He stood drunkenly on the track trying to comprehend this phenomenon. A couple of old men were watching him. They were watching him from the track fifteen yards ahead. They were bulkily clad in furs, leaning against each other. They were not only leaning against each other, but into each other, and then away again. He blinked and perceived that there was only one old man, and that he was not an old man but a bear.
Houston had never in his life seen a bear, except in a zoo. He had seen men dressed up as bears. This looked like a man dressed up as a bear. He knew all the same that it was not, and he felt in his pocket for the knife to increase his armoury.
The bear began to walk towards him, quite slowly, forepaws raised like a somnambulist, snout sniffing against the streaming wind. Houston couldn’t fire the pistol with his glove on, so he took it off, and waited till the bear had covered half the distance, and then fired. He pressed the trigger four times. The gun did not fire on any of them.
Even at that moment, he could recall years later, he had not been in the least frightened of the bear. He thought he was too exhausted for fear. The bear came on slow painful pads. Its fur was stained with dried blood, and had fallen out in places. Its little eyes looked sightless, and were discharging, the teeth in its open mouth worn down to rounded stumps. Houston saw that an agile human would have no difficulty in evading it. He did not himself try to evade it. Dizzy and stupid with hunger, he stood swaying on the track, seeing intermittently one and then two bears, and his only thought was that so many hot meals were advancing towards him, and that if he kept them in focus he might have them.
The bear seemed to come upon him with love, whimpering a little, leaning its mangy, stinking old paws upon his shoulder and nuzzling his face, for all the world like some grandfather come to kiss him.
The bear was not trying to kiss him. It was trying to eat him, there, as he stood, too dazed and hungry to kill him first, taking his head in its mouth and mumbling ravenously.
Houston felt his cheek bruised and crushed as if in a pair of giant nutcrackers, and withdrew the knife he had plunged into its breast and stabbed upwards into its face. He found that he was on the ground. The bear was on the ground also, the pair of them too weak to stand and strive against each other. The blunt teeth had not penetrated Houston’s furry balaclava, and the animal’s wet pad of a nose snuffled round to find some more promising mouthful. There was an abominable reek on the bear’s breath, an animal reek of excreta. It smelt the ungloved hand holding the gun and came gobbling hungrily at it.
Even in his reduced state of sensitivity, the pain of his frozen fingers being crushed was so agonizing that Houston cried out, and stabbed savagely, ignoring and tearing with the knife. The bear growled and released a paw and batted him with it, the claws viciously ripping the cap and scoring his face. Houston managed to release both arms in this moment. He got the one with the knife under the animal’s throat and plunged it in, but could scarcely move the other with numbness, and the bear returned to it, ripping the sleeve with its paw, and grasping the whole arm.
Houston heard himself howling, howling like a dog with the insufferable agony of the hand and arm in the bear’s mouth. He stabbed with all his strength, twisting and turning the knife in the bear’s throat to make it stop. The bear, enraged, began to bite and shake his arm just as savagely, moving all the way up it to beyond the elbow.
The pain as his elbow was ground and crushed in the animal’s jaws was such that Houston passed out.
The bear still had his arm in its mouth when he came to. It was still shaking it, but no longer biting. He realized after a moment that it was not only the bear’s head that was shaking, but the whole bear. It was shuddering and coughing. Great gusts of the excreta smell was released as it coughed. Blood was running from its mouth, and from its throat. Its armpit and its breast were running with blood. The bear lay shuddering slightly, paws flexing and jerking as its life drained away. It did not gurgle from the wound in its throat as the Chinese soldiers had gurgled. It merely coughed, a slow tired cough, with several seconds in between, its whole body heaving like some great cat being sick, blindly and on its back.
Houston lay for over an hour with the bear’s blood congealing on him. He could not somehow organize himself to move. He had withdrawn his injured arm from the dead bear’s mouth, and with the sleeve torn back could see the bones sticking out.
