42

I set my plate upon the floor, first removing the dental artifact. “Eat up, dog,” I said. “You must put some weight on if you’re to be worth the effort of butchery.”

Then I wheezed out another rattling laugh and, noting that the tooth’s other half was now loose, perhaps wishing to be reunited and whole again, I lowered myself to the floor. I lay behind Eberhard on his mat by the fire and placed one arm roughly over him. He peered back at me with a look of weary tolerance. Together we spooned like old lovers.

“Not you,” I said into his fur, breathing in the musty dander. It smelled of boiled gruel. “I’d sooner feed you my hand to keep you alive, old friend. Your life is worth at least as much as mine.”

I thought of the old stories again. The Endurance and her sixty-nine dogs, every one of them named, beloved, and killed when circumstance insisted. It was a recurring theme in Arctic exploration. Dogs loved, dogs eaten. I understood the logic distantly, but would it not be better to die? At what point did the survival instinct eclipse humanity? And was it really so far a cry from eating one’s dog to murdering one’s shipmate?

“No, I wasn’t thinking of that,” I said again into Eberhard’s neck. “I was thinking of Bengt.”

Here I must point out that it was the Norwegian sailors who first gave me the name Sven the Seal Fucker. They found me odd, for I did not behave as most old trappers do, and this was the simplest, most prurient way of expressing themselves. Norwegians, though humorless about themselves, delight in mockery of others, particularly when it concerns Swedes, whom they think of as soft and nymphomaniacal. Alas that the crude title was spread throughout Longyear, and so on from there. But allow me to state unequivocally that I never molested a seal. Animals cannot consent to the sexual act with man, no matter what he might think their eyes are telling him in the long polar night. I did have an enriching relationship with a walrus, but it was platonic.

For Eberhard and I were not entirely alone that first lonely winter. A bull walrus, perhaps separated from his harem on Moffen Island, found his way to Alicehamna. I imagined that he had bravely gone nosing for clams in the midst of a towering storm, if only to show the females his prowess and mock the other males’ fear, but the rushing ocean had pushed him out of his reckoning, and when he surfaced he could no longer tell north from south.

He appeared in late November, before I had decompensated completely. Our first sight of him was his huge, sleek head emerging from the harbor on a placid day. Eberhard barked, I looked, and at first I thought he was a seal. But as his head rose farther, inquisitive about the strange dog noise, I noted his luxuriant beard of stiff yellow whiskers and the top several inches of his great descending tusks. I named him Bengt.

He may have been lonely, or he was curious, or he didn’t care one way or the other. He was master of his own counsel. But he had a fondness for ship’s biscuits that overpowered whatever natural caution he might have possessed. I learned this when I emerged from the hut one morning to find him sleeping on the beach within twenty meters of us. He was seated, in a way, his head resting upon his upright neck. Eberhard ran toward him barking, his hackles raised, but stopped short when the walrus’s vast bulk showed no signs of retreat. Bengt opened his eyes and regarded the dog with mild annoyance. He made a low watery grumble in his throat, then closed his eyes again. Over the course of the next hour I approached him gradually, until I was within arm’s reach, and still he remained wholly unperturbed. Every so often he would rouse and watch me for a minute or two before resuming his careless slumber.

Eventually, in an act that Tapio would surely not have approved of, I returned to the cabin, retrieved some hardtack, and brought it back to the walrus, holding it before his twitching whiskers. He ignored me for some time until suddenly his huge bulbous nose rocked sideways and, with one terrifyingly swift movement, he lurched his head forward and snatched the biscuit. For a second I glimpsed the cavernous inside of his mouth, and then he slurped the tack away. His whiskers, strangely inflexible, grazed my hand. I took a step back. Then Bengt produced a deep, weird hoot from somewhere farther down his body and, with surprising agility, shuffled toward me. I gave him another biscuit.

