Free The Ice Child by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

out on nine whaling voyages, he had never seen a polar bear. All he knew of them, he had from his uncle. He would shudder at the dream of them, the unreal beasts that lived where nothing else could live. It was rumored that they could sleep in storms, covered with snow. That they could swim through ice. That they could be ten feet high at the shoulder and weigh as much as eight men.
    Would they see one now, on this voyage?
    Gus knew that it was hard to kill them. A bullet could be put through one, and it would still live. They were the white ghosts of the seas, creatures that could dive and stay underwater for inconceivable lengths of time. They were silent, patient killers, stalking the seal for hours, lying in wait for them above their breathing holes, or listening for the sound of the pups in the ice dens below them.
    His father had never caught one, but his uncle had.
    Gus knew the story by heart.
    The female had come right up to the ship across a floe, and had started licking the whale oil from the wood. They caught her with lassoes, with the rope heaved through the boat’s ring on the stem, and the rest thrown over her head. They had to be quick to take in the slack, drawing her tightly to the boat. It was a work of seamanship and art to pull her, ten men at a time, into the boat, while she thrashed, throwing her head from side to side for air. Her huge claws dug into the ice, the boat, and the sides of the ship. She was made fast to ring bolts in the deck, with ropes on each foot and around her neck.
    The men had argued whether to keep or kill her. Alive, she might be taken back to England and sold, and fetch a fine price for exhibition, although her kind did not live long once captured and caged. Or they might kill her for the rich food she could provide, better than venison, and so much better than black whale-skin, with its coconut flavor, or even the gums of the whale with bone still embedded, which could be delicious. Better even than the mess of green from reindeer’s entrails, that the natives called mariyalo , and certainly better than boiled seal or walrus meat, which was always tough and tasteless.
    They decided on slaughter.
    She took the first blow, by a whale lance, with barely a shudder, still standing, her head a little lowered. At the second blow, which severed an artery and streamed blood, she turned her head in an almost full circle, and looked back over the rail, out onto the ice that she had left behind. While she swayed, they moved in on her and overcame her quickly, and she finished with her front paws folded under her, her back legs still straight.
    It wasn’t until the cook’s fires were lit that they noticed the cub.
    He was not far from the ship, on the ice, pacing forward, and then running hesitantly back. They all hung over the side and watched him, taking bets when he would run and when he would stand still and look up at where his mother had been taken. His uncle said that he stayed there for hours, and they threw bread down to him that he didn’t touch. Every now and again he would cry, and it was a sound like a dog chained and unfed. Eventually, sick of the noise, they lassoed him easily and hauled him up.
    He was small and easily chained to the deck where his mother’s blood and skin still lay. As they broke free of the ice and sailed, the captain ordered the deck swabbed, and the cub pulled hard on the chain while the water ran under him.
    He choked on the chain for a whole week, his uncle said, pacing up and down as the ship endured a five-day storm. They tried to get him to eat, but he refused everything, all the while vomiting a thick, oily, fish-smelling milk from his stomach.
    On the eighth day when they came up on deck, the cub was dead.
    It was a pity and a shame, his uncle told him.
    All the money they could have made by selling him in Hull.
    It was midmorning when Gus was taken down onto Terror ’s lower deck.
    Only half the crew were there, but it was already