by Laline Paull
COPYRIGHT
4th Estate
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London SE1 9GF
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © Laline Paull 2017
Cover design by Jo Walker
Cover engraving and interior engravings © Chris Wormell
Map © Joy Gosney
With grateful thanks to the following for their permission to reproduce copyright material: Extracts from Arctic Adventure by Peter Freuchen by permission of Echo Point Books. Extracts from Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen by permission of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. Extracts from Lost in the Arctic by Ejnar Mikkelsen, published by William Heinemann. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. © Ejnar Mikkelsen 1913. Extract from Polar Bears by Nikita Ovsyanikov by permission of Quarto Publishing Group. Quote from Judge Rüdiger Wolfrum courtesy of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Extract from ‘Century of the Wind’ from The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, copyright © 2009 by Wade Davis and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Reprinted by permission of House of Anansi Press, Toronto, www.houseofanansi.com, and the University of Western Australia Press. Extract from Northern Lights; The Official Account Of The British Arctic Air-Route Expedition by F. Spencer Chapman, published by Chatto & Windus. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in future editions.
Laline Paull asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007557752
Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780007557769
Version: 2017-03-28
DEDICATION
For my brothers
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
Author’s Note
A Very Partial Bibliography
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Laline Paull
About the Publisher
Among dogs are found characters almost as various as among men. Some dogs do not give a damn what they eat; some will eat their own mothers, as I have often witnessed, and others will starve to death before touching the bodies of their team-mates. Again, some refuse to eat the meat while it is still warm, but perhaps after it is cold they forget what it is and devour it greedily.
Arctic Adventure: My Life in the Frozen North (1936)
Peter Freuchen
1
They were rich, they were ready, they were ravenous for bear. Nine days into their fourteen-day voyage on the Vanir, the most expensive cruise ship in the Arctic, the passengers’ initial excitement had turned to patience, then frustration, and now, a creeping sense of defeat. As sophisticated travellers they knew money didn’t guarantee polar bear sightings – but they still believed in the natural law that wealth meant entitlement. Ursus maritimus sightings very much included.
‘Realm of the Ice King’ stated the brochure, featuring competition-winning photographs of sparkling ice and polar bears with cubs and kills, taken by recent passengers on this very route. But now instead of high blue heavens, the skies were overcast. Instead of a crisp and exhilarating minus three or even ten degrees (they were eager to test their new clothing), they suffered a vile gusty swelter that turned the Arctic dank as an English summer, and for which no combination of clothing was right. Plus the endless daylight was oppressive – medication schedules went awry and it was always and never time for a coffee to wake up, or a drink to ease down.
There were several lawyers among the passengers. They invited the tour leader to the bar to look at the brochure and hear their formal complaint. The voyage was misrepresented. They had been mis-sold. Enough with the beach landings to stare at derelict huts and piles of whaling junk. Enough birds too, that didn’t fob them off. What they’d all paid for were sightings of live ice-obligate mammals. That was the primary focus of the text and image of the brochure, a sales document with a legal duty to accuracy. No icebergs either, just some dirty glaciers. They were considering a class action for compensation of time and money.
The passengers repaired to the salon and put on the compilation film that had become their envious obsession. In this footage, recent and very much more fortunate passengers had seen all the wildlife the Arctic could offer, from vast haul-outs of walrus, to pods of various whales so close you could see the barnacles on the fins. But most of all, they had seen the great apex predator, the polar bear.
With the blinds down to keep out the bullying daylight, the passengers stared avidly at the on-screen polar bears; the one standing on a crimson mat of ice ripping flesh from a red rack of seal carcass, then the mother and her yearling swimming between the floes. Best of all was the large male standing on his hind legs, staring into the camera, his muzzle bright red. That was what they wanted.
The tour leader ran to the bridge to confer with the captain and the ice-pilot, who by law they were still required to employ, even though the summer sea ice was two years gone. They stared out at the grey chop of the Barents Sea. All knew, though they would not say for fear of their jobs, that the animals had all but vanished and the footage in the salon was several years old. There was one solution, prohibited, but every tour company knew it as a last resort. Send up a drone and find a bear.
Two miles away around the coast, down a deep M-shaped fjord, a large silvery wood cabin blended with the dark cobble of its beach. Modern extensions at its rear and sides were made of the very rock of the mountain that rose up behind it, and a close look would reveal several windows that reflected sea, sky and rock. But no one did look, in that intrusive unwelcome way, because this was Midgard Lodge in Midgardfjorden, and by direct intervention of Oslo, to the Sysselmann’s office in Svalbard, special rules applied.
