We ventured forth by moonlight. It was late November and the sun had never appeared that day. Trudging behind Tapio, I tried to regulate my labored breathing so I might stay as quiet as possible and not disgrace myself. All I knew of our purpose was that we were checking traps, but I had a general sense of our whereabouts because Tapio had insisted that I study the maps until I could name all of the major fjords and mountains within a fifty-kilometer radius.
“What will you do if I die while we are out on the trapline?” he had said.
“Mourn you, I suppose. Read a poem at your burial.”
“Very droll. You will make your way back to camp or you will join me in death and there will be no one to read poetry for either of us.”
Periodically he stopped to gaze at the ground, hunched over like an ancient. He was looking for tracks, I knew, but I saw nothing. At last, after nearly two hours, Tapio motioned for me to catch up with him. He pointed down at the prints like dinner plates. Sweat prickled up over what seemed like every inch of my skin, even the parts of me exposed to the bitter, still night air. I knew what I was looking at but did not wish to say the word aloud. My heart began to pound in my throat.
Tapio seemed deep in thought and deadly serious, but made no move for his rifle.
“Is it near?” I said in a gasping whisper.
“No. Long gone.” He gestured at the set of prints immediately before us. “See how the wind has blown snow into them? The claws lack definition. Two hours gone. Three at the most.”
Two hours did not seem very long to me. I jerked my head from left to right, thinking I might see the hulking form of an ice bear as it lurched away, or toward us. I imagined it materializing from a fold in the mountains, white on white, an ambulatory ridgeline, or rising from the sea, sleek and dripping with a great shudder like dream made manifest.
“Why will you not let me have a gun?” It was a case I had pleaded before.
“You’re not ready,” Tapio replied, unmoved.
“But you wish me to survive even after your own grisly demise!”
“After my grisly demise you can take this gun and use it however you wish. In the meantime, you’re not ready. It takes a great deal of practice to know your way around a trap. It takes a great deal more to be competent with a rifle.” He paused for a moment, looking at me. “Also, you seek danger. You long for it. Even if you don’t recognize the impulse in yourself, it’s there, luring you into places you shouldn’t go.”
I began to protest but he raised his hand. “I don’t mean this critically. I have felt the same at times in my life. Times of ignorance and naïveté, usually, but other times as well. Many of us feel it. What do you think brought you to Spitsbergen in the first place?”
I did not answer. I felt stung by his appraisal, and began to turn inward, searching morosely for evidence of this mysterious, self-destructive engine.
“Never mind, Sven. But you must understand that a gun in the hands of someone who seeks danger is a tool for the same dark purpose. It will speed you to the precipice and before you know where you are, it will push you over. Now let’s go.”
After another hour or so of miserable shuffling in ill-fitted snowshoes, the straps of my pack beginning to chafe and bite in a way that consumed all thought, and hunger kneading my stomach into a shriveled, misshapen little stone, I bumped into Tapio’s hand. He’d been holding it out to prevent me from knocking him over. Apparently my pitiful reverie was only too obvious.
“Forgive me,” I said. “What a shameful specimen—”
But Tapio held up his finger to his lips and pointed away to his left.
“What is it?” I breathed in a hoarse whisper. “I see nothing.”
“Down on the beach.”
“Beach?”
“Yes, fool!” Tapio was a master of the subaudible bark. “Do you not see the beach, the water, the Arctic Ocean for all love?”
I squinted into the purplish glow, eventually making out a line of ridges a way off, steep and jagged, rising like the scaly spine of some gargantuan sea creature. I had seen topography like this before but it held more power and strangeness in the moonlight. As my eye focused at last on something other than my feet, fighting to blink away the endless watering that blurred it, I thought that the mountains emerged from an unnatural featureless plain. It was the ocean, of course: a great bay with water as still as tea, and the mountains were on the other side. In the foreground, little more than a hundred meters off, there was a rocky beach.
If Tapio had not put his hand out, I might have walked straight into the ocean and never returned.
