They divide up evenly the scanty rations that remain and allow each man to cook and eat them as and when he pleases. They take turns to feed and tend the fitful blubber lamp. The remaining rifle lies near the entrance of the tent for anyone who wishes to hunt with it, but although they pass to and fro to shit and piss and bring back snow to melt for water, no one picks it up. There is no one in command any longer: Otto’s authority has gone, and Sumner’s role as surgeon, without his medicines, means nothing. They sit and wait. They sleep and play cards. They tell themselves that Webster and the others will send help, or that the Yaks themselves will surely come out searching for the two who are dead. But no one arrives, and nothing changes. The only book they have is Otto’s Bible and Sumner refuses to read from it. He cannot bear its certainties, its rhetoric, its all-too-easy hope. Instead, he silently recites The Iliad. Whole sections return to him at night, unbidden, near-complete, and in the morning, he tells them over line by line. When the other men see him mumbling to himself like that they assume he is at prayer, and he doesn’t seek to disabuse them since this is as close to honest prayer as he is ever likely to come.
A week after the departure of Webster and the others, a fierce storm blows in off the bay, and the tent is lifted away from its moorings and ripped along one seam. They spend a wretched, bone-chilled night clustered together gripping the sagged and flapping remnants, and in the morning, as the weather clears, they commence, glumly, to make what repairs they can. With his jackknife, Otto whittles and bores some rough needles out of seal bone, hands them to the men, then commences pulling lines of thread from the frayed cuffs of one of the blankets. Sumner, stiff and dazed from lack of sleep, walks off in search of rocks suitable for reanchoring the edges of the tent. The wind is bitter and blustery, and in places he has to wade through thigh-deep drifts of snow. As he passes by the tip of the headland, with the rough ice stretching out before him and the wind whipping crystalline spindrift from its angled peaks, he notices Cavendish’s gravesite in a state of ghastly disarray. The covering stones have been scattered and the corpse itself has been half-consumed by animals. All that is left is a grotesque and bloody gallimaufry of bones, sinew, and innards. Pieces of shredded undergarment are strewn about haphazardly. The right foot, gnawed off above the ankle but with toes intact, lies off to one side. The head is missing. Sumner comes closer and slowly crouches down. He takes his knife from his pocket and levers out a rib from the frozen mass. He pokes and peers at it awhile, touches its broken end with his fingertip, then looks off into the white distance.
When he gets back to the tent, he takes Otto to one side and explains what he has just seen. They talk together for a while, Sumner points, Otto crosses himself, then they walk across to where the snow house used to be and begin digging down into the icy ruins with their bare hands. When they reach the stiff and frozen bodies of the two Yaks, they pull them free and strip off the remains of their sealskin undergarments. Lifting the bodies up by the heels like wheelbarrows, they drag them farther away from the tent. When they judge the distance and angle is right, they place them down again. They are panting from the effort of the pull, and steam is rising up from their heads and faces. They stand talking awhile longer and then walk back to the ramshackle tent. Sumner loads the rifle, then explains to the other men that there is a hungry bear somewhere out on the ice and the dead Yaks are bait for it.
“There’s enough good meat on a beast like that to last the five of us a month or more,” he says. “And we can use the hide for extra clothing.”
The men look back at him, empty-eyed, indifferent, strained beyond their limits. When he suggests they share the effort—that each man take the rifle for two hours at a time and keep a watch out for the bear while the others rest or repair the tent—they shake their heads.
“Dead Yaks int good bait for a bear,” they tell him, with a sureness which suggests they have tried such a thing before and found it disappointing. “Such a plan won’t work.”
“Help me anyway,” he says. “What harm can it do?”
They turn away and begin to deal out the cards: one, one, one; two, two, two; three, three, three.
“A cockeyed plan like that won’t work,” they say again, as if their gloomful confidence itself provides them comfort. “Not now, not ever.”
He sits at one side of the tent with the loaded rifle at his feet and peers out through a spy hole cut into the gray canvas. Once, while he is watching, a rook comes down and settles on the forehead of the elder Yak, pecks briefly at the matted tanglement of his frozen hair, and then extends its wings and jerks upwards and away. Sumner considers firing at it, but saves his powder. He is patient, hopeful. He is sure the bear is close. Perhaps it is asleep after its recent feasting, but when it wakes it will be hungry again. It will sniff the air and remember the treasures nearby. As it gets darker, Sumner hands the rifle across to Otto. He cuts a two-inch cube of seal meat from his cache of provender, skewers it on the point of his knife, and holds it over the blubber lamp to cook. The other three, without pausing from their endless game of euchre, observe him carefully. When he has eaten he lies down and covers himself.
After what seems like barely a moment, Otto nudges him awake again. There is ice on the outside of his blanket where the moisture from his breath has seeped through its weft. Otto tells him there is still no sign of any bear. Sumner shuffles across to the spy hole and looks out again. The moon is gibbous, the arcing sky garrulous with stars. The two dead bodies lie just as they were, exposed and recumbent, like the eerie gisants of a long-forgotten dynasty. Sumner props himself against the rifle and wills the bear to come to him. He tries to picture its arrival, its slow-footed emergence from the murk. He imagines its curiosity, its wariness: the smell of dead flesh pulling it forwards, a sense of strangeness, foreignness, holding it back.
He falls asleep while seated. He dreams of trout fishing on Bilberry Lough: it is summer and he is wearing shirtsleeves and a boater, above and below him is a blue expanse of sky and water, and all around the lake is edged with elms and oak. He is empty-headed, happy. When he wakes, he sees movement in the distance. He wonders if it is the wind against the snow or if the ice is shifting out in the bay, but then he sees the bear, starkly white against the ashen darkness. He watches it approach the dead bodies, moving, low-headed and rhythmical, without eagerness or urgency. He pushes the tent flap slowly to one side with one hand, checks the percussion cap, cocks the rifle, and raises it partway up to his shoulder. The bear is tall and broad but spindle-shanked and gaunt around the ribs. He watches it sniff at the two bodies, then raise its paw and place it atop the chest of the elder. No one else is awake. Otto is snoring softly. Sumner kneels. He rests his left elbow on his knee and presses the rifle stock into the softness of his right shoulder. He raises the sight and looks along the barrel. The bear is a rag of whiteness in the larger dark. He breathes in once, exhales, then fires. The bullet misses the head but hits high on the shoulder. Sumner grabs the bag of cartridges and rushes out of the tent. The snow is deep and uneven and he stumbles twice, then rights himself. When he reaches the bodies he sees a large patch of blood and then a spattered trail leading onward. The bear is nearly a quarter mile ahead now, running lopsidedly, favoring the right foreleg, as if the left is maimed or numb. Sumner runs after it. He is sure it cannot escape, that soon it will either collapse and die or turn around to fight.