The North Water by Ian McGuire Page A

pulls the spade out and brings it down again, and then again, stabbing deeper with each thrust. With the third blow, he pierces the bear’s heart and a great purple gout of blood comes steaming to the surface and spreads like India ink across her ragged white coat. The air is filled with a fetid blast of butchery and excrement. Drax feels pleasure at this work, arousal, a craftsman’s sense of pride. Death, he believes, is a kind of making, a kind of building up. What was one thing, he thinks, is become something else.
    The mutilated oarsman after some moments of screaming has passed out from his pain and is beginning to sink. The bloody remnants of his lost arm still depend from the dead bear’s tusks. Cavendish gets the boat hook and drags him back on board. They cut off a length of whale line and tourniquet his stump.
    â€œThat’s what I call an almighty fuckup,” Cavendish says.
    â€œWe still have the babe,” Drax says, pointing. “That’s twenty pounds right there.”
    The bear cub is swimming beside his mother’s corpse, mewing and nudging the body with his nose.
    â€œA man’s lost his fucking arm,” Cavendish says.
    Drax takes his looped rope and, using the boat hook, slips it over the bear cub’s head and pulls it tight. They bore a hole in the dead she-bear’s jaw, run a cord through the hole, and lash the other end of the cord to the bollard. It is a slow, hard pull back to the ship and before they get there, the oarsman expires from his injuries.
    â€œI’ve heard of such a thing,” Cavendish says. “But never seen it happen ere now.”
    â€œIf you could shoot straight, he’d still be living,” Drax says.
    â€œI put two solid bullets into her, and she still had strength enough to take off a man’s arm. What kind of bear is that, I ask you?”
    â€œA bear is a bear,” Drax says.
    Cavendish shakes his head and sniffs.
    â€œA bear is a fucking bear,” he echoes, as though the thought had not occurred to him before.
    When they get back to the Volunteer they attach the dead bear to a block and tackle and haul her up out of the water until she is suspended over the deck, dangling, shabby and lifeless, from the yardarm drooling blood. Still down in the water, separated from his parent now, the cub becomes enraged, swimming hither and thither in a fierce, wild-eyed frenzy, snapping at the boat hook and pulling back against the rope collar. Drax, on his feet in the whaleboat, calls for an empty blubber cask and, with the help of Cavendish, tugs and prods the bear cub into it. The others toss down a net and haul the cask, filled now with a screaming, flailing bear cub, up onto the deck. Brownlee watches from the afterdeck as the cub tries, repeatedly, to escape out of the upright cask and Drax, armed with a stave, prods him down again.
    â€œLower the mother’s body,” Brownlee calls out. “That’s the only way to quiet the beast.”
    Flat out on the deck, a hillock of bloodied fur, the she-bear steams like the gargantuan centerpiece of some barely imaginable banquet. Brownlee kicks over the cask, and the cub scurries out, his claws scrabbling and scraping on the wooden deck. There is a moment of panicked swiveling and disorientation (men, laughing, scramble up the rigging to escape), but then he sees his mother’s body and rushes to it. He nudges its flank with his nose and starts to helplessly lick the smeared and bloodied fur. Brownlee watches. The cub whimpers, sniffs, then settles itself in the lee of the mother’s corpse, flank to flank.
    â€œThat cub’s worth twenty pounds,” Drax says. “I know a man at the zoo.”
    Brownlee looks at him.
    â€œThe blacksmith will rivet you a grille so you can keep him in the cask,” he says. “More likely than not he will die before we get home, but, if not, every penny he fetches goes to the dead man’s