Entering the mouth of Raudfjorden for the first time in three months, I was beset by competing emotions. It looked like home—so deeply familiar in its every immediate feature—and yet cold and unknowable. I felt relief to be back in my place of stillness, away from the jostling hordes, but I missed Ludmilla already. I had forgotten just how fundamentally one might need the warmth of human companionship. One cannot require what one does not remember. Now I remembered it.
And Bruceneset, as we rounded the headland and dropped anchor in Alicehamna, seemed a desolate place. Peaceful, yes. Beautiful, of course. But stark and monochromatic, for its palette relied wholly upon the Arctic elements. Even Raudfjordhytta, the only visible sign of human interference, looked like just another gray stone, huddled and still. Eberhard’s memory flooded icily through the cavities in my chest. Ever since our ship left Pyramiden I had been thinking of him more regularly again, and now as we approached the fjord—his fjord—his ghost grew stronger. Helga stepped into the ship’s boat with two Norwegian sailors, and her jaw was set hard. Perhaps she felt the same creeping despair that I did. I wondered bleakly whether either one of us would survive the winter at this rate.
But as the sailors heaved on their oars and we grew closer to the beach, Helga said, “There is a light, uncle! In the hut!”
I squinted my bleary eye but could make nothing out. A shifting glare from the sea threw weird shadows across the cabin. It might have been sunset reflected in the glass. I kept silent. Then we ran aground with the usual crunching din, and as the Norwegians jumped out to help with the several heavy crates of goods we’d brought from Longyear, I heard a bark. It was far off, and my brain didn’t register it as odd until I recalled with a knife blow that Eberhard was not here to welcome us—the greatest traumas can be experienced ad infinitum. But then I heard it again. A seal? No, for it came from inland.
And then I saw the figure of a man skiing down the slope of Brucevarden. He was a couple of hundred meters from the cabin, hauling a sled. I was seized with apprehension, suddenly desiring all the perilous solitude my hunting grounds could afford. By the time Helga had said her fond farewells to the Norwegians and we made it up the beach, the man was pulling up to Raudfjordhytta and, with a great air of entitlement, unslinging his sled. A tiny figure, like a tuft of wet kelp, preceded him. It moved with remarkable urgency, bounding and tripping over itself as it ran at us, and barking all the while. Then it was upon me, growling and yipping and whining and biting at the heel of my boot. I lifted my foot and it came up attached, looking ferocious and ridiculous and wholly unconcerned with its new vantage. A pup, about the size of a large Norwegian rat.
“Look at this cheeky fellow,” I said to Helga, and then watched with some shock as the man, having unstrapped his skis, opened the door to Raudfjordhytta and walked inside without one word of greeting. He left the door open.
When I stepped in, the dog still clenched tenaciously to my boot, the man was stooping at the woodstove, gathering up red coals with a poker. His back was turned.
“Did you take the long way around Spitsbergen?” he said. “I’ve been waiting here two weeks.”
“Tapio!” I exclaimed, and despite my joy at discovering the old Finn, could think of nothing else to say.
He turned around and inspected me. His face was the same grim well-groomed visage I knew so well, perhaps a bit more weathered around the eyes from squinting against the flat Arctic light. “You’ve been eating well,” he said, not unkindly. “And you smell different. Farmed meat?”
I nodded, suddenly reluctant to tell him anything about what I’d been doing, for fear of exposing myself to his judgment. “And you?” I said. “Where have you been for the last four and a half years?”
“Hunting,” he said, and seemed to think it a sufficient answer.
At that moment Helga stepped inside, Skuld on her back, and she held in her arms four ptarmigans upside down. She looked at us with a mild inquisitive expression. “Yours?” she said to Tapio. “Or shall I interpret them as a housewarming gift?”
“Tapio, may I introduce you to my niece, Helga, and her daughter, Skuld. Helga, this is my dear old friend and teacher, Tapio.”
“Ah, the Finnish socialist,” she said. “I have heard much. Very pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Honored,” he replied, with a stiff little bow of his graying head.
I found, improbably, that I was smiling. “And who is this brute?” I said, and picked up the pup, who had fallen asleep on his back as soon as we neared the stove, his belly exposed, shamelessly indifferent to any new threat. His tiny heart was beating like a turnstone’s wing.
“He is a dog,” Tapio said.
“Yes, I see that. And what is his name?”
“Why would I give him a name? He’s a pup. Besides, he’s not mine, he’s yours.”