by Peter Geye
“Have you got your hakapik, Odd Einar?” Mikkelsen asked, his eyes sharp on the shore.
It sat ten paces behind me, and I told him as much.
“Grab hold of it. Do you have another shot in that gun of yours?”
“Yes.” I patted the pocket of my coat to see if I had more cartridges. “But none more.”
It was a fearful business. Made so as much by Mikkelsen’s darting eyes as by the sight of our killing boat getting sucked out into the fjord. It wouldn’t have moved so damn well under sail. The colony of gulls escorting us all along sent up a mighty cheer as they settled upon it from bow to stern.
“We are right fucked, Odd Einar,” Mikkelsen said. “That’s thirty or forty kroner worth of sealskin floating away.”
“The Sindigstjerna will catch her, though.”
“Likely she will.” He scanned the waters from boat to shore. “But that’s an angry bear. He got a nose full of that rich seal blood. His appetite is excited, you can be sure of that. And he’s vexed by that bullet in his shoulder.”
“Where did that fiend go?”
“Not far. He’s hunting us now.” He marked the falling sun. “Great Christ, is this worrisome.” From his pocket he removed the spyglass he’d earlier used to spot seals, ran it over the shoreline to the south, and handed it to me. “We can try to jump those bergs, ja? Hope our boat runs aground on that jutting land down there? Have a look.”
I did, as though I might have a nice opinion on this matter. But of course I knew nothing of these currents and eddies and tides up here and couldn’t begin to guess where the killing boat might end up. The only thing plain to me was that it drifted farther away with each gust of wind. When I turned back to Mikkelsen, he had his ear tilted landward, his gun raised again to his shoulder.
“Is that our bear?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer, only walked slowly up the shore while studying the shadows among the ice. I readied my own gun and watched as he skittered up a wedge of vindskavler. When he got to the top he lowered his gun.
“Faen ta dag,” he said, more, I thought, to the wastes than to the bear. “He’ll track us, Odd Einar, unless we track him first.”
“Why track him at all? And with what—two bullets and a hakapik?” I checked the barrel of my Krag-Jørgensen again. “We need our boat, not that bear.”
Mikkelsen stood atop the drift, surveying the land and ice. “You’re lame now,” he called. “I can see your trail of blood. I’m going to find you.” He checked quickly the horizon to the south, the angle of the sun. “Find you and put one right in your brain.” He turned to me. “From his blood”—he pointed with his gun barrel—“I can tell he’s moving inland. You make a wide sweep down the shore. A hundred yards. Then cut across the ice. Be careful. We’ll kill this hellion and then get our boat back.”
“Flush him out, then?” I scuttled up the ice. What I saw was a world of crags and crevices and shadows. An eerie fog emanating from the glacier’s ragged surface. Darkness in the east. “He’s disappeared, right? Gone off somewhere to lick his wounds. So why not just march down the shore in hopes of finding our boat? Or even hail Captain Solvang and the Sindigstjerna from that open coast?”
“He’s offended. He’ll mark us every step. Let’s keep him in front of us, not behind.”
This thinking seemed dubious. The bear had been lamed. He was gone. Why we’d persist in hunting him while our boat floated down the fjord was beyond me. But there was such a thing as rank, even in a two-man crew, and I was in Birger Mikkelsen’s service, despite being ten years his elder.
Now, what I knew of him at the time didn’t amount to much. He came of age in the village of Røst, a third-generation fisherman, a fact that impressed me. But Birger had a touch of the nomad about him, and at the age of fifteen went off on a whaling ship. He’d been as far as the South Sea and came home eight years later a harpooner in Svend Foyn’s fleet sailing out of Iceland. After three years he joined Solvang’s crew, preferring sealing to whaling because the killing was more regular. If that makes him sound simple, it shouldn’t. His appetites were not base, and he sought the pleasure of hunting as a man of God might seek divine inspiration. At least that’s how I’d come to understand him.
