“We’ll find a ship,” Cavendish says again. “And if we don’t find one, we’ll winter o’er. Whichever way it goes, we’ll all live long enough to see you hanged in England, you can be sure of that.”
“I’d be happier hanged than fucking starved to death or frozen.”
“We should drown you now, you cavilling bastard. That’d be one less fucking mouth to feed.”
“You wouldn’t like my dying words too well if you tried that trick,” Drax answers. “Although there’s others here might find ’em interesting enough.”
Cavendish looks at him for a time, then leans forwards, takes a firm handful of his waistcoat, and replies in a fierce whisper.
“You hant got nothing on me, Henry,” he says. “So don’t ever think you do.”
“I int squeezing, Michael,” Drax says calmly. “I’m just reminding. The time may never come, but if it comes, it’d suit you to be ready, that’s all.”
Drax picks up his oar, Cavendish calls out the order, and they begin to row again. To the west, a long line of coal-dark mountains, ashen-tipped, rise up out of the hammered grayness of the sea. The two whaleboats move gradually onward. After several hours, they reach the craggy tip of Bylot Island and enter the mouth of Pond’s Bay. Rain clouds gather and disperse; the light is slowly failing. Cavendish peers eagerly through his telescope, sees first nothing, then, wobbling on the horizon, the black outline of another vessel. He waves and points. He shouts to Otto.
“A ship,” he calls. “A fucking ship. Over yonder. See there.”
They all see it, but it is far away and seems to be steaming south already. The smoke from its stack makes a faint angled smudge against the sky, like a thumbed-out pencil line. They give urgent chase, but the effort is futile. In another half hour, the ship has disappeared into the haze, and they are alone again on the dark, brimful sea, with only the brown snow-clad hills about them and the scuffed and mournful evening sky above.
“What kind of fucking watch are they keeping that they don’t see a whaleboat in distress?” Cavendish says bitterly.
“’Appen the ship is full,” someone answers him. “’Appen they’re heading home with all the rest.”
“No fucker’s full this year,” Cavendish says. “If they had anything about them, any fucking thing at all, they’d still be out here fishing.”
No one answers him. They look out into the pallid misty drabness seeking for a sign but see nothing.
As darkness falls, they pull over to a nearby headland and raise the tent on a thin strip of gravel beach backed by low brown cliffs. After eating, Cavendish orders the men to break up one of the whaleboats with hand axes and build a beacon fire with its salvaged timbers. If there is another ship out there in the bay, he argues, they will see the blaze and come to rescue them. Although the men appear to doubt this reasoning, they do as they are told. They turn the boat over and begin to smash apart its hull, keel, and stern piece. Sumner, wrapped in a blanket, shivering and queasy still, stands beside the tent and watches them at their work. Otto approaches and stands next to him.
“This is how I dreamed it,” he says. “The fire. The broken whaleboat. Everything the same.”
“Don’t tell me that,” Sumner says. “Not now.”
“I don’t fear death,” Otto says. “I never have. We none of us have any idea of the riches that await.”
Sumner coughs violently twice, then retches onto the icy ground. The men gather the broken wood into a pyre and light it. The wind catches the flames and blows them sparkling upwards into darkness.
“You’re the one who survives,” Otto tells him. “Out of all of us. Remember that.”
“I said before, I don’t believe in prophecies.”
“Faith is not important. God doesn’t care whether we believe in Him or not. Why should He care?”
“You really think all this is His doing? The murders? The wrecks? The drownings?”
“I know it must be someone’s,” Otto says. “And if not the Lord, who else?”
While it burns, the bonfire elevates the crewmen’s spirits; its startling brightness gives them hope. As they watch it rage and fork and spit out sparks, they feel sure that somewhere out there other men are also watching, that boats will soon be lowered, help dispatched. They throw the last fragments of wood on the raucous blaze and wait expectantly for their rescuers to arrive. They smoke their pipes and squint eagerly out into the murky distance. Their talk is of women and children, of houses and fields they might still live to see again. Every minute, as the flames gradually reduce and daylight increases around them, they anticipate a boat, but none appears. After an hour more of fruitless waiting, they begin to feel their optimism curdle, and something rank and bitter take its place. Without a ship to shelter in, without enough firewood and food, how can anyone live through the winter in a place like this one? When Cavendish walks down from his seat on the cliff, holding the closed telescope in one hand and a rifle in the other, his expression remote, disgraceful, his eyes turned away, they know for certain that the plan has failed.
“Where are the boats?” someone shouts to him. “Why don’t they come?”
Cavendish ignores the questions. He goes inside the tent and starts counting up their remaining provisions. Even reducing everyone to half rations, two pounds of bread a week and the same of salt meat, there is barely enough to last past Christmas. He shows Otto, then calls the remaining crewmen together and explains that they will need to hunt for their food if they want to survive until the spring. Seals will do, he says, foxes, loons, auks, any kind of bird. As he speaks, it starts to snow outside and the wind picks up and shakes the canvas walls like a prelibation of the coming winter. No one answers him, and no one volunteers to hunt. They look back at him silently, and when he has finished they curl up in their blankets and drift to sleep, or sit about playing euchre with a pack of cards so ancient, limp, and filthy, they might have been cut from the rags of a lazar.
The snow falls steadily outside for the remainder of the day: heavy, wet flakes that sag the tent and clump like barnacles against the remaining whaleboat’s upturned hull. Sumner is racked and shuddering; his bones ache and his eyeballs itch and throb. He cannot sleep or piss although the desire for both is fierce within him. As he lies there, immobile, garbled fragments of The Iliad pass through his beleaguered mind—the black ships, the broken barricade, Apollo as a vulture, Zeus seated on a cloud. When he leaves the tent to shit, it is dark outside and the air is bitter cold. He crouches, pulls apart his raddled arse cheeks, and lets the hot, green liquid sluice out from him. The moon’s light is blurred by lines of cloud; snow sweeps across the outstretched bay, gathering on the extant floes and dissolving down into the black waters between. The cold air clamps and shrivels his bollocks. Sumner refastens his britches, turns, and sees, fifty yards away along the gravel shore, a bear.