He lay quietly, trying to work out how to pick it up. He thought that if he could do that, and hold it, he could get quickly back to the hermit hole. He could have it tied up and return with the girl, and between them they could get the bear on the sled. He could drag the bear home and eat it. He could eat it for weeks and weeks.
He drew the arm delicately towards him. The hand was not unlike a bunch of hot-house grapes, purple and swollen. He took hold of the wrist. He saw that to pick up the arm he must roll over on his back, and he did so, and held it there above him, sickened at the sight of the bloody bone inches from his nose. He tried to sit up. He did not seem able to sit up. He fell into a mild panic at his inability to sit up; and in his panic, without thinking about it, began to rock himself up. He rocked as if he were lying on his back on a toy horse, rocking a little higher each time, until at last he made it and sat there, holding the arm and gasping.
He couldn’t think what to do with the arm. He couldn’t stand up while holding it. He saw that he would have to kneel first, and he placed it very carefully on his right knee, and got his left hand down on the ground and levered himself up. Then he picked up the arm and got on the other knee also, and knelt, holding the arm before him and plotting the next move.
Houston came up off the ground very slowly, holding the arm delicately before him like a contestant in an egg and spoon race. He stood bowed over it for a moment, and then began to move.
He had no recollection at all of the journey back. He remembered kicking with his boot at the entrance stone, and then coughing weakly in the blast of hot air, and then burping gently with an aftertaste of tea in his mouth.
‘Oh, Chao-li, Chao-li, what have you done?’
He was sitting against the wall, on the sleeping bag. He was in his fur jacket still, and sweating. He wondered why he had the jacket on in the hot cave, and then saw the bones sticking out and saw why.
He was helping her to remove the jacket when he remembered suddenly that he mustn’t remove it, that he had to go out again with it. He had begun telling her this, when he realized with alarm that everything had changed, that he was no longer sitting up but lying flat on his back, and that his jacket was off. One arm was tied to his chest with a strip of cloth. The girl was dabbing gently at his face with a wet rag.
‘Lie still, Chao-li. Don’t move yet.’
‘Mei-Hua, I must go out. There is a bear.’
‘There is no bear, Chao-li. You have been dreaming. You are safe now.’
‘Mei-Hua, I’m not dreaming! There is a bear, a dead bear. I can eat it. It’s food, Mei-Hua –’
‘Yes, Chao-li, yes. See, there is tea and tsampa for you. Eat it and you will feel better.’
‘Mei-Hua, I don’t need your food. Keep your food!’ he said desperately. ‘I have my own food. I killed the bear. We must go and get it quickly –’
He saw that she had stepped swiftly back.
‘Oh, Chao-li,’ she said. ‘It isn’t true. Don’t say that you have killed a bear!’
‘I tell you I have!’ he said, shouting almost above the hammering of his arm, and a peculiar swimming motion that had affected her head. ‘I killed it, and I must eat quickly. …’
‘Oh, Chao-li, I cannot help with a bear.’
He saw that her head was not only swimming in circles but shaking slowly from side to side.
‘Chao-li, I must protect all bears. It is a very great sin to have killed a bear.’
Houston went out again to the bear himself. He got into his jacket himself, and he staggered up into the chorten himself. The girl followed him while he did these thing
s, weeping as she explained why she could not help him. Houston scarcely heard her. He was so feeble that he had room in his mind now for only one thing.
He imagined himself eating the bear.
He imagined himself eating it all the way there. He planned all the operations that would facilitate his eating it.
He would not be able to get the bear on the sled himself. He would have to cut it up first. He would have to cut off the limbs, and take them back and eat them, and then return for the body when he was stronger. He would have to hide the body meanwhile off the track.
It was quite dark when he came to the bear. It was frozen to the track, with the sled and gun and knife frozen alongside. Houston booted the knife free of the ice and sat down on the bear and began to cut off a leg.
He started high, above the haunch, but the flesh had frozen into the consistency of toughened rubber, and he couldn’t wait, and with his hand tore off a piece from the side of the incision. Holding it by the fur, he scraped off the meat with his teeth. There was very little taste that he could tell. But he felt it going down, and his. stomach beginning to work again.
