He and Algie wandered off, amicably bickering, and I strolled down to the beach.
Crossing the stream, I found my way on to the rocks. It was nearly midnight, and the great sloping pavements gleamed in that deep, gold, mysterious
light. From a distance, they appear to shelve gently into the shallows, but in fact they end in a nasty four-foot drop. The water’s deep, and you can see right down to the bottom, to huge green boulders and undulating weeds like drowned hair.
Crouching at the edge, I watched the waves slapping, and the chunks of ice jostling and clinking. I heard that peculiar crackling as it talked to itself.
I thought, if I fell in, I wouldn’t be able to climb out. I’d try to swim round to where it’s shallower, but the cold would get me long before then.
As I was heading back, a shaft of sunlight struck the bear post. The wood was bleached silver, except for a few charred patches, and some darker blotches which must be blubber stains. I found it hard to believe it was once a tree in some Siberian forest.
On impulse, I drew off my glove and laid my palm against it. It felt smooth and unpleasantly cold. I didn’t like it. A killing post.
And yet I think I now understand the impulse which drives men to shoot bears. It isn’t for the pelt or the meat or the sport – or not only those things. I think they
need
to do it. They need to kill that great Arctic totem to give them some sense of control over the wilderness – even if that is only an illusion.
*
Just now, a shadow sped over the tent, and I got such a fright I nearly cried out.
Steady on, Jack. It was only a gull.
The wind is blowing hard, and the dogs are howling. They’re restless tonight.
The cabin is finished, and we’ve moved in!
It went up in three days, as everyone worked like Trojans, and it’s beautiful. Black all over: walls covered in tarpaper, roof in felt, with the stovepipe poking a little drunkenly from the top, like the witch’s hovel in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The two front windows are such different sizes that they resemble mismatched eyes.
Between them there’s a small enclosed porch, above which Gus has nailed a pair of reindeer antlers: a nice baronial touch. If you turn right and go round the corner, you find the outhouse, which Algie pompously calls the lavatory. At the rear, the eastern half of the cabin is backed by a lean-to of packing cases and wire netting for the dogs, while the western half abuts the boulders. The whole cabin is surrounded (except for the doghouse and the boulders) by a boardwalk about
two feet wide. When you’re inside and someone treads on this, you can hear the footsteps, and feel the floor vibrate – as Algie is all too fond of demonstrating.
My radio masts stand a few feet to the west, and beyond them is the Stevenson screen for the meteorological measurements. We’ve fenced that in to keep out the dogs, and set a line of posts with ropes slung between them all the way to the porch, as Mr Eriksson says we’ll need this in bad weather. The emergency storehouse is way off near the cliffs; and we’ve planted the dogs’ stakes in front of the cabin, so that we can keep an eye on them.
Before we were even half unpacked, I ran a test on my wireless equipment. It works. Thank God. My heart was in my mouth as I started the petrol engine for the big transmitter. When the valves began to glow, the sweat was pouring off me.
Shakily, I tapped out our first message to England. It’s childish, I know, but I did enjoy impressing the others. See? Good at it, aren’t I?
With head-phones in place and the receiver switched on, I took down our first communication from the outside world.
MESSAGE RECEIVED STOP WE HAVE 5 MESSAGES FOR YOU STOP
. Seventeen hundred miles through the ether, and clear as a bell. The Times and the RGS; Hugo, sportingly wishing us luck from Tromsø; Algie’s girlfriend; Gus’
parents and sister. Algie crassly asked why there was nothing for me, so I told him. Parents dead, no siblings, no friends. I think he wishes he hadn’t asked.
The small Gambrell transmitter also works perfectly, as does the Eddystone receiver, which I got going in time for the BBC National Programme. George Gershwin is dead, and the Japs have bombed Shanghai. It all seems very far away.
Or it would have done if Algie hadn’t blathered on about Mr Hitler needing a jolly good thrashing. Gus told him sharply to shut up. He’s like me, he doesn’t want to think about another war. He told me the other day that he comes from a line of soldiers stretching back to Crécy, so the whole thing’s rather hanging over him. Which you’d have thought Algie would have remembered, as he’s known Gus since they were boys.
