Dan Simmons - The Terror

Mr. Wall, Erebus ’s cook, was sick with something like consumption and lay curled into the bottom of one of the cutters most of the time, but Mr. Diggle remained the same energetic, obscene, efficient, bellowing, and somehow reassuring figure he had been for three years at his post near the huge Frazer’s Patent Stove aboard HMS Terror . Now, with the ether fuel depleted and the spirit stoves and heavy whaleboat coal stoves abandoned, Mr. Diggle’s job was to portion out twice a day the small bit of cold salt pork and other victuals remaining, always under Mr. Osmer’s and another officer’s watchful supervision. But always the optimist, Diggle had cobbled together a crude seal-oil stove and cooking pot which he was ready to light if and when they shot more seals.

Every day, Crozier sent out hunting parties to find those seals for Mr. Diggle’s pot, but there were almost none to be seen and those few sighted slipped back into their open leads or tiny holes before the hunters succeeded in shooting them. Several times, so the men on the hunting parties reported, the slippery black ring seals had been hit by buckshot or even a musket ball or rifle bullet but managed to slide back into the black water and dive out of reach before they died, leaving only a trail of blood on the ice. Sometimes the hunters knelt on the ice to lap at the blood.

Crozier had been in summer arctic waters many times before and knew that by mid-July the water and opening floes should be teeming with life: huge walruses sunning themselves on ice floes and flopping ponderously along the water’s edge, their barks more a series of belches than barks; a proliferation of seals catapulting in and out of the water like children playing and bellying their way comically across the ice; beluga whales and narwhals spouting and rolling and submerging in the open leads, filling the air with their fishy breaths; female white bears swimming in the black water with their ungainly cubs and stalking seals on floes, shaking the water out of their strange fur as they pulled themselves from the ocean to the ice, avoiding the larger and more dangerous males, which would eat the cubs and the sow as well if their bellies were empty; finally, seabirds flying overhead in such profusion as to almost darken the blue arctic summer sky, birds on shore, on floes, and lining the irregular tops of icebergs like musical notes on a score, while more terns and gulls and gyrfalcons skimmed the water everywhere.

This summer, for the second year in a row, almost nothing living moved across the ice – only Crozier’s diminished and diminishing men gasping in their man-hauling halters and their relentless pursuer, always briefly and partially glimpsed, always out of rifle or shotgun range. A few times in the evening, the men heard the yip of arctic foxes and frequently found their dainty tracks in the snow, but none ever seemed to make itself visible to the hunters. When the men did see or hear whales, they were always many floes and small leads over, too far to reach even by frenzied, careless running – men throwing themselves from rocking floe to rocking floe before the sea mammals casually breached and dove and disappeared again.

Crozier had no idea if they could kill a narwhal or beluga with the few small arms they carried, but he thought they could – a few rifle bullets to the brain should kill anything short of the Beast that stalked them (which the seamen had long since decided was no beast at all, but a wrathful God out of the captain’s Book of Leviathan ) – and if they somehow had the strength to drag a whale onto the ice and render it down, the oil would power Mr. Diggle’s stove for weeks or months and they would eat blubber and fresh meat until they all burst.

What Crozier most wanted to do was to kill the thing itself. Unlike the majority of his men, he believed it was mortal – an animal, nothing more. Smarter, perhaps, than even the frighteningly intelligent white bear, but still a beast.

If he could kill the thing, Crozier knew, the mere fact of its death – the pleasure of revenge for so many deaths, even if the rest of the expedition still were to die later from starvation and scurvy – would temporarily lift the morale of the survivors more than discovering twenty gallons of untapped rum.

The beast had not bothered them – not killed any of them – since the ice-enclosed lake where Lieutenant Little and his men had died. Each of the hunting parties the captain sent out had standing orders to return immediately should they find the thing’s tracks in the snow; Crozier intended to take every man who could walk and every weapon that could fire out to stalk the beast. If he had to, he would use men banging pots and pans and shouting to flush the thing out, as if it were a tiger in the high grass of India being brought to bay by beaters.

But Crozier knew this would work no better than the late Sir John’s bear blind. What they really needed to bring the thing closer was bait. Crozier had no doubt whatsoever that it was still keeping pace with them, moving in closer during the increasing hours of darkness, hiding wherever it hid, perhaps under the ice, during the day, and that it would come even closer if they could bait it in. But they had no fresh meat, and if they had even a pound of fresh kill, the men would devour it, not use it as bait to catch the thing.

Still, Crozier thought, while remembering the impossible great size and mass of the monstrous thing on the ice, there was more than a ton of meat and muscle there, perhaps several tons, since the larger male white bears weighed up to 1,500 pounds and the thing made its white bear cousins look like hunting dogs next to a large man in comparison. So they would eat well for many weeks if they did manage to murder their murderer. And with every bite, Crozier knew, even eating the thing-flesh as they were the salt pork while on the march, there would be the pleasure of revenge, even if it had to be a dish best served cold.

If it would work, Francis Crozier knew he would set himself out onto the ice as bait. If it would work . If it would save and feed even a few of his men, Crozier would offer himself to the beast as bait and hope that his men, who had proved themselves atrocious shots even before the last of Terror ’s Marines died in the cold water, would be able to shoot the monster often enough, if not accurately enough, to bring it down, whether the Crozier bait survived or not.

With the thought of the Marines came, unbidden, the memory of Private Henry Wilkes’s body left behind in one of the abandoned boats a week earlier. There had been no gathering of the men for Wilkes’s nonburial, only Crozier, Des Voeux, and a few of the Marine’s closer friends saying a few words over the body before dawn.

We should have used Wilkes’s body for bait , thought Crozier as he lay in the bottom of the rocking whaleboat while the other men slept in heaped piles around him.

Then he realized – and not for the first time – that they had fresher bait with them. David Leys had been nothing but a burden for eight months, ever since the night in December of last year when the thing had given chase to the late Ice Master Blanky. Leys staring at nothing since that night, unresponsive, useless, hauled in the boat like a hundred and thirty pounds of soiled laundry for almost four months now, nonetheless managed to slurp down his salt-pork broth and rum ration every afternoon and to swallow his spoonful of tea and sugar each morning.

It was to the men’s credit that none of them – not even the whispering Hickey or Aylmore – had suggested leaving Leys behind, or any of the other sick men who currently could not walk. But everyone must have had the same thought…

Eat them.