Background and Escape Plan

Drax’s escape from the winter camp grows out of a decision to leave rather than remain with the others. He tells Cavendish that a local hunter is due to depart on a sledge the next morning and has agreed to take him. To make that plan possible, Drax asks Cavendish for a file to remove his chains and for a moment of deliberate inattention. Cavendish does not agree to help; Drax proceeds without his assistance.

The cold makes the work of freeing himself slow and difficult. Drax can manage only about twenty minutes outside the tent before losing feeling in his hands and feet, so he makes four trips through the night, returning each time to continue working on his manacles. He threads his way among the sleeping men, who stir and curse but do not wake; Cavendish alone watches him. The repeated movement between the tent and the freezing darkness turns escape into a patient, physical task rather than a sudden flight.

Once free, Drax feels newly awake and unburdened by fear of what comes next. He gathers his clothes into a bundle, keeps the file, and makes his way to the snow house where the two hunters are sleeping. The contrast between the camp’s sleeping bodies and Drax’s deliberate preparations establishes the danger of the escape before anyone else understands what he intends to do.

Killing the Hunters and Taking the Sledge

Drax enters the snow house while the two hunters sleep. He kills them both, then takes the elder hunter’s anorak and locates the blubber knives and rifle. The killings clear his route out of the camp, but they also make the escape a lethal one: Drax has turned the hunters’ shelter and equipment into means of survival for himself.

Outside, he retrieves the deerskin traces and harnesses the dogs to the packed sledge. He returns once more to the snow house to gather the dead men’s boots, trousers, and mittens, placing them in a sleeping bag. By the time he comes back out, Cavendish is waiting by the sledge. Drax has acquired transport and supplies, but his departure now depends on what he will do about the man who has watched him prepare.

Cavendish’s Death and the Camp’s Response

Cavendish waits beside the sledge, still observing Henry Drax’s preparations. Drax directs him to look inside the sleeping bag, then uses the moment when Cavendish bends down to kill him with a single stroke of a blubber knife. He turns Cavendish’s final inspection into an ambush, and afterward searches Brownlee’s greatcoat. The escape has now become not only a flight from the camp but the elimination of the one man who had watched it take shape.

Drax’s parting words assign the idea to Cavendish, though the deaths of the two hunters and Cavendish are the means by which Drax has secured his own departure. The statement sharpens the reversal between them: Cavendish had believed he could prevent Drax from getting ahead of him, but Drax leaves him dead beside the sledge while the dogs and supplies are ready to go.

At first light, the camp finds Cavendish’s body on the snow. The men initially suspect the two hunters, only to discover that both are dead as well and that Henry Drax has disappeared. The three deaths leave them stunned, unable to make sense of the sequence until they recognize that Drax has escaped. The scene turns the camp’s practical uncertainty into a collapse of trust: the danger they first attribute to outsiders has come from within their own group.

Under Otto’s direction, the men bury Cavendish in a shallow trench at the headland and cover him with stones taken from the cliff. They leave the hunters where they were found, blocking the snow-house entrance and collapsing its walls and roof over them. After these separate, improvised burials, Otto gathers the survivors to pray for mercy and for the dead. The act offers a fragile form of order, but it cannot answer the immediate fact that Henry Drax has left the camp, or restore the men’s confidence in one another.

Earlier Pattern of Work and Violence

The escape also extends a pattern established during the sealing: Henry Drax works alone, moving methodically between groups of seals, killing them and preparing their skins while the other boats load their catches. His competence is presented through repetitive physical labor, not reflection; he keeps moving until the ice is marked by the hunt and the five whaleboats carry their loads back. That earlier work makes the winter-camp killings part of a broader narrative in which practical skill and violence are difficult to separate. Drax’s actions repeatedly turn bodies, tools, and the surrounding environment into means of continuing forward. The escape brings that instrumental approach into the camp itself, where the equipment and transport associated with survival become inseparable from the deaths that enable his departure.