by Peter Geye
I told him about the ubiquitous fog, which rose from the mountains and glaciers each morning as sure as the steam from Inger’s teapot did back home. I told him about how, on the fifth morning from my last, it drew down the fjord like a second dawn. Some days the fog settled onto the plain where I lived those last mornings, there to smother what little warmth the sun might offer. But I told him also about how darkness drew the fog away, and how the starlight then seemed like lanterns to light my dreams.
Twice I decided I’d rather work toward Kapp Guissez under those stars than in the soupy fog, and so many hours I might have been asleep passed walking through the night instead. Toward the next inevitable glacier, blooming beneath the night sky like a great milky river. I spoke of how I walked with my sack of meat slung over my shoulder, using my gun as a shovel or a cane, my hakapik in the other hand, my steps purely rote. As though plodding ever onward had been my sole adult occupation, and I was now a master cragsman.
I told him about the snow again too. The melodies of its falling and blowing. How it erased distance and time and shone the same under the daytime fog and nighttime stars and moon. It consoled me, and not only because the shelters I built with it provided some semblance of warmth. It was as if the snow spoke to me and eased what I knew to be my imminent death. So my reverence for it grew, and I spoke to it in turn as I had once prayed to God.
I told him how the cold had become the principal condition of my life. And how my reveries had gone from sumptuous feasts or sensuous nights with Inger, or evenings of song with my daughter after she’d returned home, to the much simpler desire for warmth. Every time my vision clouded with a gust of wind or a shift in fog, I’d conjure from the blurriness a great blaze toward which I’d hurry with fresh hope. Those hopes, of course, were dashed by the next shift in the breeze, and I would raise my voice to the snow once more, imploring it. Even, sometimes, asking for its forgiveness.
So I was rightly surprised on the same fifth-from-the-last morning—after all fantasies of a warm fire had been abandoned, same as any feast, or night of song with my daughter, or long slumber with my wife—when I drew my vision back across the plain and saw, a half mile distant, what at first glance appeared to be a whale’s ancient skeleton, its ribs and spine scrubbed clean by time and wind and pecking birds, leaving only dried bones that glimmered there for my curiosity and pleasure. I wondered if I might be able to set them ablaze. To hang my sodden clothes to dry in the heat of that fire. Or to signal a distant ship.
But as I hurried toward it, I had the sobering realization that the beast would have suffered a terrible death, drowning on the same air that I myself breathed in such abundance. I wondered whether he had a whale wife or whale daughter who had swum off across cold northern seas and up into the bowels of a faraway continent. I wondered, too, whether in her memory he was loved or scorned. Or whether some whale landlord kept his corner of the sea in splendor, while this poor brute was made to beach himself, as I had done, on these sacrilegious shores.
And then, the closer I got, the more those bones seemed instead a bridge spanning a creek or small ravine, which thought put an extra quickness in my step. How many bridges had I wished for? Over crevasses high upon the second and third glaciers that I’d already crossed. Through this darkness of foggy days. Into peaceful sleep. Back to the poverty of my previous life. Back to my home.
If it seems unlikely that I’d recall such specific thoughts, I begged Marius Granerud to understand that my sentience in those days was drifting like the ice floes. It might as well have been subject to the same tides and winds, to the same ocean currents and distant calving glaciers. But for all of my mind’s aimless wandering, I was aware more than ever of my insignificance, so I judged my thinking up against that. To say this was the great lesson of my time on Spitzbergen would be to underestimate the many others, so many of which cost me dearly. But I do believe that if I’d stood amidst the Fonn and failed to see my slightness, I would have perished that night, or the next, or at least before I heard the bell of a ghostly boat some days later.
But back to that whale’s bones. I now stood nigh a hundred paces from it, wisps of fog breathing through me, the paltry sunlight low and straight into my eyes. I learned well in those days how distance collapsed with time, and at that spot on the beach I turned and contemplated the earth I had already trod. Perhaps fifteen miles lay behind me, a third of those across three glaciers, some by day, some by night. I could not have known that the last hundred paces separating me and the whale would be the last I’d cover, but I did know my exhaustion had reached its zenith. I felt the tightness in my stomach. I reached for it, and then let my hands travel up my own ribs. And there, on the beach, I realized how sick I was. If this understanding had come to me without that new destination before me, I might’ve laid myself out on the rocks and slept forever. I was disappearing. Dying, like the whale. I shivered and felt the flush of my fever. My own bones grew closer to my touch. The flesh on my face was drawn, so tight that it felt thin enough to tear like paper, should the right wind come off the fjord. As I stood taking that paltry inventory of my flesh, feverish even as I trembled with whatever sickness had taken root, I bargained with myself. I would walk to the whale, at least, and die in its company. And in ten or twenty or fifty years, or whenever the next lost soul should find himself wandering those plains without a boat to get home in, and then chance upon that bridge of bones, he would find my own ribs beside the whale’s. And thus might have a foreshadowing of his own doom.