And when he said, “We won’t rest until we’ve cut the heart out of that thief,” I could only follow.
So it was that Mikkelsen debouched onto the glacier, following the bear’s blood, while I wandered down the water’s edge to flank the beast should it turn south. It couldn’t have been a minute or two before his paws emerged from the sea onto our gunwale, and maybe ten between our decision to keep hunting and this desperate situation. But isn’t that how these things happen? One moment happily counting the kroner those skins would bring, the next deserted as the drifting boat carried them away?
I’d never see Mikkelsen again. Not as a whole man, anyway.
It seemed impossible that I should find myself standing alone there, given how our day had started. We’d taken our breakfast in the Sindigstjerna’s mess, same as any other day. Cold cod and lingonberries and tea. Mikkelsen sat at the board, fish bones stuck in his beard, and showed me the chart of the Krossfjorden.
“Imagine some hand what’s been hammered once or twice. Put it palm down and that’s the Kross. But, see, the little finger’s the biggest fjord. Lilliehøøkfjorden, we call it. But we’ll start on the middle finger”—he pointed at a smaller inlet, the middle one indeed—“where the fattest seals will be gathered like church ladies.” He took a big bite of fish. “That’ll make twenty miles back down to Kapp Guissez after we do our clubbing. A hell of a row. So, eat more fish, and quaff that tea. Bellies full.”
I heeded his instructions while studying the chart, which seemed inadequate to the place I’d been watching off our port bow all night, the ice packing up in the Forlandsundet, the light resolutely low.
“The current makes its own streams in these waters. Might drive us up, might drive us back down. Either way, we’ll be working. Bring a change of clothes. Your hakapik and rifle. A sharp knife, too. And memorize that map. When I get eaten by an ice bear, you’ll want to know where you are!” He guffawed and slapped the board and drained his tea. “You find yourself land-bound, keep your eyes on the water. The last thing you want is to get up in the glaciers and snow. That’s all the same place. North is south and east is west as soon as you blink. You’ll be dead on the first night.” He stood up, checked his pocket watch, and said, “We’ll be in the water by seven. Don’t be late. And bring the chart.”
I stuffed the last of the cod in my mouth and hustled to our quarters, packed my duffel, and had a smoke. It wasn’t my first hunt, but if Spitzbergen had taught me anything yet, it was to be humble in its midst. Each night, down in the bunks, it was one story after another of the crushing cold or darkness or wind or fog or snow or ice bears, any one of which could drive you crazy or kill you. Usually one right after the other. And though I never knew a hunter or fisherman prone to telling the truth, something in these storytellers’ hard eyes and expressions was reverential if not downright nervy.
Our quarters weren’t much for sleeping. Between the tossing of the ship and the blood-reek of our coats and trousers hanging bunk-side, to say nothing of a persistent uneasiness about our general whereabouts, I was lucky for a few hours most nights. And even those were fretful slumbers. My bunk was hung rudely between two bulkheads in the forecastle, with two others above and below. What a godless ruckus we snoring hunters sent up! It might have done the job of convening with the whales somewhere beneath our hull. But who ever put a crew of men like that in such close quarters and expected a nursery full of sleeping babes? The condition of our bunk room bears mentioning only as it compares to the fourteen shivering nights I spent alone on Spitzbergen. This is what I meant to get to.
I remember the first night best. What a thing it was to watch the moon
over the wide and cold fjord and know the bitter odds that I would be dead before it finished its arc. What a thing to see death in its slow and deliberate march toward you. How many times in those initial hours of darkness did I aim my cocked Krag-Jørgensen at the night and think to fire, to offer myself up to that same undead night? To meet my Maker and accept my fate not like a beggar, but like a man finished with his evening prayers and ready for sleep? How many times did I conjure Inger and Thea in my delirious fear and wave them goodbye?
