Now it was the old man who did everything, going over the side to the dinghy for the butchering. It was a wonder how quickly he did it, from the very first moment when the brim of his cap pointed down like a beak as he squatted in the dinghy and leaned, his left hand resting on the side while his right arm and hand slanted down in parallel with his cap, extended by the long knife whose point gleamed sunstruck as it touched and dimpled a sunny place on the pink-mottled brown skin of the dying walrus which lay like a torpedo between the Peterhead's gunwale on which the other hunters crouched and the dinghy, in which Two-Nuts pulled tight the harpoon cable which the old man in old grayish kamiks had so carefully strung, and the cable passed through the boy's clenched fingers and then into the old man's left hand, which was not resting after all; every part of the old man's body was doing a job; and then the cable doubled back up toward the Peterhead and into the grip of the grandson who always got in trouble. In the bow of the dinghy, the boy who hated white people sat holding two lines to keep the vessels close together. And the knife went in. In seconds the old man had begun to lay bare the walrus's yellowish ribs and blue-green membranes behind. His head turned from side to side as quickly as his knife and he grinned a little with effort as his reddened wrist flowed with perfect skill and confidence through the flesh. He'd opened the creature up like a boat, and it lay so whiskery and ancient with its tusks pointing upward, reddish-yellow and lined with long grooves. Between the dinghy and the Peterhead, seawater sparkled and foamed red like fresh raspberry juice. The wrinkled gray hulk of the walrus still breathed, such was the old man's quickness, and even after the first quarter was winched up over the side (the dark meat reddish-purple and the light meat pinkish-orange), the heart still beat. Its wound-gash now clean and bloodless, the next quarter went up only a moment later, making the Peterhead heel a little under the weight. The grandson who always got in trouble guided each still-trembling walrus-chunk into the well at the bottom of the boat, bending one knee and grabbing high where the meat was hooked to swing it down. When the belly-chunk came, the intestines were still squirming and working. Slowly the rectum discharged a mound of custardy excrement and then it gaped open and still. And the Peterhead sat alone in the still sea, the center of a million concentric ripples which bore away with them the last marks of the animal's struggle.
The final quarter came aboard, and for a split second it seemed that the grandson who always got in trouble was embracing it so passionately with his head buried in the flesh just below the hook, but that was only for an instant; then the arms which had gathered the flesh in continued to push it laterally and down; and it was all done. The gray flesh, the black and reddish steaks filled the entire floorspace of the hold.
The walrus penis was given to the kids to use as a baseball bat. Then they turned around for home. There were many other walruses, but the old man said they only needed one. They motored back to their island where the houses of their village would rise up from the muddy bouldery land; they'd go back to the scarlet sunfooted days ahead like toadstools, to the sunny days of swatting mosquitoes, to the summer as huge, scarlet and mysterious as a walrus liver. And the old man sat on top of the pilothouse with One-Nut, whose walrus it was, steering with the sole of his kamik and not quite smiling.
