My duties as hunting camp steward were nominal, but necessary for Kalle and Sigurd to permit the presence of a fourth man on their winter grounds. Fortunately, their needs were very few, and neither wished for any interference with his grooming habits. I cleaned and I cooked, preparing a repetitive stable of meals—some British, some Nordic, and some essentially prehistoric—and there was rarely a serious complaint. We dined together in Michelsenhut, where I also resided with Tapio, but Kalle had claimed Clara Ville for himself and Sigurd bunked in a disreputable cabin on the outskirts of camp. I was instructed never to enter their private domains unless my cleaning services were demanded. So the winter ground on and, as I became marginally less incompetent, my trapping responsibilities increased. Eventually Tapio laid out my own trapline, which I checked with absurd, religious fervor. Rarely did I achieve success. I caught two foxes that season. I remember them both.
The paucity of animals we targeted was surprising. We trapped the fox, and though I was not permitted to do so until the following year, for obvious reasons, we occasionally trapped the bear. That was it. The rest of the pelts—seal, walrus, caribou—had rifle holes in them. As for whaling, the hunters I knew never attempted it. They didn’t have the gear, skills, or water confidence.
Feeling that I had at last gained something—a pittance, really, but something—to show for myself, I wrote to MacIntyre and Olga. To the former I enclosed some halfhearted attempts at lyrical prose in describing my first sight of a glacier, and a bit of nonsense about the sublime, with many words scratched out in a fit of self-recrimination. There was no way to mail the letter, however, with the fjord frozen and no one coming or going, so I could only imagine his response: polite, encouraging even, but letting me know that he would dwell intently on the question of which works of literature might steer me in a more profitable direction. To Olga I wrote a more thorough accounting of my deeds, health, and companions. Included was a note just for Helga—tucked in its own tiny folded-up envelope with a scrawled warning that no one else should open it, on pain of death—recounting in atrocious detail some of the stranger animal behaviors and carcasses I’d witnessed to date.
In January, Tapio fell ill with a stomach complaint. He passed it off as mild indigestion, but I believe he may have been close to death. On the second day of his infirmity, we ceased consumption of the canned cod he’d been eating and emptied the remaining cans into the snow.
“He can’t handle his liquor, that’s all,” Kalle said.
I protested that Tapio hadn’t been drinking.
Sigurd grunted dismissively, his primary mode of communication. “Parasite.”
“Possibly,” I said. “Though what concerns me most at this point is botulism. What if the cans weren’t sealed properly?”
“What is this nonsense?” Kalle said.
“Bad cans,” Sigurd explained. “Paralysis. Shit himself to death.”
Sigurd’s ill-tempered reticence occasionally masked an unforeseen depth of knowledge. The fact that he thought so little of everyone and everything led him to a kind of greedy nihilism, whereby he sought out and collected bits of information that validated his bleak world view, and stored them for future use.
“I can hear you,” came Tapio’s dim voice from the jakes. “I can hear you from a dozen meters away, over the wind and the gurgling in my guts.”
“Not paralyzed,” Sigurd confirmed. “Parasite. Or bleeding ulcer.”
Free from Tapio’s rigid control, Kalle took it upon himself to commandeer my education. He insisted that I accompany him on his traplines.
“Unless Mr. Shitty Trousers has something to say about it!” he called in the direction of the outhouse, where Tapio had now been more or less cloistered for four days.
There was no reply.
Out in the elements with Kalle, I felt at first a sense of liberation. Kalle never reprimanded me or gave me a withering look. He let me hold the gun, and he even let me take shots at a seal and a bird, both of which I missed. It was like being with a permissive uncle. As we trudged, Kalle told ribald stories and laughed his big laugh, and I found myself laughing too, regardless of the content. With Tapio’s unspoken prohibitions suddenly lifted, I realized that I had been eager to spend time with Kalle, or perhaps just to relax in any way whatsoever.
Then we came upon Kalle’s first sprung trap. A young fox lay in ruins. Its eyes and arse had been pecked by seabirds. Its mouth and paws were bloody from where it had scrabbled in futile desperation at the trap. Its pelt was ragged, its belly bloated, the legs stiff in weird repose.
Trying to keep the disgust from my voice, I asked how long it had been since he’d checked the line.
“Oh, a week or two,” he replied blithely. “I have so many lines, boy, I can’t check them every day like your friend the monk.”
In my time with Tapio, we never once came upon an animal that was already dead. Tapio generally dispatched them from a distance.
“So they don’t panic,” he explained. “No one should see his death coming.” If one of his prey looked like it had been trapped for more than ten hours, he would reprove himself bitterly, and then make careful alterations to his route and his schedule.
Kalle did not reprove himself. He freed the useless corpse from his trap and kicked it away. Then he shifted the trap a short distance off and reset it. “Let’s move on,” he said. “I’m getting hungry.”
That day we found two living foxes, three more dead—only one of which had a marginally passable pelt—and a reindeer stuck in a bear trap. The reindeer’s head had been pulled off by a bear. All around were scrapes and disturbances in the snow where the bear had attempted to remove the reindeer from its bonds and hoard it someplace else. Apparently the head had come off in the struggle, or else been dismembered in frustration. The carrion was partly eaten, but it looked as though the bear had not wished to linger. Likely Kalle did not take the time that Tapio did to protect his traps from human scent.
The scene gripped me with fear and revulsion. I thought I might be sick, and asked Kalle whether the bear would return.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said, chuckling. “If he does, we’ll be ready!”
We saw no more sign of the bear—its tracks led away and away—and we returned to Camp Morton after eight or nine hours on the line.
Tapio was back on his feet the next day, much reduced, and though he was not yet fit to work, he declared that he needed my help fixing some broken equipment. He would not hear of Kalle taking me out again.
“I must tell you, I am relieved to have you back as mentor,” I said once Kalle and Sigurd had gone. “Kalle is…” My brief admiration for the man and his ways had eroded to nothing, but I tried to think of a word that conveyed the proper meaning without total betrayal. “Careless. Sloppy.”
Tapio looked into my eyes. His were sunken and bloodshot. “Yes, Sven. He is.”