One or two of the crew, seeing the fish already diminished, felt privately sad, and the notion of further dismemberment seemed undignified.

They looked at the captain for he was Captain.

Rightly, the fish should be cooked intact.

Then came a moment of small genius.

They wrapped the fish in a foil survival blanket from the boat’s First Aid supplies. Then slid it into the barrel of the thermal harpoon gun.

All this was done with a degree of melancholy ceremony, as if they aimed to fire the fish beshrouded out to sea in funeral.

But they set the barrel heat to one hundred and sixty and stood back.

I suppose we give it forty minutes, the captain guessed. ‘Give it forty minutes.’

~

When people imagine being out here, they imagine silence, quiet.

But there’s the engines. The constant struggle, noise of the engine, pulling.

Never been able to zone it out. Then again, you listen. It’s like you see with your ears, not your eyes. The sea ahead, if it’s still, doesn’t change much to the eye. But you can hear the current thicken, in the engine sound; you can hear a drop in pressure coming, with the sound changing in the air. Even the pull of the wind, the way the sounds are taken.

When the soft tugs are clear we idle a while, exchange banter. Shouting from deck to deck. Watch the counterweights take the tow lines down under the water; the spin of the winches as they wind back in. Their pitch getting higher the less line. Then they change to the lighter solar engines, and head away. The smell of diesel drops from the air. I hear them for far longer than I see them.

When they’re out of earshot I cut the motor. I know this should not be done. It’s when you can lose a berg, without the movement through the water keeping it stable.

But I do it just to hear the silence. Just a little while.

It’s something that if you’ve never heard you will not understand.

The sound of silence on the Northern water; and the sound of ice. A berg calving away from some great body.

Like something falling from the face of the Earth.

~

He thinks again of heading away, to somewhere without such constant sound.

The long trips have given him time to make all the calculations. How many tins of food he could amass and store in the hold of the boat, and how long they would feed him. The drums of fuel.

Ironically, the problem would be water.

But it could be done.

How far could he get burning the fuel it would take to tow enough ice to keep him; and where would he go? For silence.

He imagines understanding the world with his eyes again. Having to account contours, and colours, and the solidity of a surface.