Most outraging to those who knew of it, was the one which flouted a major conservation regulation and allowed Midgard Lodge occasional helicopter flights between Longyearbyen airport and the tiny beach in front of the Lodge, which was just large enough to land a twelve-person Dauphin.
The second was that no cruise ship penetrate the Wijdef
jorden system past a certain point, thereby closing the spectacular rock stratification of Midgardfjord and its peculiar forked glacier Midgardbreen, one side blue, one white, off to tourism.
The third, which caused the autocratic Sysselmann the most disquiet, was that these diktats were verified at the highest level but relayed verbally, via a female assistant defence minister. She refused to confirm them in writing and though the Sysselmann had not heard of her, she was rather too well informed about him. She reassured him that the one occasion when cupidity had got the better of him, was not significant at all. His record was otherwise spotless, his patriotism unquestioned, and he could rely on her appreciation at the end of his tenure. The Sysselmann duly made sure Mrs Larssen’s requests were observed, and in consequence, Midgard Lodge was not.
Except for today, when general manager Danny Long, on duty in the cabin office looking down the fjord, felt his instinct tweak him to take another look at the AIS radar screen. He had just checked it at mid-scale, taking in the little coloured arrowheads that showed, variously, pink and purple for fishing and sailing vessels, green for cargo, and god forbid, red for tankers coming in too close. He looked at the screen more closely. He could feel something was off.
He clicked on the green arrows and saw what he expected – Asian cargo ships on the new TransPolar route. He clicked a couple at random: the Hao Puren: Rotterdam to Shanghai. The Zheng He, going the other way, Dalian to Algiers. A couple of others – everything moving smoothly.
Then he studied the dotted blue arrows of the cruise ships. Now the ice-free and liquid North Pole was just another bit of sea and offered no photo opportunities, Svalbard’s stunning coastline was clogged in the summer. All captains tried to stagger their route to minimise bottlenecks, but because of the rarity of animal sightings, the tour operators had an agreement to share the information with each other on Channel 16 – despite this leading to what amounted to a cruise ship race to be second at the kill. The coastguard policed what it could, and was glad of Midgard Lodge’s ability to offer search and rescue – but both knew that would be a last resort.
There: he saw it. The tiny blue cursor which had crossed into Midgard’s unofficially restricted area. He clicked. Passenger cruise ship Vanir, he knew it. High staff-to-passenger ratio, regular circuit – except today. Probably after a bear. There was a huge male passing through, he’d seen it standing in silhouette on the fjord’s bone.
He would report the ship’s transgression later, but for now the protocol was to ensure front-of-house was neat and clean, everything quiet. Keeping an eye on the Vanir’s position, he hit a speed-dial on the iridium phone never far from his hand. A moment later, the phone flashed back at him. Message received, they would stay out until further notice. Then Long called down to reception and was pleased to hear everything was in hand. He returned to the screen, watching the little blue cursor slowly blinking around the headland, coming closer.
When the bear was young and the snow fell clean and white, his fur showed creamy, even pale yellow at times. Now the snow had a greyish tinge, causing him to shine even brighter against it. He had grown long yellow guard hairs on his massive forelegs, increasing his appearance of power, and when the sun shone through them it gave him a gold aura. He was following the scented track of a female in oestrus who had passed by, but paused to watch the ship heaving into the narrow mouth of the fjord, its engine thundering the water, its fuel stinking the air.
The deck was crowded with people, bare-skinned faces with shiny black insect eyes turned towards him. Their human body smells mingled with the smell of food from the ship, and metal, and fuel. The engine sound died down and the vibrations slowed then stopped. The voices faded.
The black walls of the fjord held the Arctic silence, until the bear lifted his white anvil of a head, black nostrils flaring for more information. His every move drew clicks and whirrs from the ship, becoming a frenzy as a curl of wind tickled him with a clue, and he lay down and rolled in the female’s trail.
On the bridge with the captain, the tour leader looked down at the entranced passengers, and relaxed. The bear was massive by any standards and on the most photogenic port side of the Midgardbreen glacier, where the ice terminus was blue and formed a cliff above the water. On the other side of the black bone of rock, the glacier was younger white ice and debouched in a relatively gentle slope down to the cobbled beach. With a start, the tour operator noticed the silver-grey wood cabin, extending back into the mountain.
‘Is this the British guy’s place? I heard it’d been sold – what goes on here?’ Neither the Norwegian captain nor ice-pilot replied. They had crossed a line to find her passengers their bear. Svalbard had many enigmatic structures. No comment.