But instead of lying down I walked in circles, the mountains all around me growing taller with the settling dark, their snow-covered caps aglow, lit like distant fires by the light of the brilliant moon. I had heeded Mikkelsen’s advice and packed the chart, but instead it now rode in my duffel aboard the killing boat, down those tricky currents and tides toward Kapp Guissez. And try as I might to recall the five hammered fingers, I couldn’t imagine a route to get to where the boat might be going. In the crux of each fjord between where I circled and where I needed to be loomed an immense glacier, calving its blue ice. While rowing up we’d seen four or five or six of them on the starboard side, each guarded by towering mountains. To walk the twenty miles Mikkelsen had earlier mentioned would have required not only crossing each glacier with their deadly crevasses but also climbing and descending ten or twelve mortal peaks.
To the west, a more difficult route promised both the same treachery and an even more remote chance of rescue. The Sindigstjerna wouldn’t search those waters. And anyway, such a passage dictated a nigh impossible march across the mountains and glaciers without providing any view of the water, which Mikkelsen had specifically warned against. At least the shelf of land I circled was relatively flat and full of ancient rocks that I might stack against the wind. So that is what I did. I made a shelter of stone and called it my camp for those sleepless hours.
* * *
—
I returned to myself at Bengt’s table. All eyes were on me, including Granerud’s, one behind his monocle. The only sound was the rasp of flames in the great fireplace. I felt as if I’d emerged from a dream, and I looked to Inger, whose gaze just then was gentle and proud.
I didn’t let go of her attention. “And even as I lay there with nothing to do but die, do you know what thought I settled into?” I asked. “I thought of you, Inger, who had sanctioned my plan to go with Sverdrup last June, who had believed in me as you had once believed in our daughter. And even though I didn’t pray, I thought of God and of what a fool my life of faith had made of me. If I slept it was only for a minute at a time, and when the morning light came, it was shrouded in fog. A fog which by noon had become snow.”
The other three at the table also turned their focus on Inger, who held a hand up to her blushing cheek.
Everyone but Bengt Bjornsen, that is, who swirled his mug of glogg under his nose, cleared his throat, and interrupted the calm that had descended over the room. “What you say there, about that bear and your first night up north, it sounds like a folktale my mother might’ve told me.”
At this Granerud now stared at Bengt and said, “Herr Eide’s story sounds exactly the sort that the whole world wants to read.”
Now it was Inger’s turn to speak. “Perhaps my husband can take a break from that night and finish his dinner. He nearly starved up there. That plate of mutton must look heavenly to him.”
“Of course!” Bengt agreed. “Let him fill his belly!” He raised his mug and offered a wordless cheer before taking a swig while surveying the table. Then his eyebrows shot up and he slammed the mug down and shouted, “Fru Bjornsen!” as if the mutton had caught fire. “Why!” And without another word he rose and hurried into the kitchen.
So fast did all this happen that the rest of us sat merely wide-eyed. A knowing expression softened Gerd’s face. She put her hands together, almost in a gesture of applause, as Bengt returned mere seconds after leaving, another platter raised above his shoulder on a flat palm, as though he were a waiter in a city café. He rearranged the candles and the mutton and with a flourish set the new platter on the table, right before me. “That Ruth is no replacement for you, Inger! She forgot to serve the smalahove!”
The boiled sheep’s head sat with its snout toward me, its sockets paired hollows that, for all the world, seemed like my own eyes reflected in a mirror. Startled by its gaze, I lost all at once what was left of my appetite.
Bengt, again at the head of the table, beyond the twin candles flickering in their holders, plopped down and regarded me closely. His pink face, flush from dashing about, appeared both drunk and suddenly menacing. “It’s no small thing to slaughter a sheep.” His words were meant for me, though he glanced around the table as the platters passed by one person to the next. The aroma of all that fresh meat being spooned caused my stomach to coil so urgently that I felt I might have to excuse myself.