Still. All that’s over now, and we’ve been settling into our new home.
It’s thirty feet by twenty, which sounds a lot, but is actually pretty cramped, as we’ve got so much equipment. When you enter the porch, you have to squeeze past a tangle of skis, snowshoes, shovels and brooms. Then – and I’m told this will be crucial in winter – you shut the front door
before
you open the one to the hall. (Mr Eriksson calls this the First Rule of the Arctic: always shut one door before opening the next. Especially in a blizzard.)
With that door shut behind you, you’re in darkness, because the hall – which is narrow and extends along the frontage – has no window, only gun racks and hooks for waterproofs, and a cupboard which Gus calls his darkroom. There’s also a hatch into the roof space, which is our main food store.
Having groped your way down the hall, you open the door to the bunkroom – and fiat lux, a window! The bunkroom occupies the eastern end of the cabin, and is mostly bunk, with shelves made of packing cases on the opposite wall. We only needed three bunks, but it was easier to build four. I’ve got the bottom one at the back. (The one above me is empty; we use it as a dumping ground.) My bunk is nearest the stove in the main room, which is good; but it’s got the doghouse directly behind.
From my bunk, you can see straight into the main room, as that doorway has no door. To your right as you go in, there’s the stove, water barrel, and shelves which make up the ‘kitchen’ (no sink, of course). The main room is dominated by a big pine table and five chairs, and against the back wall are shelves crammed with books, ammunition, field glasses, microscopes and provisions.
The western end of the cabin, on the site of the old trappers’ hut, is my wireless area. It’s packed with receivers and transmitters, the Austin engine, and the
bicycle generator, which faces the west window, so that I can see my wireless masts. My work bench is at the front, under the north window, overlooking the bear post. As the wireless area is farthest from the stove, it’s noticeably colder than the rest of the cabin. But that can’t be helped.
After hours of unpacking, we were too exhausted to cook a proper meal, so I made a big pot of scrambled eider-duck eggs. (We bought a barrel from the crew, who gather them in their thousands and ship them back to Norway.) They’re twice the size of hens’ eggs, with shells of a beautiful speckled green. Delicious, although with a lingering fishy tang. I can still smell it.
I’m writing this at the main table, by the glow of a Tilley lamp. Outside it’s light enough to read, but in here we need lamps, as much of the room is blind: there’s only the small west window at the end, and the north one to the front.
Before we lit the stove, we could see our breath in here, but it’s warmed up now. We’ve left the stove door open, and the red glow is cheering. I can hear rain hammering on the roof and the wind moaning in the stovepipe. Yesterday the weather turned squally. In the morning, the dogs’ water pails were coated with ice. When I remarked to Eriksson that it’s turning wintry, he laughed. He says that in Spitsbergen, winter doesn’t begin until after Christmas.
It’s eight o’clock, and we’re safely inside for the night. I say ‘night’ because although it’s still light outside, it does feel like that. This evening, we saw the first faint stars.
Gus and I are at one end of the table: I’m writing this journal, and Gus is smoking and doing his notes for the expedition report. At the other end of the table, Algie has set up the Singer treadle, and is making dog harnesses. He’s whistling some inane tune, and when he’s not whistling, he’s breathing noisily through his mouth.
So what with Algie and the treadle, it isn’t exactly quiet. Added to which, there’s the noise from the dogs. They’re all related to each other, which is supposed to minimise fights, but you wouldn’t think so to judge by what’s coming from the doghouse. Growls, snarls, yelps. Scrabblings and gnawings. Bouts of oo-oo-woos. When it gets too loud, we shout and bang on the wall, and they subside into hard-done-by whines.
As usual, Mr Eriksson and the crew have gone back to the ship to sleep. It’s their last night at Gruhuken, and I get the impression that they’re relieved. Tomorrow we’ve giving a lunch in Mr Eriksson’s honour. Then we’ll say a fond farewell to the
Isbjørn
, and be on our own.