The wind dropped as he ate, as it usually did at this time of the evening, but the cold became suddenly more intense. He saw that he was not going to be able to sit about cutting off all the limbs, and that he had better take only one of them to be getting on with. The forepaw seemed the easiest, and he took that. He broke the bone with his knife and gun, and holding the limb down with his boot, finally wrenched off the paw up to the middle joint.
The paw was too big to go in his pocket, and too small for him to trust by itself on the sled. Houston walked home with it in his hand, in the darkness.
The bear tasted very little better than it smelt. But it lasted Houston. He ate several pounds of it every day. He ate it even when he was out of his mind. But a good half still remained when they left.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THEY went through the pass on what Houston took to be 12 April, but which he later calculated must have been the 18th. Despite his tremendous calendaring, he had somehow lost six days – perhaps in delirium or unconsciousness. He had no recollection at all of the pass itself, and very little of the journey to it. It was not possible for the girl to have pulled him on the sled, for there were four bags of emeralds on it – over a hundredweight of them – so he reckoned that he must have been out on his feet; a state by no means unusual for him at the time.
He had passed through a month of unrelieved horror. The girl had not in any way helped to ease the pain in his arm, which she regarded as a penance for his sinful killing of the bear. Above all animals, the bear was sacrosanct, a mysterious creature of the mountains, who died each winter and lived again each spring. Not even to save life was it permissible to kill a bear; and the fact that Houston had done so during the period of its greatest mystery was so peculiarly abhorrent that she neither could, nor would, do anything to ease his sufferings. Some of Houston’s most nightmarish memories were of trying to ease them for himself.
He had a confused impression of blackness and pain: of sleepless nights with the girl’s tears trickling down his face; of a series of crazy, unreasonable acts. (He had tried, it seems, to set the arm, in a mess of bear fat; and later to freeze it; and then to unfreeze it. And he had wakened one night to find the girl gone, and had discovered her in the place of wind devils, quite naked, in a trance, trying to expiate his sin. Incredibly, she had come to no harm.)
But despite these vicissitudes, he had clung most doggedly to the plans he had made. He had staggered out of the hole on what he thought to be 1 April, and with the girl helping him had gone for his first look at the village. It was set in a hollow, on the banks of the same frozen river; and they had looked down on it for a couple of hours, seeing no Chinese.
They had made the journey again a week later, taking the sled with them this time and two sacks of emeralds. Houston had found a suitable cave for the emeralds, off the track, a cave whose curious ledged roof (the sacks were ‘stuffed in the roof fabric – very laborious’) he later sketched from memory. There were no Chinese in the village this time, either.
He had made one more emerald-ferrying trip a couple of days later; and it was on this trip, it seems, that he had knocked himself out for good. He had a recollection of clambering on to a rock with a sack on his shoulder; and then of finding himself in his sleeping bag, shouting aloud with the savage pain in his arm. He thought he must have fallen. He thought he had fallen on the arm.
After this, nothing was very clear.
It seemed to be colder in the hermit hole, the wood-pile shrinking.
It seemed to be darker.
It seemed to be stinking constantly, himself not in the big sleeping bag, but in Ringling’s.
Vague impressions only came to him from the blur: of dragging up the smoky steps to the chorten and eating his meat raw; of crossing off days, the laborious upreaching effort worthwhile to record their final obliteration.
Of his own voice, drunken and slurred: ‘No, no, you’re wrong. It can’t be. It’s too early.’
‘Chao-li, sit up. Please sit up.’ An idea that his face was being washed. ‘I tell you everything is melting. The sun is shining. I swear it.’
The sun indeed shining, the track wet, everything wet; the world running with glittering slushy water, and himself evidently tramping through it, boots turning an endless treadmill, some inevitable burden at his back, constant aching light in his eyes.