“Why, just this morning I was out in the lambing shed. An old Steigar sheep, out of step with the rest of my flock and of no particular use to me, was leaning against the wall. I wanted him. I knew it when I went out there.” He spoke almost like he was making a criminal confession. “I had whetted the knife and it glinted in my hand, and do you know what? That old sheep just stood there. His eyes were no more concerned as I walked toward him than they are right now!” He waved at the smalahove with his fork, a piece of mutton hung dripping from its tines. “God’s creatures,” he said, as though two words spoke volumes.
Marius Granerud was quick to change the subject. “There’s a café at the harbor hotel in Tromsø that serves a fine plate of mutton, but it’s nothing like this, Fru Bjornsen.”
She nodded her thanks.
“I bet you could get used to someone providing your supper every day, couldn’t you, Herr Eide. Get some ballast back in your tank. What if you allowed me to arrange for a visit?”
“To Tromsø?” I said.
“We’d wait until you had time to reacquaint yourself with Fru Eide, of course. But yes. We might transcribe the story there—if you’re willing, of course. We’d also arrange the best accommodations. And great stores of mutton and warm glogg! You might think of it as a holiday.”
“Why Tromsø?” Inger said, her soft voice barely rising above the hum in the room.
Granerud gazed at my wife and said, slowly and thoughtfully, “I’d need the resources of my office, naturally. And we’ll require portraits of Herr Eide to run beside his story. In all, I’d intrude on your lives only for a week or two.”
“The resources of your office?”
He set his fork down. “Fru Eide, this story can’t be told in a day. It likely can’t be told in a week. I’ll need my assistant and secretary. The typist. The portraitist. All of those people live in Tromsø. You have my word we’ll take good care of him. We’ll also make sure he returns as quickly as possible.”
He waited for Inger’s response. I was less patient myself. “Herr Granerud,” I said. “I’m still unclear why anyone would want to know the first thing about what happened to me.”
Again he considered his words carefully before saying, “Did you not hear your own words just now? Because we all did.” He swept an arm around the table. “What we learned after Nansen’s triumphant return is that there’s no limit to people’s eagerness for stories of survival. Especially in the polar climes. The mere idea of all that cold and ice, the darkness and danger—why, it stirs our souls. You’ve got the impetus of that frightful bear on top of it all.”
“The adventure!” Bengt added, more sotted now than even a minute earlier.
“The adventure is part of it, to be sure,” Granerud conceded. “But people aren’t as interested in accomplishments as one might think.”
“You mean to say that Nansen’s achievement is that he went to a cold place?” Bengt scoffed, slurping the end of his glogg in one sloppy pull. These windy men—they want to be heard no matter what they�
�re shouting.
“Nansen is no ordinary person,” Granerud said. “He’s even more popular than the King.”
“But I’m a common man,” I said, hoping that might put the matter to rest.
“Less than that, I’d say!” Bengt was quick to chortle.
All eyes turned to him, whether to scold him or to laugh along I couldn’t tell. But he was right, so I echoed him, “Less than that.”
“This is why your story’s important,” Granerud whispered. “Why people will love to hear it. Precisely because you’re exactly what you say.”
I must have looked flummoxed.
“And yet here…you…are,” he said, with an urgency in his voice that I recognized as pleading.
Inger must’ve heard the same thing, because she said, “Herr Granerud, please. You know that my husband has had but one night home. Look at him, he’s as lean as a schoolboy. He could hardly be expected to make the trip to Tromsø, or to recount his story before regaining his strength.” She paused, daintily wiped her lips, and laid her napkin beside her plate. “And I could hardly be expected, after so long an absence, to be without him.”
At this Gerd shot her a piercing look, which Inger pretended not to notice.
“I know just the thing!” Granerud said. “You’ll join your husband, Fru Eide. Both of you will come to Tromsø. You must! You can comfort him there as well as here!”
“I’m not sure,” she said.
Undeterred, he went on. “People are now calling Tromsø the ‘Paris of the North.’ It’s a very sophisticated place. Theaters, cafés, museums. I’ve already mentioned the fine hotel. Just the sort of place for a woman of your intelligence.”