It would be an untruth, or a deliberate obfuscation, to say that Tapio taught me everything I know about hunting and trapping, for he taught me everything I know about all practical skills. Fortunately, he was far less of a fastidious taskmaster when it came to construction. His interest was not in grandeur or aesthetics but integrity, economy, and speed. Having laid in a great store of dry and canned goods, he existed in a state of perpetual trepidation that our camp would be ransacked by a bear before we could build protective structures, and we would be left either dead or insufficiently stocked and therefore just as dead. This concern drove us.
The Swedes were true to their estimated arrival time. In fact they were a day early, which Tapio declared another of their self-righteous characteristics. “Served them well enough shipping rations and iron ore to Germany during the war,” he muttered.
Tapio was civil to the Swedes, though he pretended not to speak their language. I had nowhere to hide and needed to help unload the supplies anyway. Several became very friendly when they learned, in the first exchange, that I was from Stockholm, but after catching one of their unguarded looks of horror at my face, I grew taciturn and the conversation died away. They departed with a skeptical wish for our good fortune, and rather than feeling forlorn or desperate as their ship rounded the headland and disappeared into the Arctic Ocean, with no other such visits planned until springtime, I felt clean. I felt safe.
Accepted wisdom among those who purport to know has it that I built Raudfjordhytta in 1928. The fact is that, with help, I did build a cabin during that time, and it still stands there almost twenty years later, against all odds, but I built two before that one in the very same place. The first Raudfjordhytta—our first, at any rate—lasted almost three years. No blame for its eventual ruin can lie at the feet of Tapio, who was a thoroughly competent builder, if not an artisan. Nor can the blame lie entirely at mine, though I’m sure I made many grave structural mistakes when Tapio wasn’t watching. But the hut in question was perhaps a little more than a hundred square meters, set upon rocky, uneven ground. There were no footings sunk deep in the earth; no foundation to keep things level and secure. And we built it within a stone’s throw of the Arctic Ocean, in perhaps the least hospitable climate on earth. Yes, it is true that buildings in Spitsbergen often remain upright for generations after the original occupants are dead, for the air is cold and dry, and I have heard tell of Pomor corpses disinterred, accidentally or otherwise, looking for all the world like they had enjoyed only a few years of stony silence. But many more dwellings, constructed in haste, have been wiped clean from the landscape with violent indifference, as a caribou might snap off his old antler on a rock and think no more of it than he would a discarded tick.
At any rate, we built the thing. I learned as I went, accepting Tapio’s harsh words as a function of necessity, for winter was closing in. Late October in Spitsbergen. By the time we had the hut clad in siding and the walls insulated with various items of dubious merit, from newspaper to lichen to old socks, the sun was already limiting its appearance to an hour at most and the cold was bitter. Many mornings, until it was built, we had lain shivering on our respective sides of the tent, too frozen to move, knowing that the other was awake but hoping to avoid the inevitable world outside our sleeping bags. Many nights I had lain awake too, clenched and fetal, tormented by the need to urinate, all that vital body heat having been routed needlessly to my bladder.
The day we moved the little woodstove felt like a long-awaited triumph. We dismantled the chimney from the tent, lugged the surprisingly heavy stove the six meters to our hut, and within minutes had it installed on our rude hearth, puffing cheerfully. The Arctic wind makes a mighty draw in a man’s chimney. In fact, we had failed to notice the crack in an elbow of the pipe, and the stove drew so well at first that soon the cabin’s single room was full of smoke. We probably should have run about in a panic and flung open the door, swinging it to and fro to get some clean air, but instead Tapio hastily smeared some foul black epoxy over the crack—with his bare hand, I might add—and we sat back laughing and coughing.
The first Raudfjordhytta was broken in with a bottle of Scottish whisky that MacIntyre had packed in my case, without my knowledge, of course. Tapio and I guessed that MacIntyre would approve of this as a suitable occasion for such precious stuff. We knocked our wooden mugs together—Tapio insisted that tin utensils in the Arctic were irrefutable evidence of deep-seated ignorance or masochism, for the metal had the unfortunate habit of bonding to one’s flesh—and drank to the health of our hut. Then we drank to it again, and a third time, and when the bottle was nearly empty, and MacIntyre in absentia had been toasted more than a monarch, Tapio suggested that Eberhard be given his own dram in a bowl on the floor—for perhaps I have forgotten to say that the dog was with me through all of this, and took berth with me on the ship from Longyear, and indeed tolerated the unruly sea far better than anyone else, and won the hearty respect of the sailors, and was deposited on the shore with me, and ate many semi-petrified seabirds, and rolled in many carcasses, and sometimes spent the night at the bottom of my sleeping bag, and sometimes at the bottom of Tapio’s (and sometimes we argued over who would get to share his warmth), and was now curled comfortably upon the hearth, as close as he could get to the stove without actually singeing himself, sometimes with a paw on the blistering iron, as though he had been waiting for us to finish this great labor on his behalf.
But he roused when Tapio called, “Ebbe, you old boar, come drink the health of your benefactor!”
And he lapped his dram with companionable interest before returning to the woodstove and going to sleep.