We didn’t hear from Tapio for the next several days. Once, MacIntyre ventured forth and made inquiries among the miners—though never, he emphasized, among any of the supervisors, who could, by tarnishing Tapio’s name, endanger the trapper’s employment prospects in Spitsbergen. What little MacIntyre learned was vague and often contradictory. There had been a brief melee at the company canteen, beginning with some harsh words from both parties. The accounts seemed to agree that Tapio had struck one miner a glancing but conclusive blow with a bottle of aquavit and then taken on two others. At some point the fracas moved outdoors, where by some ruse or flash of skill—here the accounts diverged—Tapio gained the upper hand and smashed one Swedish miner’s head repeatedly against an exposed bit of wooden planking until the man was quite close to death. Ultimately Tapio was pulled away and subdued.
Several of MacIntyre’s informants were adamant that Tapio himself had been rather badly beaten, and that the miners had comported themselves with fortitude and dignity, but MacIntyre didn’t care. Neither of us had seen any egregious wounds on Tapio. What did concern MacIntyre was whether the nearly dead miner would file a formal complaint when he returned to something more like life.
As it happened, the miner’s Swedishness may have saved Tapio from prosecution or deportation. The Norwegian majority in Longyear did not appear especially aggrieved at the potential loss of a Swede, and no complaints were filed. After all, the fight was fairish, and did not Swedes, with their loose tongues and libertine ways, bring such things upon themselves? Finns were seen as peculiar and alien—Russians by any other name—but hard-handed and tough. Also, Tapio’s reputation as an incomparable trapper was well known, and if he failed to make himself an amiable companion, he was at least respected.
“I nearly forgot,” MacIntyre said one morning. He produced several weather-beaten envelopes from his jacket pocket. “Forgive my presumption, but I took it upon myself to retrieve your mail. I didn’t know whether you deliberately avoided news of home, or any reminders of a previous, discarded existence…” He let the sentence drift off.
I took the letters from his hand and peered down at the familiar hand. One from my mother in her confident, efficient cursive. Three from Olga in her haphazard, dashed-off, unladylike uppercase. I smiled despite myself. “No, Charles, not discarded. Merely buried in a shallow grave.”
“I suppose that makes me the wild dog that comes sniffing along and digs up your family’s remains,” he said with a wink. “I shall leave you to your exhumation.”
I read my mother’s letter first. In less than eight lines, it told of my father’s death and her relocation to Olga and Arvid’s house. She wrote that she was spending more time with her grandchildren, and catching up on reading. (My father had always frowned upon books as an inappropriate pastime.) The tone was formal—clinical, even. She betrayed no emotion; no tears had stained the page or caused the rigid characters to bleed into one another.
After reading it through three times, I looked up at the glare refracting off the ice on MacIntyre’s windows. I tried to locate a feeling of grief—even the tiniest pang—within me. There was none. My father had been cold and unkind. If he had ever earned even a mote of affection or allegiance from his children, it was an accident. I moved on from his death, as one steps lightly from stone to stone, and asked the next logical question: how would I feel—would I feel?—when my mother followed suit? The thought of her, alive or dead, provoked only guilt.
One of Olga’s letters touched upon the same theme, but lightly. I noted with appreciation that, despite the time and distance, she still maintained enough respect for me not to engage in any pretext of mourning. She had not loved the man any more than I had. It is possible she was beaten more often, though I doubt any of us kept score.
Her letters expressed grave, persistent concerns about my health and happiness. She felt certain that she had single-handedly doomed me to a life of disfigurement and self-imposed isolation by finding the job in Spitsbergen, and the intervening months had only served to deepen her guilt. She knew she was being ridiculous, she said, but she felt it all the same and swore that she would not unshackle herself from this leaden responsibility until I wrote and assured her that I’d found some way of turning this miserable calamity to my advantage, other than by shocking my poor sister with casual jests and gratuitous language. If I failed to rectify the situation immediately, she’d be forced to take ship and collect me back to Stockholm herself, and God knew Arvid would find a preposterous way to die in her absence.
When that subject was exhausted—for she yet knew nothing of how my situation had changed—she mused upon her typical preoccupations: her indifferent mothering, Helga’s troublesome, rebellious nature—now almost nine, she had taken to loitering with fishermen and sailors, her capacity for crudeness developing at a rate that far outstripped her more formal education—and the cold but ever-present attentions of our own mother, now so much more trying since she had moved in with them. But Olga was content to have someone else keeping an eye on Helga, and on the various domestic duties for which she herself had never shown more than a passing competence. Freed from some of these, Olga had taken up plein air painting with a “gabble,” as she termed it, of weary housewives. She claimed to have no more of a natural way with painting than she did with motherhood or housework—she had, as evidence, enclosed a small, splotched study of a docked whaler, which I did not find half bad—but didn’t care, as it took her out of the house and onto the pier or the beach. There she could place herself a respectful distance from the nattering ladies and engage in one of her preferred activities: staring across the great roiling expanse of water until she felt herself very small and insignificant. I smiled to think of how alike we still were.
MacIntyre observed me gazing mistily at nothing in particular and brought me a glass of tea—his usual viscous concoction, about half tea and half milk. I have no idea where he found milk.
“Charles,” I said, “I feel that perhaps I should return to Sweden.”
His eyes widened dramatically, but without surprise. “Oh?”
“Not that I wish to go. I’ve hardly seen the archipelago. Tapio tells me I’ve seen nothing at all, not even what is directly before me.”
