What Crozier most wanted to do was to kill the thing itself. Unlike the majority of his men, he believed it was mortal — an animal, nothing more. Smarter, perhaps, than even the frighteningly intelligent white bear, but still a beast. If he could kill the thing, Crozier knew, the mere fact of its death — the pleasure of revenge for so many deaths, even if the rest of the expedition still were to die later from starvation and scurvy — would temporarily lift the morale of the survivors more than discovering twenty gallons of untapped rum.