I’ve moved to my bunk, because Algie is using his collapsible safari bath, and I’d rather not watch. All that wobbly, freckled flesh. His feet are the worst. They’re flat pink slabs, and the second and third toes protrude way beyond the big toe, which I find repulsive. Gus saw me staring at them, and flushed. No doubt he’s embarrassed for his ‘best pal’.
Sometimes, though, I wonder why I’m finding it quite so hard to tolerate Algie. Maybe it’s because we’re so cramped in here. We’re all getting hairier and dirtier, and the cabin smells of woodsmoke and unwashed clothes. You’ve got to duck under lines of drying socks, and pick your way between the gear. Algie’s simply making it worse. He never puts anything away. And every morning he shakes out his sleeping bag and leaves it draped over the bunk ‘to air’.
I never thought I’d say this, but I’m quite glad that we didn’t get rid of the dogs. Of course I still don’t
like
them, and that’s not going to change, despite Gus’ best efforts. Yesterday he tried to introduce me to his favourite, a scrawny russet bitch named Upik. She fawns on him, but when I approached, she growled.
I shrugged it off, but he was disappointed: with
Upik, and maybe also with me. ‘I don’t know why she did that,’ he said. ‘You’re not afraid of her, I can tell.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I don’t particularly like her, either. I bet she senses that.’
He looked so downcast that I laughed. ‘Give up, Gus! You’ll never make me a dog-lover.’
Right now, I can hear them yowling and scratching at the wall behind my bunk. To my surprise, I don’t mind the sound at all. In fact, I like it. It’s reassuring to know that just behind my head, on the other side of this wall, there are living creatures. Even if they are dogs.
The
Isbjørn
has finally gone, and we’re on our own.
My lamp casts a little pool of yellow light, and beyond it are shadows. Just now, I went to the north window. I saw the lamp’s golden reflection in the panes, which are dark-blue and spangled with frost. When I cupped my hands to the glass and peered out, I saw a sprinkling of stars in an indigo sky, and the charcoal line of the bear post.
Nothing is wrong, but I want to set down what happened this afternoon. To get it straight in my mind.
Around noon, some of the crew rowed ashore, and we gave them a crate of beer as a thank-you. They’ve worked hard, even if it was because they’re desperate to leave and get in a few weeks’ sealing before the winter.
Then we had lunch with Mr Eriksson. Guessing that he’d appreciate a change from ship food, we gave him tinned ox cheek and curried vegetables with Bengal Chutney, followed by Californian pears and Singapore pineapple, then Fry’s chocolate and coffee. He enjoyed it immensely, although at first he seemed intimidated by the Royal Doulton. But then Gus opened two bottles of claret and a box of cigars, and he became quite jolly. Told us how to make the trappers’ speciality, blood pancakes, and gave us advice on getting through the dark time.
‘Walk every day. Keep a routine. Don’t think too much!’ He added that if we ever get into ‘difficulty’, there’s a friend of his, an experienced trapper called Nils Bjørvik, overwintering on Wijdefjord, twenty miles to the west. He made quite a point about that.
Then he surprised us by producing three jars of pickled cloudberries, which he says are the best thing for warding off scurvy. (He scoffs at the notion of Vitamin C, and thinks our Redoxon tablets a waste of money.) I was touched. I think the others were, too.
After lunch, the crew still had a couple of hours’ work to do, assembling our German Klepper canoes.
Gus went down to the beach with Eriksson to take photographs, and Algie cleaned up the lunch things, as per our rota. To clear my head of cigar fumes, I went for a walk.
I headed upstream past the mining ruins, and at first the ground was a springy carpet of dwarf willow and moss. I walked fast, and was soon sweating. That’s something I’m still getting used to, having to gauge how many layers to put on. Mr Eriksson told us a Norwegian saying:
If you’re warm enough when you set out, you’re wearing too many clothes.
As I climbed higher, the going got tougher. I found myself stumbling over naked scree and brittle black lichen. The wind was sharp, and I was soon chilled. Clouds obscured the icecap, but I felt its freezing breath. When I took off my hat, my skull began to ache within seconds.