“They were lonely steps, Herr Granerud.” I spoke those words on the second to last of our meetings, in the quiet of his office. To recall them was to summon again that feeling of certain death, and my face must have displayed it.
“And without God to walk with you,” he whispered, with dire solemnity across his face. As though he were in fact mourning the loss of me.
“Halfway there, I looked up. Maybe I wanted to delay what I knew would come. Maybe I only wanted to take solace in my decision to give up. I felt a calm I’d not known since I’d last sat in Inger’s sweet company. I laid the Krag-Jørgensen on the rocks and slid the makeshift sack of meat from my weary shoulders. Ten paces on, I dropped the hakapik. There were patches of fog still, and they continued to pass through me.”
“Your face is serene, Odd Einar. Is it because you did not lie down and die? Is it because you lived to see your wife? To lie down instead in a warm bed with her?”
“I cannot think of those minutes on the plain without thinking of the warmth that came after.”
“What warmth?”
“Why, the warmth of fires.”
He appeared confused. As confused as I myself had been when I got close enough to see these weren’t bones at all, only the ancient and upturned hull of a wrecked nordlandsbåt.
“This, then, it must have been another of your turns of good fortune? The third of four?”
“Can you imagine it? After all that cold? All that darkness? Indeed, to have, sitting there right before me, as though a treasure left behind by some earlier explorer, enough wood to build a bridge?”
“A royal find.”
“Yes, Marius, given my sack of meat, I’d rather have had that wood than a tin of cookies.”
He shook his head. “I’ve asked you a dozen times to call me by my given name, Odd Einar. And now you have.”
“If I’m anything, it’s slow to learn.”
“We’re all that, friend.”
“May I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” he said, and sat up in his chair.
“Having heard all this, do I strike you as a stooge?”
“Of course not—”
“Will the man or woman who reads of me think I’m a fool?” I pointed to the papers spread across his desk. “It’s one thing to have lived through my ordeal, and to have suffered its indignities. But quite another, it occurs t
o me, to think about living it over and over and over again in the minds of people I’ll never know. It’s as if my woe will live on forever. Or for as long as people care to even pick up this story. Should I want that?”
He appeared speechless, a pose uncommon for him, and he looked between my wondering face and his notes on the blotter and said nothing at all. When finally he spoke, the strength of his voice had abandoned him and he sounded like an old man who wasn’t used to speaking. “I don’t know what to say, except it is my intention that anyone reading of your plight will know the man who came out of it alive did more than survive with dignity. I will want these readers to know he redefined dignity.” He glanced again at his pile of notes, rearranged a few, and dipped his pen in his inkwell as if pressed to record his own thoughts. But he merely held the nib of his pen in the air. “I marvel at you, and not only because of what you survived. Not only because of your intuition and your will and your instincts. Odd Einar, I marvel at you for your humility, too.
“And though I cannot account for my own abilities, or for the sensibilities of whatever audience my work might gain, I can say with some confidence that my portrayal of you and your misadventure will reflect my great admiration, and that others will see what I do.”
He now regarded me, maybe in hopes that his words did soothe me, and then dipped his nib once more, hardly removing his gaze from mine. He appeared to reformulate his thoughts twice, his lips parting and twisting as if to speak, before he said simply, “Tell me about how that fire felt, Odd Einar. Tell me about those last five days.”
* * *
—
As soon as I kindled, with the help of Mikkelsen’s flint and steel, the first fire on the shore of the Krossfjorden and felt its resplendent warmth and my shivering body found reprieve, I began to think of the new offerings that dreadscape might have for me. For as sure as I knew I was dead before discovering that ancient hull, I knew then with equal certainty that those old planks would prolong my stay and give me time to complete my inventory of memories. The ones I wanted to take to my death with me. For this I was deeply grateful.
The first memory was of my daughter on a morning in eighteen and ninety, her eleventh year. I had been working by lantern light one morning in the boathouse, carving a new rudder gudgeon for my faering, when Inger came hurrying in with Thea at her side.
