Later, while the two hunters butcher the seal and pass out portions of the meat and blubber to the other families in the camp, the children gather round Sumner where he stands, tugging at his bearskin pantaloons, touching and rubbing themselves against his thighs and knees as if hoping for a share of the good luck he has brought. He tries to shoo them away but they ignore him, and it is only when the women come out of the igloos that they disperse. The size of the seal, it seems, has confirmed his status. They believe he has magic powers, that he can conjure the animals up from the depths and draw them onto the hunters’ spears. He is not a full-blown god, he supposes, but he is a kind of minor saint at least: he assists and intercedes. He thinks of the chromolithograph of Saint Gertrude hung on the parlor wall in William Harper’s house in Castlebar—the golden halo, the quill pen, the sacred heart lying like a holy beetroot on the flat of her outstretched palm. Is this any more absurd or improbable, he wonders, any more sinful even? The priest would have a thing or two to say on the matter, of course, but he hardly cares. The priest is in another world altogether.
Later, under the deer hides, Punnie presses herself up into him, rump against groin. He thinks at first that she is only rearranging herself, that she must be asleep like the others are, but then, when she does it again, he understands what is intended. She is short and thick-limbed, broad in the hips and no longer young. Her square-topped head reaches only up to his chest and her hair smells of dirt and seal grease. When he reaches out to touch her shallow breasts she doesn’t speak or turn around. Now that she is sure he is awake, she lies there waiting for him, the way her husband waited for the seal earlier out on the ice, poised but without expectation, both desirous and cleansed of all desire, like everything and nothing held together in silent balance. He hears her breathing and feels the soft heat her body radiates. She twitches once, then settles again. He thinks of saying something, then realizes there is nothing he can say. They are two creatures coupling. The moment has no greater meaning, no further implications. When he pushes into her, his mind empties out and he feels a purifying surge of inner blankness. He is muscle and bone, blood and sweat and semen, and, as he jerks and jitters to a rapid and inelegant conclusion, he needs and wants to be nothing else.
Each day the hunters go out and catch another seal, and each night, under the deer hides, while the others are sleeping, he couples with Punnie. She keeps her back turned against him always; she neither resists nor encourages. She never speaks. When he is finished she rolls away. When she gives him breakfast in the morning—warm water, raw seal liver—she treats him coolly, and there is no sign that she remembers anything that has occurred between them. He imagines she is acting out of a heathenish model of politesse, and that Urgang himself has encouraged or commanded this. He accepts the offering for what it is: no more or less. After a week, when it is time for him to return to the mission, he decides he will miss the vacancy of the ice and the incomprehensible jabber of the igloo. He has not spoken English since he left the mission, and the thought of the priest sitting in the cabin waiting for him with his books and papers, his opinions and plans and doctrines, fills him with irritation and gloom.
On the final night, instead of moving away when they have finished, Punnie turns back towards him. He sees through the lamp-leavened gloom her blunt and pockmarked face, her dark eyes and small upturned nose, the line of her mouth. She is smiling at him, and her expression is eager and curious. When she opens her lips to speak, he doesn’t realize, at first, what is happening. The words sound to him like noises only, like the low guttural clucks the hunters make when they are soothing their dogs at night, but then, with a shudder of dismay, he understands she is talking to him in a crude but recognizable form of English, that she is trying to say “good-bye.”
“Gud bye,” she says to him, smiling still. “Gud bye.”
He frowns at her, then shakes his head. He feels exposed and sullied by her efforts. Ashamed. It is as if a bright, burning light has been flashed upon the two of them and their pitiful nakedness has been revealed to the world. He wants her to be quiet again, to ignore him now as she has always ignored him before.
“No,” he whispers fiercely back at her. “No more of that. No more.”
*
Next day, when he arrives at the mission, it is dark and cold, and the borealis is unwinding across the night sky in peristaltic bands of green and purple, like the loosely coiled innards of a far-fetched mythic beast. Inside the cabin, he finds the priest stretched out on his cot, laid low and complaining of stomach pains. Anna, under the priest’s instruction, has placed a warm poultice on his abdomen and brought him castor oil and jalap from the medicine chest. He is badly bunged up, he explains to Sumner, and may require an enema if there is no movement presently. Sumner makes tea for himself and heats a can of bouillon soup. The priest watches him eat. He asks about the hunting trip, and Sumner tells about the seals and about the feasting.
“You encourage their superstitions then, I see,” the priest says.
“I let them believe what they want to. Who am I to interfere?”
“You do them no service by keeping them in ignorance. They lead a brutish kind of life.”
“I have no better truths to tell them.”
The priest shakes his head, then winces.
“Then what are you exactly?” he says. “If that is the case?”
Sumner shrugs.
“I am tired and hungry,” he tells him. “I am a man who is about to eat his dinner and go to bed.”
In the night the priest has a fierce bout of diarrhea. Sumner is woken by the sounds of loud groans and splattering. The cabin air is dense with the velvet reek of liquid feces. Anna, who has been sleeping curled on the floor, rises to assist. She gives the priest a clean cloth to wipe himself and takes the pot outside to empty. When she comes back inside, she covers him with blankets and helps him drink some water. Sumner watches but doesn’t move or speak. The priest strikes him as robust and healthy for a man of his age, and he assumes the constipation is a result of nothing more than the usual deficiencies of the arctic diet, bereft as it is of plants, vegetable matter, or fruit of any kind. Now that the purgatives have had their effect, Sumner is sure he will be back to his normal self soon enough.
In the morning, the priest declares he is much improved; he breakfasts sitting upright in the bed and asks Anna to carry over his books and papers so he can continue with his scholarly work. Sumner goes outside to say a last farewell to Urgang and Merok, who have spent the night in the igloo. The three of them embrace like old friends. They give him one of the seals, as agreed, but they also offer him one of their old hunting spears as a souvenir. They point at the spear, then at Sumner, then out onto the ice. He understands they mean him to go hunting by himself once they are gone. They laugh, and Sumner nods and smiles at them. He takes the spear and mimes the action of striking a seal through the ice. They cheer and laugh, and then when he does it again they cheer even louder. He realizes they are mocking him a little now to ease their parting, gently putting him in his place before they leave; they are reminding him that although he has magical powers he is a still a white man, and the idea of a white man knowing how to use a spear is comical indeed. He watches as their sledge disappears beyond the granite headland; then he goes back into the cabin. The priest is making notes in his journal. Anna is sweeping up. Sumner shows them the spear. The priest examines it, then passes it to Anna, who declares it is a well-made spear but too old to use.
They have crumbled hardtack and bouillon soup for lunch. The priest eats everything that is in front of him, but then, almost as soon as he has finished, he vomits it out again onto the floor. He stays in the chair for a while, bent over coughing and spitting, then climbs back into the bed and calls for brandy. Sumner goes into the storeroom and takes the bottle of Dover’s Powder from the medicine chest, dissolves a spoonful in water, and gives it to the priest to drink. The priest drinks it, then falls into a doze. When he wakes, he appears pale and complains of a more severe pain in his lower abdomen. Sumner feels his pulse and looks at his tongue, which is furred. He presses his fingertips into the priest’s abdomen. The skin is tense, but there is no sign of a hernia. When he presses just above the line of the ilium, the priest cries out and his body jackknifes. Sumner takes his hand away and looks out of the cabin window—it is snowing outside and the panes are thick with frost.
“If you keep the brandy down, that should help a little,” he says.