Collector of Lost Things (14 page)

A couple of miles behind us, the tops of the
Amethyst’s
masts were three twigs stuck in the ice. But the air was so crystal clear that the distance didn’t seem to exist. I felt as though I could reach out and touch the wood. French had prepared me for this phenomenon. As I had waited to step onto the ice sheet that morning, he had explained the optical unreliability of the Arctic: ‘There is nothing in the air,’ he said, ‘except a lens that might bring an object several miles away to be the distance of this.’ He had held his hand before us. His fingers were slender, with long nails. ‘Men have marched towards an encampment, hollering their greeting, only to find it is an abandoned biscuit tin. Or they have drawn the outline of an unknown rocky promontory onto their charts, only to see that it was just a seal, sunbathing on the ice. The Arctic will catch you out, too, believe me.’

As we walked I wondered about Talbot, how he must feel back on the ice that once so nearly killed him. During that fateful night he must have sheltered in some bare hollow while the blizzard raged overhead. A starless night while his companions died, one by one, around him. Would they have held each other in desperation, or suffered privately, in silence, as their toes and fingers became painful, became numb, became solid, piece by piece, giving up on life? What had kept Talbot alive? What, in fact, determines a man’s survival, when he really should have died? Talbot was inscrutable. Maybe that was the answer. He didn’t think about it. He just acted, as an animal acts. Perhaps instinct will save, where thought will kill.

Abruptly, Talbot brought us to a standstill with an out-reached hand, his frostbitten fingers spread out level with the ice. The men crouched, silenced, and gathered into a group. By the time I had caught up, he had already assigned various duties in simple whispered commands.

‘… Mr Bletchley, you absolutely must refrain from talking,’ he was saying, with barely disguised impatience. Bletchley nodded, chided, and Talbot proceeded to divide the men into two parties with a swift motion of his hands, directing them either side of a long ridge of broken ice that rose ahead of us.

‘Is them saddlebacks or bladdernose?’ one of the men asked.

‘Bladdernose,’ Talbot replied, uninterested.

Bletchley felt it necessary to explain to me: ‘That’s the sailor’s name for the
hooded
seal,’ he said, in a stage whisper.

‘
Shh
, man,’ Talbot commanded.

The sledges were unpacked, and a series of stout sticks, handspikes and clubs were laid out on the ice, most of which had iron or stone weights strapped to their ends. Several of them were hakapiks, used by the Esquimaux, a rigid implement consisting of a strong shaft with a hammer and spike fixed at one end. It was a popular tool among the men. I noticed Connor Herlihy wielding one, his eyes glinting with a form of murderous excitement, before he tucked a long-bladed flensing knife into the waistband of his coat. In this manner they armed themselves like a gang of brigands, selecting what felt best in their hands, holding hammers and sticks and feeling the edges of their knifes with the flat of their thumb. Only Bletchley carried a gun, with a second one slung across his back. He waited, patiently, his pale eyes made even paler by the glaring light, grasping the barrel with tightly clenched fingers.

Talbot singled me out. ‘You want to hunt?’

‘I shall watch.’

He shrugged. ‘If you wish to observe, go this way. You will be downwind.’ He indicated a route through the ice blocks, directly ahead. ‘Once the shouting starts, it matters little if the seals spot you.’

With that he left, leading one of the groups, while Bletchley joined the others. They were a curious sight, working their way along and behind the ridge, crouching low as if in a parlour game, and in a minute or so they had slipped from view and I realised I was now totally alone. Stopping on the ice was all it took for a complete and oppressive silence to overwhelm. No wind, no birds, no air that moved; my ears felt hungry for other sounds. By a peculiarity of my position I couldn’t even see the ship. I marvelled at how suddenly and effortlessly all signs of man could vanish.

Perturbed by this, I crawled through the sharp blocks of the ridge until I found a vantage point. Ahead of me was a bare field of the ice sheet, blotted with broken water in several ponds. About twenty seals were scattered across the area, lying on their side, one or two with a head raised in the sunlight. They were a strange and wonderful sight: log shaped, limbless, lying without pattern as if they had been carelessly dropped. Most were a dark tea brown, with pale grey underbellies, and among them I saw several young, whose newborn fur was a gleaming ivory white.