And then not light but dark, and everything gone but the sacks. Only the sacks left to look at in all the world; and he found himself looking at them very closely, and realized he was lying on them. He was lying on the sled. He was alone. It was night.
He came blundering up off the sacks in such distress of spirit that he heard himself wailing. She had left him. She had gone without telling him. Her time had come and she had gone. But then he remembered that it was only her spirit that went. It went and came back. Surely it could not yet have gone far; not beyond recall. He tried recalling her spirit, staggering about on the track in the dark. But it would not answer him, and he went weeping to look for her body that like all bodies had to be left; and saw it some time later, running towards him.
‘Chao-li, be quiet, be quiet!’
‘Why have you gone?’
‘I was looking for the cave, for the other sacks. Chao-li, I can’t find it. I can’t remember it.’
‘Oh, Mei-Hua, don’t leave me.’
‘Chao-li, keep your voice down, I implore you! We are at the pass!’
‘Promise me.’
‘Yes, I promise it. Chao-li, you must help me find the cave. There is little time.’
‘How much time? Tell me, Mei-Hua. I must know.’
The unearthly conversation on the pass in the dark – was it a dream, a nightmare? – all that he could recall with any clarity; but that with much clarity, like the remarks of the surgeon as he was going under in the London Clinic some weeks later. No sense at the time of cross purpose, that the girl was intent on recovering the sacks before daylight, and he on reassurance that she would not leave him. He was obsessed with the idea that she would leave him soon, that she might have left him already and that it was some figment that he held.
‘Oh, Chao-li, not for many years. I swear it!’
‘Tell me. Tell me now.’
‘I can’t tell you. I mustn’t.’
‘You must. I won’t let you go.’
‘Chao-li, the sacks – we have only a few hours.’
‘Tell me. Tell me the year and the month. You know them. Is it now? Is it now, Mei-Hua?’
‘Oh, Chao-li, no. No, no. Not for a long time.’
‘When, then? When?’
And was it then she had told him, or later; this side of the pass or the other? He couldn’t remember. Nothing remained but the words, chasing there and back through his mind, slipping in and out of each other, but always there.
A pig with a curly tail, a tail tha
t was six. A six pig, an earth pig. The six month of Earth Pig. It was a long way off, this pig. It was not yet a worrying pig. There would be time to deal with this pig.
‘And then?’ Oliphant had said. ‘There must be something else that stands out. How did you come to be on the stretcher? Would that have been in Chumbi, or before? And what exactly is Chumbi – a village?’
Not a village. A valley, a district. He had been in a little town, Yatung, and then somewhere else. But first? First, yes, a man with a rifle. And the girl in her heavy veil, suddenly. Just these two impressions: a man with a rifle, and the veil. Then the stretcher. A palanquin also, he thought. But whether for the girl or the Duke of Ganzing. … Yes, the duke there, too. A distinct recollection of the duke seated amiably by his bedside.
‘In a bit of a mess again, old chep. Never mind. Everything under control. They’ve got you a bottle of the Dalai Lama’s urine – he’s here in Yatung – marvellous specific in certain cases. Also a chep from Sikkim – very clever chep. He’s set your arm. He’ll have it as good as new.’
‘Where is the abbess?’ Houston said.
‘Near by. Quite safe and well.’
‘Can I see her?’
‘Soon. When you’re well enough to be moved. She sends to ask after your health every day.’
‘Can she come here?’
‘Not to Yatung, old chep. The Dalai Lama is here – a tricky problem of protocol.’
‘Then I’ll go there.’
‘Certainly, old chep. In a few days. The snag is, there are rather – rather a lot of Chinese about at the moment. You left a knife lying about with your name on it. They’ve promised not to come into Yatung, but they tend to roam a bit outside, looking for you. Worrying.’
‘I want to see her now.’
‘Yerss. Drink this first. Do you good.’
Days lost drinking things to do him good; drugged days in which he thought of questions to ask when he was asleep and forgot them when he woke up; or was it the other way round? And then – when? – no butter lamps but stars, and a breeze on his face, and bumping up and down.
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