“Forgive me for asking, dear boy, but I thought you were committed to Tapio’s tutelage?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I may not have within me the makings of a real trapper.”
As usual MacIntyre seemed perfectly aware of all the things I did not say—my fears of returning to anything like civilized life with my face so ruined, and my growing conviction that I wouldn’t survive the journey back to Camp Morton. But he just looked at me with frank concern and a little impatience. Then he picked up a book.
That same day we were both in quiet reflection when we were roused by a chaotic array of sounds outside.
MacIntyre opened the door, stood in confusion for a moment, and began to cackle. “Can I help you with those?”
There was a declining grunt which I knew to be Tapio’s. A minute later he strolled inside looking far more like himself than he had a few days earlier, but still with a cloud across his face that brooked no comment. “Sven,” he said, addressing me directly for the first time since we had boarded the fishing boat at Kapp Linné. “Get ready. We’re going.”
I half-rose, awkward and unprepared to be pressed for a decision. “I’m not certain I should—that is to say, I feel that perhaps you should return to Camp Morton without me. I don’t wish to be a burden.”
He stood on the threshold and stared at me. I couldn’t tell if it was irritation or genuine curiosity that played across his face. “You mean you’re afraid you’ll die on the journey.”
“No, I—yes.”
“You’re right to worry. Your pitiful condition was a surprise even to me, who should have known. I’m frankly amazed you made it as far as you did. Were I to lead you back in the same fashion, you might very well lose your life, or at least a leg. But fear not. I have secured for us a mode of transport that will have us speeding along as though we wore the winged shoes of Hermes himself!”
“Another boat?” I ventured, my heart lighter at the prospect.
“No, you fool. Did it escape your keen attention that the fjord is frozen over and impassable once more?”
“If not a boat, then what?”
“A team!” he said, with a look of triumph that parted the storm in his face for a passing moment. “Well, not exactly a team. I could not find two dogs, or two reindeer, so I purchased one dog and one reindeer.”
I was perplexed. “Do you mean to say we’ll be riding them back to camp?”
At this, Tapio turned to MacIntyre, who burst into a fit of raspy laughing so severe that his eyes watered and he clutched at a chair.
Tapio’s face lost some of its stiffness and the muscles in his jaw appeared to twitch. “Indeed yes,” he said. “And we will draw straws to see who gets the reindeer.”
MacIntyre tried to say something—the words “riding” and “dog” came through—but was overcome once more.
“I’m pleased to provide you both with such amusement,” I said, raising my voice over MacIntyre’s chortling cough.
“Ah, Sven,” said Tapio. “Clearly you’ve never heard of skijoring. The animals will be in harness, and with any luck, if we can prevail upon them to do so, they will pull us all the way home.”
Both animals were unkempt and patchy. The reindeer’s antlers were broken off at a rakish angle on the starboard side, which gave a certain tilt to his head and his overall countenance. He switched his tail as though assailed by flies. He appeared to know the dog and dislike him. Several times, as we packed our meager belongings onto a sled that Tapio had procured, the reindeer tried to kick the dog, who was fast and unperturbed.
The canine, also male, had the general shape of a sled dog—the pricked ears, the heavy fur, the build for running, and the look of active intelligence—but clearly no particular pedigree. He was mottled and brownish, with a few errant white patches on his legs, left ear, and muzzle. His tail, instead of curling hard against his back, either hung downward like a rudder or stuck out laterally, lending him the look of a fox. His eyes were amber.
MacIntyre, deep in amusement, was trying to compose his face into something more neutral. “I suppose you got them at a bargain price?” he said. “You don’t fear that they may be…unwell?”
“It would be immediately evident to even the least-trained eye that they’re unwell,” Tapio said, “but it’s only a spot of mange. And lice, and fleas. Nothing that cannot be improved by getting them out into the good clean air. If necessary I will wash them.”
At this point, my curiosity having overwhelmed the repressed tide of questions and anxieties that threatened to drown all else, I asked their names and where they had come from. The dog’s name, though he appeared not to know it, was Eberhard. The reindeer had none.
The reindeer, Tapio said, had been found and half-trained, along with a herd of other wild native stock of the archipelago, by a Sami trapper looking to create work for himself in the off-season, who had apparently been disappointed by their size and intractability relative to the domesticated reindeer he grew up with. Determined to keep working with them, he’d regaled anyone who would listen with the infinite uses and skills of a well-trained reindeer, but he had fallen into a crevasse in November and been lost along with most of his ragged herd. Three of the semi-feral animals found their way, starving, back to Longyear, whereupon two were purchased by the Company for meat. The third, rejected perhaps as unwholesome, was now ours.
“And the dog?” I asked.
Eberhard’s story was simpler. He’d been part of a Norwegian sled team but had been abandoned in Longyear because he didn’t behave well in groups. Surviving on scraps and garbage for nearly a year, he carved out a meager existence under various huts and was alternately shot at or humored by miners and proprietors. He was eventually taken in by a shopkeep who had a mind to train him as a guard, but the dog had very little interest in the comings and goings of humanity, so he was once again released on his own recognizance. Tapio corralled him behind the mess tent, licking a putrid grease stain from the canvas. Clearly Tapio’s proffered gristle held more promise than whatever the dog had lately found to sustain him, because he submitted to a rope collar with stoic resignation. It occurred to me, as perhaps it did to Tapio, that the dog’s ambiguous future with us couldn’t be any worse than his past.