Crowded at the rail, excited as schoolchildren and all thoughts of class actions gone from their minds, the passengers of the Vanir were busy changing lenses and exclaiming in wonder. The bear was as huge and charismatic a celebrity as they could dream of, they guessed him at eleven or twelve feet, nearly a ton, maybe more. Through powerful telephoto lenses they saw his duelling scars, and the way he stood up on his hind legs, the edge of his pelt shining gold around him. He stared straight back with knowing black eyes, and they felt a euphoric jolt of fear. He could kill them.
Without warning the white god dropped to all fours and changed into a frightened animal, running for the edge of the glacier. In consternation the passengers watched him stagger and clamber to where the jagged peaks threw knives of shadow. They groaned in disappointment, they scanned around for what had scared their bear, but though their hi-mag lenses probed the darkness of the lower crags and pored across the bright rock striations that pulsed strange colours, nothing moved. They stared at the layers of rock and tried to appreciate the earth’s history laid bare. But they felt angry and tiny.
Someone shouted out: there! that puff of snow higher up the glacier – surely too far and they had not seen him run – but they focused in hope. They gasped in wonder as a hundred hidden chimneys below the surface puffed out more sparkling ice-smoke. The air clenched and the sea sighed. The Vanir lifted as a great pressure wave passed through the water.
And then it started. First a distant boom, a detonation deep inside the glacier. Nothing, for a few long seconds, then a huge tearing, cracking sound that shook the air, before time stretched and the blue snout of the glacier, sliding belly down from the ice cap, moaned and pushed out over the water, a blue bulge of ice filled with energy – and then with thunderous bangs like car-crashes it exploded all along its front, hurling shards of ice into the air and seismic bursts into the water so that the reinforced steel hull of the Vanir vibrated with the charge.
Wraiths of glittering ice-dust drifted over the sea. The passengers gripped each other as the Vanir lifted and fell again, and the shards of ice so small as they splashed, rolled out into the fjord as icebergs tall as the ship.
And then, as they watched, something happened that made no sense at all.
In front of the still-shuddering glacier, an invisible hand pinched a fold of sea like cloth then pulled it high into the air in a fistful of waterfalls. Out of the dazzling torrent something bright turquoise blue emerged: a great sapphire castle with turrets and minarets, throwing sparkling foam and mist as it cleared the water for one long stupendous second.
All of the passengers on the Vanir screamed and shouted as their eyes brimmed with wonders – some saw the streak of gold glowing deep within the frozen blue, some the detail of the minarets, some saw gargoyles’ faces in the ice – but their voices were lost in the roaring sound as the vision leaned and fell, making a great bowl of the sea in which it twisted and rolled over, completely inverting itself.
All they saw now was a dark blue ice floe the size of an ice-rink, its pinnacles and spires forever hidden. Like a sentient thing, it glided towards the Vanir, a peculiar ridge of water pushing the ship aside as if to clear its way. Unearthly and real, the great dark floe followed the other icebergs out towards the mout
h of Midgardfjorden, and the open sea beyond.
The passengers of the Vanir had no more words, but one of them, Trudie Burke, was making a convulsive, almost sexual sound. Oh, she kept whispering, still filming everything, the calving ongoing within her. Her lens followed the newborn icebergs, the whirling eddies in the water, and back to the glacier face. She filmed the water slapping and rocking at its base, and the cave of deepening blue ice where the water surged and circled. Something swirled at its centre, making the current waver. Something that had not been there a moment ago.
Without taking her eye from the viewfinder, she reached out a hand for her husband. She pulled him towards her and gave him the camera, still recording. She pointed to the red shape rocking just below the surface.
‘John,’ she said softly, ‘is that a body?’
There is one place on the coast of which they stood in some dread – the great glacier of Puisortok. Travelling in early summer in their umiaks, they necessarily hug the coast, and utilize the narrow leads that exist between the pack-ice and the glacier. The literal meaning of the name is “the thing that comes up”, as this peculiar glacier often calves by huge pieces breaking off underwater, which come to the top and shoot like breaching whales into the air. Instant destruction is the penalty for misjudgement or mere bad luck.
I remember an old hunter saying: “Do not speak, do not eat, until Puisortok is passed.”
Northern Lights: The Official Account of the British Arctic Air-Route Expedition 1930–31 (1932)
Frederick Spencer Chapman
2
The calving of the Midgard glacier was a tiny stitch in a larger pattern. While the male corpse it disgorged was already in Tromsø and under autopsy, all around the Arctic Circle scientists were recording calving events of unprecedented magnitude. This apparently synchronised new behaviour of the ice was strongly active for about seventy hours in Greenland, Nunavut Arctic Canada, Alaska and Russia, before stopping as abruptly as it started.