Weeks passed like days, and months like weeks. The sacrifice, in my new perspective, was this: my connection to the outer world grew brittle. It thinned and frayed. After a time I assumed it had severed entirely. I no longer wrote to my sister or MacIntyre or Tapio. Ever since the Norwegians had come face to face with my morbid grotesquerie, they had afforded me a wide berth. This outlook had spread to any other sailors who docked at Longyear, or so I gathered from the way they remained near their boats whenever they passed through Bruceneset with supplies. It seemed self-evident that they rowed ashore only when explicitly directed by MacIntyre to do so. Ships came seldom to Alicehamna now. They drifted by the open mouth of Raudfjorden and I imagined that their captains would pause and think of the bay’s comfortable shelter, and yet know it would be prohibitively rude to moor in Alicehamna without stopping in to see how I was faring, and so sail on to Woodfjorden and beyond.
News rarely passed north of Ny-London, or if it did I failed to hear of it. The Svalbard Act came and went without my notice. It was ratified in August of 1925, granting Norway sovereignty over the archipelago and putting us all under Norwegian law. They also changed the name of the place to Svalbard, though most people continued to call it Spitsbergen, whether they referred to the big island or Nordaustlandet or even Bjørnøya, which was apparently left out. The new laws affected me little, or not at all. Tapio’s rulebook was stricter than anything the Norwegian legislature could dream up.
I had no mail to send, and thus fewer and fewer letters came back. And I had most of the supplies I needed. Once a year, in the spring, I shipped off my carefully packed store of skins and furs—the Norwegians knew to come for this, as they were well compensated—and these were taken back to Longyear, where MacIntyre arranged for their sale in the civilized world. With this bounty I sent a list of necessaries. A month or two later, Norwegian sailors returned with a thorough accounting of what I had earned—held or deposited on my behalf by MacIntyre—along with a crate or two of whatever I had requested. MacIntyre seemed to understand quite well that I was in no state to be voluble, so he sent no inquiries after my health or anything else. He merely acted as my agent, trusting, I suppose, that if I needed more from him I would make that clear.
In truth, I needed nothing. Yes, I missed society sometimes—the limited society of a few people I knew and loved—but the less I heard of it, the less I remembered or cared. Humans moved too quickly, scuttling about like nervous beetles. I had become as acclimated to the land—and as inconsequential—as a well-camouflaged lizard.
Or so I reckoned. A person does not necessarily notice when his emotions go dormant. He may even feel better, as I did for a while. But a gray cone may form atop the volcano, and it will appear to be sleeping while yet the magma roils beneath. I don’t mean to suggest that I was full of magma or anything else so volatile. Merely that the ashen cone is temporary, and though it may fool the volcano himself, and some of the people around him, it should not.
Perhaps a better metaphor is this: life in the void is without wounds, for nothing can touch you. But the void is chilly. And the cold bites even as it numbs.
I shudder to imagine how things would have gone without Eberhard. Many hunters make curious friendships with the Arctic fox, for he does not know that he is being hunted until he is trapped, and I’m sure this condition has been the cause of many hard decisions and regrets. I was spared this delicate dance of camaraderie and betrayal because Eberhard kept the foxes away from our hut. Not only was his urine everywhere, but if he saw any feral dog kin within striking distance of the premises, he made a concerted effort to kill them.
We were lucky that he was made of very dense material. Twice between 1924 and 1926, he fell through the ice in Alicehamna, and before I had to make the choice of whether to imperil my own life for his, he clambered back out in a spray of foam and ice-crackling fur and I was able to get him back to the woodstove.
He also antagonized a bear. It is likely that he mistook it for something else at a distance, or was emboldened by the fact that it was moving away from him at a reasonable pace, for he chased it across a ridge and down into a rocky snowbound ravine. When the bear realized that she was being harassed by an obnoxious pest, she turned to face him. She made a quick charge, but Eberhard was faster. He brought her to within a hundred meters of me before I comprehended what was happening. My hands were deep in mittens. My rifle was not ready.
“I am a dead man,” I said.
And then the bear turned abruptly, sniffed the air, and ambled away on a new quest entirely her own.
There were numerous other scrapes and near deaths for the dog, and several for me, too. We did not dwell on them. We devoted all strength and will to survival, our own and each other’s, with as little forecasting or remembrance as possible.