sleeps easily that night and in the morning rises again to feed the bear. When the slops bucket is empty, he lassoes a rope about the bear’s neck and secures the rope end while he rinses out the cask. Although the wind is freshening and the deck has been washed clean, there is a lingering smell of decay from yesterday’s flensing. Instead of settling down as usual, the bear paces back and forth and sniffs the air. When the dog approaches him, he wheels away, and when she nudges him gently he growls. The dog wanders off awhile, lingers at the galley door, and then returns. She wags her tail and steps closer. They stand for a moment watching each other, then the bear pulls back, stiffens, raises its right front paw, and in one fluid downward movement rakes its fossil claws along the dog’s shoulder blade, ripping open the sinew and muscle to the bone and dislocating the shoulder joint. A watching crewman whoops and cheers. The dog screams abominably and skitters sideways, spraying out blood onto the deck. The bear lunges forwards, but Sumner grabs the rope leash and pulls it back. The Airedale is squealing, and blood is pumping out from its open wound. The blacksmith, watching on from his forge, selects a heavy hammer from the rack, walks over to where the dog is lying, trembling and pissing itself in a pool of blood, and strikes it once, hard, between the ears. The squealing stops.
“You want I should kill the bear too?” the blacksmith asks. “I’ll do it happily enough.”
Sumner shakes his head.
“It’s not my bear to kill,” he says.
The blacksmith shrugs.
“You’re the one as feeds it every day, so I’d say it’s yours as much as anyone’s.”
Sumner looks down at the bear still straining at its rope end, still gasping and growling and scratching at the deck in a primitive and implacable fury.
“We’ll let the vicious fucker be,” he says.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
About midday, the wind veers suddenly from south to north and the loose pack of drift ice which clogs the middle of the sound, and which previously posed no danger begins to move gradually towards them. Cavendish moors the ship to the edge of the southerly land floe and orders the men to cut out an ice dock for protection and be quick about it. Equipment is brought up from the hold—ice saws, gunpowder, ropes, and poles—and the men leap over the gunwales and down onto the ice. Their dark silhouettes move urgently across the unmarked surface of the floe. Black paces off the dock’s required length and breadth, then drives boarding pikes into the ice to mark the angles and midpoints of each side. The men are divided into two teams to make the first long cuts. They erect wooden tripods with pulleys at the apex. They reeve ropes through each of the pulleys and attach a fourteen-foot steel ice saw to each end. Eight men are attached to each rope to deliver the upward cutting stroke and another four take hold of wooden handles on the saw end to drive it down again. The ice is six feet thick and the dock’s sides are two hundred feet in length. Once the two sides are cut, they cut across the end, and then cut again from one corner to the midpoint of the right-hand side. From there, they cut another diagonal line in the opposite direction from the midpoint to the ice’s edge. After two hours’ labor, a final horizontal cut across the middle of the dock leaves the floe divided into four separate triangles, each one several tons in weight. The men are sweating and gasping from their work. Their heads steam like puddings on a plate.
From the quarterdeck, Cavendish watches the pack advance towards him. As it continues to approach, blown on by the wind, the breaches in it heal and what was previously a loose agglomeration of separate floes and fragments becomes a seamless field of solid-seeming ice moving imperceptibly but unstoppably down upon them. In the middle distance, enormous blue-white icebergs loom like broken and carious monuments. The thinner ice around their bases rumples and tears like paper. He checks the Hastings’s position with Brownlee’s brass telescope, sniffs, then lights his pipe and spits across the rail.
Out on the ice, Black pushes charges of gunpowder down into the nearest diagonal cut and lights the fuse. After a few seconds’ pause, there is a dull thud, a high plume of water, and then a broader cascade of shattered ice. The large triangular blocks divide and break apart, and the men in teams drag the several fragments out of the dock with grappling hooks. When the dock is entirely cleared of ice, they warp the ship into it—tugging the bows in first, then swinging the stern round to straighten. They moor her to the floe with ice anchors, then climb back on board wet and exhausted. Handfuls of coal are thrown into the cabin stoves and a round of grog is served. Sumner, who has assisted with the cutting, and feels weak and wretched from the effort, eats his tea in the mess, then takes a dose of laudanum and settles in his cabin to rest. Although he drops into sleep easily enough, he is woken intermittently by the great percussions of the ice field, the thunderous explosion of one floe meeting another one. He thinks of artillery, of the fifteen-pounders thumping on the ridge, the sickening overhead roar of shell and cannonball, then stuffs his ears with cotton wool and reminds himself that their ship is safe enough and that the dock they have made for it is strong and secure.