Killer

Colin was still cursing Simon for taking the Remington, as he wedged the carbine under the club of his left arm and began fitting the clip. It wouldn’t go in! He breathed three times deeply and began again. When the rope jerked, the long shape of the gun went skidding away over the ice, and the clip arced away through the air. He knew better than to look at Kate. He swung towards the walruses and saw a bull charging, tusks on a level with his chest, ready to tear him to pieces. The bull was perhaps seventeen feet long. It stood more than six feet from flippers to head. Its tusks were four feet long. It weighed a little less than two tons, and it was going to kill him.

His mind shifted smoothly into top gear. He jerked the axe from the rope belt round his waist, and began to run forward towards the walrus. At the last moment before the dripping tusks tore him open, he dived to one side, feet skidding crazily on the ice, swung round, and buried the axe in its neck with all the strength in his arm, shoulder and back, intending to sever the spine between its shoulders and head. But the ice, treacherous under his boots, spoiled his aim, and the deadly blade turned in his hands and smashed into its shoulder, doing little damage. Ross jerked it free as the creature turned and charged again. This time he did not throw himself aside. The axe was four feet long; his arm well over two feet long – he had two more feet of reach than the walrus’s tusks. He met the charge head on, bringing the axe down between its eyes with almost insane force, screaming as he did so. The bull collapsed on the spot, its tusks driving again into the ice, inches from his boots. He jerked the haft of the axe, but the blade remained buried in the walrus’s massive forehead. He jerked it again. Nothing.

He went back to the end of the haft to exert the maximum amount of leverage. The cliff of walruses nearly ten feet high hulked unsteadily over him. He stooped to tug at the axe again.

The first of the killers hurled itself out of the water on to the pile of walruses, snapping and tearing. The floe rocked and settled further. Ross’s feet skidded again and he fell. Kate was back thirty feet from him, keeping the rope taut, and she was pulled on to her knees as he fell, but, with the genius which comes to some people under pressure, she drove the carbine into the soft floe, belayed the rope round it and held it firm with her full weight. Ross stopped sliding. The killer fell back into the water.

Colin’s feet were only a couple of yards away from the mountain of walruses. He twisted, found his footing, grabbed the axe and hauled himself erect. The steel head came free. He began to move.

The leader and his consort hurled themselves out of the water now, followed by more of the pack. They landed on the screaming pile of walruses snapping, chewing, tearing.

Ross suddenly found himself up to his knees in water. He began to run towards Kate. Behind him, the unsteady wall of walruses broke like a wave, tumbling forward, burying the body of the old bull.

Ross ran on but he was suddenly running up hill.

And there was a sound like thunder. The rope snapped taut. The gun tore out of the ground and sailed away over the ice. Kate saw the ice just beyond her feet rear up into a cliff, the rope at her waist leading up, over its crystal edge.

The floe had cracked in two, and Colin was on the other half.

The rope round her waist snapped taut, almost lifting her off the ice, the loop ripping up her back until it caught under her arms. She stood up, moving her body carefully because it felt as if the rope had stripped off most of the skin between waist and neck. Thank God, she thought, I wasn’t facing the other way.

Abruptly the rope loosened, and as Kate looked across the five feet of agitated water, there was Colin standing unsteadily fighting for his balance. Kate began to run backwards tightening the rope. He jumped. The axe flew out of his hand. The rope snapped taut, he lurched forward in the air. She fell. He crashed into the ice thirty feet away from her just at the new edge of the floe.

As their half of the floe had lurched in the water, Job and Simon were hurled down on the net and a wave of icy water washed up among the advancing walruses. The killers had been following the main body of the herd, so there were none down here as yet, and Simon and Job had had no trouble in controlling the sluggish advance of the great maroon creatures. There were maybe twenty left out of the first surge. The ice was now the colour of beech leaves in autumn and was littered with the great still sacks of their corpses.

But the floe’s sudden lurch had a disastrous effect on Simon, for, as he stumbled on the net and fell, he sent the Remington tumbling end over end towards the water. The wave which swept up among the corpses at the edge of the ice took the sleek rifle lovingly and sucked it into the ocean.