Sometimes he disappeared for several days at a stretch, or even a week, and I had no notion of where he went. But invariably he returned. Often he would lie on the beach. More than a few times we woke at night to his forlorn bellowing for his clan. He never tried to enter the hut. That was fortunate, as he would have destroyed it. But he did linger outside, and seemed to expect hardtack whenever he presented himself. I tried giving him other human food, but he turned his huge head away in disgust. He was surpassingly gentle. Even Eberhard grew to trust Bengt, and I believe Bengt trusted him in return. Only twice did I witness the great walrus in an act of hostility, and both incidents were in response to dog activity that he deemed inappropriate: frenetic rolling in a dead thing and high-pitched yapping at seabirds. But his bluff charge, an unnerving display, was more than enough to correct Eberhard’s behavior, and I don’t believe that Bengt meant any more harm than a mother who threatens to flay her children. In truth, dog and walrus passed a great deal of time together in placid repose.

The decision, then, was evil to stomach. I liken the betrayal to a farmer with a small herd of cattle who names each beast, taking upon himself the heavy responsibility of keeping them alive, even developing affection for certain individuals, and who slaughters because he must. There is no satisfaction in the act—only pain—but there is undeniable satisfaction in eating. In that sense, I suppose, Bengt himself was easy to stomach.

That awful birthday, I dragged myself up and tried to think of options and alternatives. There were none. Delay could prove lethal. Were I to put off this heinous act until I could come up with another unlucky candidate, or until the weather cleared, or even until the bleak sobriety of morning, I might lack the strength, physical and emotional, to go through with it. I unslung the rifle from its nail by the door. It was clean enough, and it was loaded. At least Tapio would not find his teachings wholly in vain. I clumsily donned some heavier woolens, followed by my waxed canvas bibs. Eberhard bore an expression of confused excitement, as if to say, I cannot imagine why you’re suiting up to go outside at this hour, but I’m ready.

“Stay here,” I told him. “You need not see this.”

I lit a lamp and stepped outside. At first I could not see him, for there were no stars and no moon, and my eye was compromised by light and liquor. But after a moment there materialized a void on the beach, like a tear in the universe, upon which the feeble rays of the lamp illuminated nothing. He was there, asleep or far within himself, contemplating unknowable walrus things.

“Ho there, Bengt,” I said, to warn him of my approach. I never could have come on him unawares—I doubt even Tapio had the skill—but it was best to be sure.

His head tilted a little. I approached with my unchewable leftovers in an outstretched hand. They were gone before I even had the chance to gauge my distance from him. Then Bengt rested his head back, our courtesies having been exchanged. I raised the rifle, the muzzle perhaps two feet from his enormous face, and fired. Bengt gave a strangely graceful shudder, almost a sigh, and then slumped to the ground as a man might fall to his bed. No spasms, no froth, no ignominious physical humiliation, unlike most of the deaths I have witnessed, beast or human. It was a dignified ending to a dignified life.

But I felt it deeply. I still do. These sorts of wounds, self-inflicted, never heal. And I found it odd that I could not weep, in spite of having wept more or less continuously for weeks. Perhaps I had found purpose again, and so took the first step away from my grave before ever eating one bite of my friend.

The process of butchering so vast an animal took every last drop of strength—strength I had assumed was gone from me. But desperation breeds vigor, and I ate as much as I could stand of his brain and blubber fresh off the corpse. There would be no way to preserve the meat and still gain the virtue of its vitamins, or to keep a frozen carcass from the predations of ice bears for very long, so I carved and stored as much as possible, knowing that just a week’s consumption of raw or minimally cooked meat would put me back on the path of the living.

I felt an uncanny fortitude return almost immediately. I have never subscribed to such nonsense as one animal passing its life-force on to another, but that is in effect what happened. After a time—I believe it was nearly morning—I released Eberhard and encouraged him to eat the entrails. True to his species, or perhaps to every species but ours, he did so without a shred of guilt or shame. Bengt was no longer; we would live longer.