“Do you see them now, the little fiends?”
There were three white shapes on the beach, moving erratically. Dancing, almost. “Bears?” I said.
Tapio groaned. “Yes. Miniature ice bears with long bushy tails. You have discovered a new species. Ursus blindswedus, they shall be called.”
I peered again. Foxes, of course. Arctic foxes. They ranged industriously at perfect intervals from one another, each with its back arched high, as though keeping its vertebrae as far as possible from the earth, or as if on tiptoes, in quick determined spurts. They skittered like crabs. I felt I was bearing witness to a strange ritual. Was this the most efficient way to scrounge for dead seabirds and fish?
Tapio moved along, keeping a parallel path with the water but not approaching any closer. The foxes ignored us.
“Will you not shoot one?” I said to his back, hoping the answer would be no.
“Someday they may find themselves in my trap,” he said. “I won’t disturb their moonlight conference.”
We checked many traps that evening—or Tapio checked and I hovered uncertainly, trying to absorb details but mostly asleep on my feet. In truth I don’t remember much from my trapping education until the time when I began to do it myself. I’ve never been adept at learning in the presence of others. Terrible mistakes, on the other hand, leave a lasting impression.
After another hour or so along the coastline, we stopped and I asked Tapio if we’d reached the end of the trapline. He told me that it had ended nearly a kilometer behind us.
“Then why on earth did we keep walking?” I regretted the question the moment it left my mouth, and replayed it in my mind, analyzing its petulance.
But Tapio appeared not to notice or care. This was a good place to eat, he said, and he wanted to show me something I had yet to see. He led me down to the beach. We were in a minor fjord within massive Van Mijenfjorden. Distances were impossible to gauge at the best of times in Spitsbergen, and with the best of eyes, so I cannot say how far we were from the other side—perhaps several hundred meters, perhaps a kilometer or two. The moon was reflected on the water in perfect clarity, so that its piercing, eerie light seemed to come from two places and make two lines of shadow. Across the bay—hulking, implacable—there loomed a glacier.
Most people new to glaciers—or to their impetuous children, the icebergs—will note first the unearthly blue. There are innumerable gradations, of course, but nearly all are shades of blue that one is entirely unprepared to encounter in the natural world. But this first glimpse of mine was at night, and the sky itself had turned a queer royal blue, seared by two white-hot celestial orbs, one in the sky and one in the water.
The glacier commanded attention. This was much more than the sleeping giant I had expected. As I watched, noting the cracks running vertically up its face like those in a wedge of hard cheese, an enormous piece flaked off and sloughed into the water. It was as though a great maul had cleaved into a house-sized round of dry ashwood. A moment after that, the report reached my ears—something akin to a rifle shot, or nearby thunder, and yet unlike. A sound I could feel in my chest.
“She calves!” Tapio said. He put his hand on my shoulder and gave me such a friendly look that I barely recognized him. And immediately he threw down his gear and set about unpacking our dinner.
But I was transfixed. The bay, I saw now, was riddled with ice shards and iceberg remnants scattered like floating bodies. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the swell created by the calving glacier reached them and they began to dip and bob.
The sloped surface of the glacier itself was less the slick ice sheet I had imagined, aproning toward the sea, and more a gently rising series of white steps, like a terraced field. To each side, ice accumulated in pinched slag heaps. The crevasses must have been terrible indeed, and I shuddered at the thought of peering into the void of one. A cold exhaled breath from some deep place where the world knew only freezing, crushing, grinding, and time measured in millennia.
And then the wave—more of a ripple by this point—hit our beach, which was littered with the glacier’s jagged-glass castaways, some the size of draft horses. The water jostled them with a sound like a chandelier in a light breeze.
“Can we get closer?” I asked, remembering to breathe.
Tapio looked up. He was chewing dried meat very deliberately, like a cow, deep in contemplation. “No,” he said. “If the glacier is bigger than your fist, you’re too close.”