Ian McGuire - The North Water

Looking up through the hazy downfall, he sees a dead boy standing before him, grubby and barefooted, clad in a dhoti and blood-soaked tabard. He is holding a limp cabbage leaf in one hand and a tin cup of water in the other. The bubbling bullet wound in his chest goes all the way through to the other side now. A yellow, coin-sized patch of light is just visible where his heart should rightly be. It is like a narrow loophole in the thickness of a castle wall. Sumner raises his right hand in awkward greeting, but the boy offers no response. Perhaps he is angry with me, Sumner thinks. But no, the boy is weeping, and, seeing this, he starts to weep himself for sympathy and shame. The warm tears course down his cheeks and then harden and freeze amidst the tangled edges of his beard. As he sits and weeps, he feels himself liquefying, losing form, sliding away into a stew of sadness and regret. His body starts to shake and shudder. His breathing slows and his heartbeat becomes languid and unwilling. He senses death, feels its leaden presence, scents its fecal perfume on the whipping air. The boy reaches out for him, and Sumner sees, through the spy hole in his chest, another world in miniature: perfect, complete, impossible. He stares for a moment, captivated by the brilliance of its making, then turns away again. He grabs himself tightly, breathes in, and looks about. The child is gone: there is nothing in existence but the raging storm and, concealed somewhere inside it, the bear he must kill if he is to live. He pulls his legs up to his chest and hugs them for a moment. He stands up with difficulty and loads the rifle with numb and trembling fingers. When he is finished, he steps away from the boulder and shouts out into the freezing air.

“Come on out here now,” he yells. “Come on out here now, you baleful bastard, and let me shoot you dead.”

There is no response, nothing except the wind-driven snow and the silent slabs of rock and ice. He peers blindly forwards and yells again. The storm continues unabated; the high wind wails. He could be standing alone on the surface of some far-flung, bitter moon, ice-choked, sunless, and unpeopled. He yells a third time, and, like a sudden ghost, conjured against its will, the bear appears before him, less than thirty yards away, part veiled by thickly wafting snow but clearly visible. He sees the ragged edges of its shoulder wound, the thin white saddle of snow settled across its spine. The bear looks blankly back at him; steam leaks from its nostrils like smoke from a cooling campfire. Sumner raises his rifle and takes unsteady aim at its enormous chest. His head is clear. There is nothing left to decide or hope for. All that exists is this single moment, this event. He breathes in, then out again; his heart fills up with blood, then empties. He pulls the trigger, hears the powder catch and roar, and feels the recoil.

The bear drops down onto its knees, and then falls sideways. The report echoes off the high rocks — loud, then quieter, then quieter still. Sumner lowers the rifle and runs over to the body. He crouches down, puts both his palms on the bear’s still-warm flank, and pushes his face and fingers deep into the fur. His lips are parted, and he is gasping. He takes a blubber knife from his belt, hones its edge with a whetstone, and tests the sharpness against his thumb. He makes the first incision near the groin, and then cuts up through the soft flesh of the belly until he meets the sternum. He starts sawing through bone until he reaches the throat. He cuts the windpipe, then jams his boot heel against one side of the severed rib cage, grips the other with both hands, and breaks it open. He feels the sudden kitchen-heat of the bear’s inner organs and tastes the heady, carnal fetor that rises out of them. He drops the blubber knife onto the snow and pushes both his bare hands down into the dead bear’s steaming guts. His frozen fingers feel like they might burst apart from the warmth. He grinds his teeth and pushes his hands in deeper. When the pain reduces, he pulls them out, dripping with red, rubs his face and beard with the hot blood, then picks up the knife again and begins to sever and remove the bear’s innards. He tugs out the heart and lungs, the liver, intestines, and stomach. The deep cavity that remains is half-filled with a steaming pool of hot black liquid — blood, urine, bile. Sumner leans forwards and starts to drink it, ladling it up quickly into his open mouth with both hands. As he drinks, and as the bear’s heat passes directly into him like an elixir — down his throat, into his empty stomach, and outwards — he starts to tremble, then twitch. After a minute he begins to spasm uncontrollably, his eyes roll back into his skull, and blackness overtakes him.

When the fit passes, Sumner is lying prone and half-covered by drifting snow. His beard is stiff with ursine gore, both hands are dyed dark red, and the arms of his peacoat are soaked up to the elbows. His mouth, teeth, and throat are caked with blood, both animal and human. The tip of his tongue is missing. He pulls himself to his feet and looks about. The wind howls, and the air is dense with close-set waves of gusting ice. He can no longer see the cliffs, or the scree slope, or the boulder where he sheltered previously. He looks down at the bear’s eviscerated corpse, its split and opened rib cage yawning like an empty tomb.

He pauses a moment, considers, then, as if stepping into a bath, he bends and lowers himself down into the striated crimson cavity. The severed bones close over him like teeth. He feels the stiffened muscle compress and spread beneath him. There is the clean wet smell of butchery, a faint but marvelous residue of animal warmth. He tucks his sea boots up into the hollowed-out abdomen and pulls the dead flesh tight around him like an overcoat. He hears the howling wind still but doesn’t feel it. He is enclosed, encoffined, in a tight and vasculated darkness. Lying there, his mutilated tongue begins to swell inside his mouth; blood and saliva bubble out from his lips and dribble down into his beard. He wishes to pray, to speak, to make himself known somehow. He remembers Homer — a hero’s corpse, the funeral games, the armor bent and broken — but when he tries to murmur out the opening dactyls, instead of words what burbles from his brutalized mouth are the inchoate grunts and gaspings of a savage.

The stranger is covered in blood, drenched and laved in it from head to foot. He resembles a skinned seal or a stillborn child newly pushed from his mother’s womb. He is breathing, just, but his blood-caked eyes are closed up and he is half-frozen. They drag his body off to the side and leave it there while they skin and butcher the bear, then pack the meat and hide onto the sledge. One hunter takes the stranger’s rifle, and the other takes his knife. They debate whether to kill him where he lies or take him back to the camp. They argue awhile, then agree to take him back. Whatever else he is, they reason, he is a lucky bastard, and a man who is that lucky deserves another chance. They pick him up and lay him on the sledge. He groans a little. They prod and shake him but he doesn’t wake. They push snow into his mouth, but the snow merely melts on his ravaged tongue and drools out onto his chin in pinkened rivulets.

At the winter camp, the wives give him water and warmed seal blood to drink. They wash his face and hands, and pull off his blood-stiffened garments. When word gets out of what has been found, the children come to stare. They peer and prod and giggle. If he opens his eyes, they squeal and run away. Soon the rumors begin. Some say he is an Angakoq , a spirit guide, sent direct from Sedna to help with their hunting, while others say he is an evil ghost, a shabby tupilaq , whose touch will kill and whose very presence causes sickness. The hunters consult the shaman, who advises them that the stranger will not recover until he is returned to his own people. They should take him south, the shaman says, to the new mission on Coutts Inlet. They ask him if the stranger is lucky, as they supposed he must be, and whether any of his luck will pass to them. The shaman tells them that he is indeed lucky, as they supposed, but that his luck is of a particular, alien kind.