Small noises rose among them, of subdued moans and the occasional cough. A mother began to hump her way across the ice, her belly shaking with a watery quiver as she moved. She approached a pup and their faces touched. Even at distance I saw her long bristles bending as she nuzzled the cub on both sides of its head, bringing it against her raised belly where it started to nudge her vigorously.

I was transfixed by the intimacy of the view, these animals making their home at the top of the world. But at that moment, a line of four or five men appeared, darkly silhouetted, from behind the tapering edge of the ridges on the other side. They ran towards the seals, waving their arms, and after a suspended moment I heard their shouts, a wild
hey-hey-ing
and
yar-ing
. Instantly, the colony reacted, waking and turning and raising their heads towards the noises but unaware of the second group of men charging in ambush from the other side. I watched in disbelief as both killing parties swiftly overran the colony, clubbing and kicking at the seals in the attempt to drive them from the open pools.

I ran also, climbing and sliding through the loose surfaces of the ridge, banging my knees and falling against the rough blocks of ice while, ahead, I watched in horror as sticks and clubs were brought down on the seals’ heads. The seal I had listened to as it had coughed was now growling ferociously, raised up in defence, almost standing on its flippers as one of the men approached and struck it, deftly, with a heavy club. Its whole body shuddered as it fell. And amid all the movement and violence I saw Bletchley, kneeling in a practised shooting posture, bracing his brand-new gun and aiming it at a seal a few feet away from him, while two men stood either side of it to prevent its escape. I saw the flash of powder gust from the end of the weapon as it kicked back, almost at once I heard the crack of its report, and I noticed the seal had been shot in its side, where the bullet vanished without a wound. By this time I was at the edge of the colony, passing an outlying animal that had been left because it was far away from any open water. As I stumbled past, it looked up at me, large eyed, without fear. I stopped, abruptly, held by such a steady liquid gaze. The eyes were as dark as onyx, but soft, too, as soft as amber. Their perfect roundness gave them a trusting, amused expression, and a compassion that was hard to face. They were full of such a human understanding that I knew that this brief, impossible connection between the seal and myself would be a sight that would haunt me. I was unable to pull my gaze from it—those eyes held me: they compelled me to ask myself, as one looks into deep wells, what depth can produce such stillness. This was an animal that was as near to a human consciousness as I had ever seen. It is no wonder that sailors are in fear of these creatures, not for worry of being attacked, but for their nearly human aspect. This was horrible, I realised, finally breaking away from its gaze, this was something I wanted to stop, and yet I had no power to intervene. Bletchley’s gun fired again at his target, and this time I saw Talbot, briskly marching towards the chosen seal, repeatedly saying ‘no, no, no.’ He placed a finger on the stricken animal’s head, between the eyes. ‘Here!’ he instructed. Bletchley nodded, quick as a schoolboy, and began to reload his gun while Talbot stood and waited, filled with a palpable disapproval.

Around me, the moaning of injured animals seemed unrelated to the tranquillity of just a few minutes before. I sat down, as if injured myself, in the middle of the area that had been their colony. Many of the seals were now lifeless and surrounded by a new colour, the brilliant flash of red blood, a redness that was more vivid than any I have ever seen. At the corners of my vision I was aware of the movement of clubs and hakapiks being brought down in swift motions, as if the air itself had turned sharp and murderous. Close by, one of the white cub seals was bleating loudly, before it was given an abrupt
coup de grâce
with a spiked boathook.

Among the carnage I gradually became aware of Bletchley, still in his crouched shooting posture, but now with his gun lowered. His fox-fur hat had fallen on the ice next to him, and he was rubbing his eyes with the back of his sleeve. The two men who had been guarding his seal were trying to coax it towards him, while fending off the repeated lunges it made at them. The seal was still very much alive, although a thin stream of blood was escaping several holes in its side. Bletchley appeared to be shaking his head. With his bloodstained hakapik in one hand, Talbot lifted Bletchley to his feet and pushed him to the animal.

‘Here’s your shot, man!’ Talbot said, excitedly. ‘Where I showed you. Right here!’

Talbot pressed the end of the gun against the seal’s forehead, and the animal acquiesced, as if the feel of the hot end of the weapon was something it was grasping to understand.

