Yes, Sir John, I said. The white polar bear of this region is — as far as we know — the largest single predator on Earth. It can weigh half again as much and stand three feet taller on its hind legs than the Grizzly Bear, the largest and most ferocious bear in North America. It is a very powerful predator, fully capable of crushing a man’s chest and severing his spine, as was the case with poor Lieutenant Gore. More than that, the white arctic bear is the only predator that commonly stalks human beings as its prey.
Commander Fitzjames cleared his throat. I say, Dr. Goodsir, he said softly, I did see a rather ferocious tiger in India once which — according to the villagers — had eaten twelve people.
I nodded, realizing at that second how terribly weary I was. The exhaustion worked on me like Powerful Drink. Sir…
Commander… Gentlemen…, you have all seen more of the world than have I. However, from my rather extensive reading on the subject, it would seem that all other land carnivores — wolves, lions, tigers, other bears — may kill human beings if provoked, and some of them, such as your tiger, Commander Fitzjames, will become maneaters if forced to due to disease or injury which precludes them from seeking out their natural prey, but only the white arctic bear — Ursus maritimus — actively stalks human beings as prey on a common basis.
Crozier was nodding. Where have you learned that, Doctor Goodsir? Your books?
To some extent, sir. But I spent most of our time at Disko Bay speaking to the locals there about the behaviour of the bears and also inquired of Captain Martin on his Enterprise and Captain Dannert on his Prince of Wales when we were anchored near them in Baffin Bay. Those two gentlemen answered my questions about the white bears and put me in touch with several of their crewmen — including two elderly American whalers who had spent more than a dozen years apiece in the ice. They had many anecdotes about the white bears stalking the Esquimaux natives of the region and even taking men from their own ships when they were trapped in the ice. One old man — I believe his name was Connors — said that their ship in ’28 had lost not one but two cooks to bears… one of them snatched from the lower deck where he was working near the stove while the men slept.
Captain Crozier smiled at that. Perhaps we should not believe every tale an old sailor has to tell, Doctor Goodsir.
No, sir. Of course not, sir.
That will be all, Mr. Goodsir, said Sir John. We shall call you back if we have more questions.
Yes, sir, I said and turned tiredly to return forward to the sick bay.
Oh, Dr. Goodsir, called Commander Fitzjames before I stepped out the door of Sir John’s cabin. I have a question, although I am deucedly ashamed to admit that I do not know the answer. Why is the white bear called Ursus maritimus? Not out of its fondness for eating sailors, I trust.
No, sir, I said. I believe the name was bestowed on the arctic bear because it is more a sea mammal than land animal. I’ve read reports of the white arctic bear being sighted hundreds of miles at sea, and Captain Martin of the Enterprise told me himself that while the bear is fast on the attack on land or ice — coming at one at speeds of more than twenty-five miles per hour — that at sea it is one of the most powerful swimmers in the ocean, capable of swimming sixty or seventy miles without rest. Captain Dannert said that once his ship was doing eight knots with a fair wind, far out of sight of land, and that two white bears kept pace with the ship for ten nautical miles or so and then simply left it behind, swimming toward distant ice floes with the speed and ease of a beluga whale. Thus the nomenclature… Ursus maritimus… a mammal, yes, but mostly a creature of the sea.
Thank you, Mr. Goodsir, said Sir John.
You are most welcome, sir, I said and left.
The Esquimaux man died just a few minutes after midnight. But he spoke first. I was asleep at the time, sitting up with my back against the Sick Bay bulkhead, but Stanley woke me.
The grey-haired man was struggling as he lay on the Surgical Bench, his arms moving almost as if he were trying to swim up into the air. His punctured lung was hemorrhaging and blood was pouring down his chin and onto his bandaged chest.
As I raised the light of the lantern, the Esquimaux girl rose up from the corner where she had been sleeping and all three of us leaned in toward the dying man.
The old Esquimaux hooked a powerful finger and poked at his chest, very near the bullet hole. Each gasp of his pumped out more bright red arterial blood, but he coughed out what could only be words. I used a piece of chalk to scribble them on the slate Stanley and I used to communicate when patients were sleeping nearby.
“Angatkut tuquruq! Quarubvitchuq… angatkut turquq… Paniga… tuunbaq! Tanik… naluabmiu tuqutauyasiruq… umiaqpak tuqutauyasiruq… nanuq tuqutkaa! Paniga… tunbaq nanuq… angatkut ququruq!”
And then the hemorrhaging grew so extreme he could talk no more. The blood geysered and fountained out of him, choking him until — even with Stanley and me propping him up, trying to help clear his breathing passages — he was inhaling only blood. After a terrible final moment of this his chest quit heaving, he fell back into our arms, and his stare became fixed and glassy. Stanley and I lowered him to the table.
Look out! cried Stanley.
For a second I did not understand the other surgeon’s warning — the old man was dead and still, I could find no pulse or breath as I hovered over him — but then I turned and saw the Esquimaux woman.
She had seized one of the bloody scalpels from our worktable and was stepping closer, lifting the weapon. It was obvious to me at once that she was paying no attention to me — her fixed gaze was on the Dead Face and chest of the man who might have been her husband or father or brother. In those few seconds, not knowing anything of the customs of her Heathen tribe, a Myriad of wild images came to my mind — the girl cutting out the man’s heart, perhaps devouring it in some terrible ritual, or removing the dead man’s eyes or slicing off one of his fingers or perhaps adding to the webwork of old scars that covered his body like a sailor’s tattoos.
She did none of that. Before Stanley could seize her and while I could think of nothing but to cower protectively over the dead man, the Esquimaux girl flicked the scalpel forward with a surgeon’s dexterity — she obviously had used razor-sharp knives for most of her life — and she severed the rawhide cord that held the old man’s amulet in place.
Catching up the flat, white, blood-spattered bearshaped stone and its severed cord, she secreted it somewhere on her person under her parka and returned the scalpel to its table.
Stanley and I stared at each other. Then Erebus’s chief surgeon went to wake the young sailor who served as the Sick Bay mate, sending him to inform the officer on watch and thence the Captain that the old Esquimaux was dead.
We buried the Esquimaux man sometime around one-thirty in the morning — three bells — shoving his canvas-wrapped body down the narrow fire hole in the ice only twenty yards from the ship. This single fire hole giving access to open water fifteen feet below the ice was the only one the men have managed to keep open this cold summer — as I have mentioned before, sailors are afraid of nothing so much as fire — and Sir John’s instructions were to dispose of the body there. Even as Stanley and I struggled to press the body down the narrow funnel, using boat pikes, we could hear the chopping and occasional swearing from several hundred yards east on the ice where a party of twenty men was working through the night to hack out a more decorous hole for Lieutenant Gore’s burial service the next day — or later the same day, actually.