Sumner tracks and kills a polar bear, taking shelter inside its carcass

Sumner tracks and kills a polar bear, taking shelter inside its carcass, in a sequence that turns a hunt into a struggle to survive. Pursuing the wounded animal across Arctic ice, he loses his bearings in a blizzard and comes close to collapse. The bear’s death does not end the ordeal: Sumner must use its body as a source of warmth and shelter until he can survive the storm.

Voyage and Conditions

The episode follows a voyage already shaped by hard physical work and exposure to danger. Sailing north from Lerwick, the crew endure fog, sleet, gales, and rough seas before reaching the ice near Jan Mayen Island. They prepare for sealing by distributing rifles and ammunition, then take their boats onto the ice. Henry Drax works alone, killing seals and removing their skins; the work yields a substantial catch, which Arthur Brownlee calculates in terms of oil, market value, and the season’s commercial prospects. The scene establishes a shipboard world where animal life is routinely treated as labor and commodity.

The crew’s later whaling success continues that pattern. After the Volunteer enters the North Water, Black strikes the first whale, and Otto’s boat joins the attack. Once the whale is dead, Brownlee estimates its oil and whalebone at a value close to nine hundred pounds. Otto and Black help process the carcass, while the crew receive an extra ration of rum. Sumner, too, is put to work: he carries heavy blocks of blubber from the deck to the hold, nearly falling in before Otto saves him. The task leaves him aching but gives him a rare sense of satisfaction, and he sleeps without laudanum. These episodes place the later bear hunt amid the ship’s routine of pursuit, extraction, and physical exertion, while also showing Sumner’s growing participation in manual labor.

The environment, however, resists any easy division between work and danger. The crew must judge moving ice and weather as carefully as they judge the animals they hunt. When drifting ice begins to close on the ship, Cavendish directs the crew to cut an ice dock, a demanding operation that requires coordinated teams and heavy equipment. For Sumner, the bear pursuit will become a more isolated version of the same contest with the Arctic: a test of judgment and endurance in a landscape whose conditions can change faster than a person can respond.

The Bear’s Approach and the Pursuit

Sumner’s hunt begins at night, after he has been watching for a bear near two dead bodies. He falls asleep while seated and dreams of trout fishing at Bilberry Lough, a summer scene far removed from the ice. On waking, he sees the bear approaching. Otto is asleep, and Sumner prepares his rifle without waking him. The bear investigates the bodies, giving Sumner time to aim. His first shot hits its shoulder rather than its head. He immediately leaves the tent and follows the blood trail across deep snow.

The pursuit becomes a test of persistence. The bear runs on, favoring its wounded foreleg, while Sumner follows across uneven ice and over a pressure ridge. He loses sight of the animal briefly, then finds its tracks again. As dawn comes, he reloads and fires a second time, but a misfire and a later shot that falls short allow the bear to continue. He keeps following despite his aching leg, fatigue, and the growing distance from camp. At one point he recognizes that, even if he kills the animal, he may be too far away to bring its meat back. The practical reason for the hunt has begun to recede; what remains is the pursuit itself and the conviction that the bear will eventually weaken.

The chase carries them past a large berg and toward high black cliffs. The bear slips through a narrow opening, and Sumner follows into a long, ice-choked fjord with steep sides and no apparent way out. He experiences the place as strangely familiar, as though it might have appeared in a dream or an opiated vision. That uncertainty accompanies the physical facts: he is hungry, weakened, and still following an animal that has not stopped. When snow begins to fall more heavily, the enclosed valley becomes increasingly difficult to navigate.

Blizzard and the Final Shot

As wind drives the snow across the fjord, Sumner loses sight of the bear and then of the cliffs. The storm erases his sense of time and direction. He eventually finds shelter behind a boulder, but by then he understands that he has strayed far from his purpose and is lost. In this state, he sees a vision of a dead boy in clothing associated with India. The boy’s presence brings grief and shame into the scene, but it does not change Sumner’s immediate predicament: to live, he believes, he must find and kill the bear.

Sumner leaves the boulder and calls into the storm. The bear appears less than thirty yards away. Although the shot gives him little room for error, he finds that his thoughts have narrowed to the present moment. He fires, and this time the rifle discharges. The bear falls. Sumner approaches it, checks that it is dead, and uses his knife to open the carcass. He drinks from its warm interior, then collapses briefly. When he comes to, he is still in the storm, with the bear’s body beside him and the sheltering rock and cliffs no longer visible.

Shelter and Significance

Sumner’s next decision converts the animal he has pursued into shelter. He lowers himself into the opened carcass and draws the dead flesh around him, using its remaining warmth to protect himself from the wind. The scene reverses the relation between hunter and hunted without pretending that the reversal is simple: Sumner has killed the bear, but he now depends on its body to endure the conditions that have nearly overwhelmed him. The animal’s death is both the outcome of his pursuit and the material means of his survival.

The episode also alters the meaning of Sumner’s earlier participation in shipboard labor. At sea, killing and processing animals have been organized around crews, equipment, and commercial estimates. Here the hunt is solitary, and its immediate measure is not oil or market price but whether Sumner can remain alive. His earlier satisfaction at handling blubber belongs to the body at work; this pursuit drives the body to exhaustion and makes survival depend on adaptation rather than the completion of a task. The contrast does not erase the novel’s account of hunting as extraction, but it shifts attention from the catch’s value to the hunter’s dependence on the animal.

The survival outcome is confirmed later when Sumner appears in Hull, where Jacob Baxter greets him as a man believed drowned or frozen. That later encounter establishes that Sumner has lived through the ordeal, without making the bear hunt a clean or uncomplicated victory. In the ice-bound valley, survival comes through a combination of pursuit, a final successful shot, and the use of the dead animal as refuge.