‘That’s good,’ Talbot said to the seal. And to Bletchley: ‘You must shoot now.’

Bletchley continued to shake his head. ‘Not—not while it watches me,’ he managed to say, while still gripping the trigger with a clawed finger.

Talbot stared at Bletchley with a shrewd and cruel expression. ‘What’s got into you, man?’

Bletchley began to plead. ‘Just … go away,’ he begged. ‘Let it go.’

The men standing either side of the injured seal looked at Talbot for guidance. He gave a simple nod of his head towards them, then crouched down to Bletchley’s level. ‘Not got the heart for it, eh?’ he taunted. ‘You’ve come a long way with those pretty rifles of yours.’

Bletchley shook his head, beginning to cry. ‘
It is looking into me!
’ he shouted, staring at the seal.

He pushed the rifle away from him, disgusted by it but unable to drop it, and I believe he was trying to shake it free of his hold when suddenly it went off, shooting the seal between the eyes. The animal dropped dead to the ground and slid towards Bletchley, almost pushing him over. He screamed with fear. Talbot stood, considering the pathetic man beneath him, then looked at the others.

‘Skin her,’ he ordered his men, as he turned away without a second thought.

Bletchley lay down on the ice, breathing heavily, his head turned away from the seal. His eyes were screwed tightly shut.

The sailors quickly abandoned him as they turned to the tasks of bending over or squatting on the ice, running their knives expertly through the sealskins, making a simple rotary incision around the tail flippers, then a long, cruelly parting slit down the belly. They worked the flensing knives in, beneath the skin, bringing the pelt away and transforming the animals into vivid red carcasses. The eyes that had just seconds before looked so compassionately were now set within a bloody and socketed skull, lifeless and grotesque. Some of the seals were still moving with heavy thumps of their tails, trying to escape as their skins were worked loose. I watched one of the sailors holding a fist full of loose hide in his bloodied hand, while the animal he was skinning tried to roll itself away from him in a slick of its crimson blood, its flippers paddling uselessly at the air. This was a vision of hell, I thought.

Hanging lifeless from one of the men, a newborn pup was dragged across the ice before me.

‘Wait,’ I heard Talbot say, as he walked briskly towards it. He crouched, close enough for me to smell his jacket, while he examined the pup for signs of life. He touched its eye with his finger to know that it was dead and beyond reaction.

‘Go ahead,’ he instructed. ‘Do you find it a hard sight?’ he asked me, still with a remnant of his bullying tone.

‘Yes,’ I replied, surprised at the steadiness of my voice. ‘It is a massacre.’

He regarded me with an appraising angle of his head, then surprisingly he nodded. ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed. He glanced at Bletchley, who was still lying face down on the ice.

‘I knew it,’ Talbot uttered.

‘I’ll go and help him up,’ I said.

‘No,’ Talbot replied, sternly. ‘Out here you help yourself up.’

He looked at the scenes of butchery around him with, I thought, satisfaction. ‘Sykes will have his devilled kidneys tomorrow,’ he added, grunting with pleasure.

A man called from the side of one of the pools: ‘He’s still under!’

Talbot went to him, and I decided to follow, towards a neat hole in the ice, the width of a common well, with a gently curved edge where it looked to have been nibbled.

‘How long’s it been?’ he asked the man.

‘Minute or two.’

‘He might have another hole.’

‘Not seen none.’

‘Me neither.’

The hole in the ice descended to a perfect disc of black water. It was an eerie sight, a tunnel into the ocean, a deep airless world of mystery, beneath our feet.

A single bubble rose wobbling to the surface, bursting against it, spoiling the reflection of the sky.

‘Told you,’ the man said.

Another bubble rose, the men waited, then impossibly the flat level of the water began to lift, creating a dome which formed, greased and slippery, into the precise watery outline of a seal’s head.

‘Now!’ Talbot instructed. Instantly the man brought down a hammer on the exposed skull. The seal slid below the water, stunned, and Talbot fell flat next to the edge of the hole, plunging the curved spike of his hakapik below the surface trying to get a purchase on the body. He thrust his weapon in again, his arm going in almost to the shoulder, but found nothing.

‘Damn him! He’s sunk!’