Walruses

Walruses enter the narrative indirectly, as a possible carcass carried to a winter camp and as ivory worked into a small carving. The novel does not depict a Walrus hunt or establish how the ivory was obtained. Instead, the animal is glimpsed through the practical and material roles its body may take: food offered in a precarious exchange and a substance fashioned into an image. That limited presence distinguishes Walruses from the seals and whales whose hunting and processing are described at length.

Signs of the Animal

When two Yaks arrive by sledge at the camp, their load includes a frozen seal carcass and something that appears to be the hind part of a Walrus. The description is explicitly uncertain: the object looks like a Walrus portion, rather than being identified without qualification. Its presence nevertheless places the animal among the provisions and materials moving across the sea ice. The Yaks have brought a mixed load, but the narrative does not say that the Walrus portion is eaten, exchanged, or otherwise used at the camp.

The distinction matters because the trade that follows is specific. Cavendish and Otto examine the load; after the Yaks display tools and carvings, the exchange is agreed for the frozen seal carcass, in return for two blubber knives and a length of whale line. The Walrus portion is not named as part of that bargain. The scene therefore shows a Walrus-associated resource present at the meeting without making it the object of the documented transaction.

Trade and Winter Survival

The encounter occurs when the stranded men are looking for food. Cavendish makes their need understood through gestures, and the Yaks respond by showing what they have brought and proposing trade. Otto chops the acquired seal into pieces and cooks it over the fire, while the Yaks tend their dogs. Sumner sees the food as potentially important beyond the immediate meal: seals could sustain the group until spring, with meat to eat and blubber to burn. This explicit survival calculation concerns seals, not Walruses, and the distinction prevents the possible Walrus remains on the sledge from being mistaken for the food the men actually obtain.

The scene sets the Walrus reference within a larger economy of Arctic materials, but gives it no independent account of capture or use. The men’s exchange depends on tools and whale line as well as food; a separate display includes an ivory harpoon head and soapstone carvings, which Cavendish declines. The text does not identify the ivory harpoon head as Walrus ivory. The Walrus connection is instead made explicit later through the material used for Drax’s carving.

Walrus Ivory and Shipboard Life

After the camp has settled for the night, Drax sits apart from the others, wrapped in a blanket and working a fragment of Walrus ivory. He carves a crude image of Britannia triumphant, using a sharpened iron nail because he is not allowed a knife. The detail brings the animal into the scene as a source of material transformed by hand into an object. It does not explain where the ivory came from or connect it to the carcass seen at the sledge.

The carving also belongs to Drax’s circumstances at camp: he is separated from the group and improvises with the tool available to him. The ivory is not described as food or as part of the men’s trade for provisions. Its role here is craft material, and its transformation into an image of Britannia places an emblem of national triumph in a setting marked by isolation and dependence on scarce resources.

Narrative Significance

Walruses remain peripheral in the novel’s account of Arctic animal life. Seals are explicitly hunted, butchered, traded, and considered as fuel and food; whales are pursued and processed for oil and baleen. By contrast, Walruses are represented through two brief material traces, neither of which becomes a Walrus-centered episode. The possible carcass on the sledge is left uncertain, while the ivory carving is identified but detached from any account of the animal’s death or the ivory’s acquisition.

That asymmetry makes the references useful without making them evidence of a Walrus hunt. They show how the Arctic setting brings animal bodies and animal-derived materials into human exchange, survival, and making, while leaving the Walrus itself largely outside the narrated action. The animal is present in the objects and possibilities the characters encounter, not as a separately followed subject.