“Odd Einar,” she said, and from the tone of her voice I knew something gravely wrong was nigh.
“Papa!” Thea shrieked. “Come see the morning. Why’s the sun all smoky?”
I looked at Inger, who nodded. “You’d best take a look,” she said.
So the three of us tromped to the shore and gazed out across the water at the towering plumes of smoke rising from the village.
“It doesn’t smell good, Papa,” Thea said, pinching her nose and squinting. Inger put her arm around her daughter and held her close.
“You ought to go see if you can help, Odd Einar.”
She was right, and I would, but I stood there for another minute positive I could be of no use and we were witnessing the end of our village, that it would never recover from the ashes of destruction. I cannot even say this thought was undesirous, forcing us, as it would, to move to a less hostile place.
If I was wrong about our fortitude in the face of ruin, I was right about my being able to help. By the time I rounded Skansen, the scope of the fire shocked me. From Gávpotjávri to the churchyard, a great conflagration seized the town. I could hear, even from across the harbor, the sizzle and hiss of the heat beneath the roaring exhalation of the flames. Smoke billowed and mushroomed and soot rained down. I thought of my friends and the people I’d known all my life. I thought of Inger’s sister and her husband, Rune, and of their apartment on the Grønnevoldsgaden, next to Lundby’s grocery store. All of it now char. Sitting there on the harbor I knew that forever after, whenever my eyes alighted on another fire, my memory would return to Hammerfest as it burned.
The fire smoldered for four days, and by the time its last cinders were doused, two-thirds of our village had burned. It surprised no one to learn that the spark that ignited it all came from the new electric ovens in Bengt’s bakery, the ones he’d boastfully brought home from the World’s Fair in Paris only the previous year. As with so many of his ventures, he trumpeted the innovation and progress of the idea as though loaves of bread were a new invention, and all his own.
Well, we were all in need of bread in the days that followed. Inger and Thea spent mornings at the kneading board while I rowed to the village to sift through the ashes, reclaiming as much as could be found. Have you ever seen the better part of a village charred and in ruins? Have you ever axed what was once your neighbor’s front door, only to have the dormant fire flare up at your feet? Have you searched for your aunt’s walking cane, and found instead the missing pastor’s thighbone? For that is some of what awaited me in the rubble.
I told this story because I had an ardent belief that I would never see flames so intense again, but as I set the first of those boards afire on the beach in Spitzbergen, and as the smoke wafted around me, its warmth reaching into every part of me, as my shivering slowed and then stopped altogether, I realized that that fire, even in its containment, was just as wondrous.
I sat with the burning bones of that old nordlandsbåt for hours, divining the rest of my life from the shifting and dancing flames. For the first time since killing the reindeer I cooked its flesh rather than eating it raw, and the warmth of that meat settling in my bowels settled me. I undressed to my skivvies and hung my clothes to dry, and that night I slept like a cat on the hearth, my face toward the fire, waking only to stoke its flames.
The next morning I luxuriated further by roasting another hunk of brisket, toasted my feet, and then used several planks to build a lean-to beside the growing heap of ashes. I dismantled more of the hull and stacked the wood into three different piles. By my uncertain calculus, I estimated that I had enough to keep a fire going for nigh three weeks. Twice that long if I stoked them only half the night. At first thought, this seemed a boon. But then I started counting up the days before the ice might clear and men like Svene Solvang and his crew would be able to return for more seals. That would be six months, perhaps even longer. And no matter how I moved the wood around, there were sure to be four or five months without anything to burn at all. And it getting colder.
So the tide of my hope was pulled by those fires, same as the seas being pulled by the sun and moon. And like the ocean level, my mood changed incrementally, and then enormously. One moment I would bask in the warmth, and the next remember how my piddling stock of wood stood against the season to come. If I hadn’t already been down with my neap tide, in those despairing hours before finding the hull, I might have panicked. But I was learning that this place gave as often as it took and here found fortitude, if not peace.
And with that in hand, I spent the next two days weathering my time. I had food. Dry clothes. Wood to burn. And time to consider every possibility. I gave thought to trying to paddle down the fjord. I might load a berg with my belongings and use a plank to steer with. But the problem was ice. Mountains of it had amassed, too much to navigate in a boat, never mind a floe. And so it made no sense to leave my lean-to and the copious fresh water I had to drink from the melting glacier. Even if Kapp Guissez was only ten miles hence, it might as well have been fifty. For I could no sooner cross the flooded moraine than I could navigate the congested ice. I was as good as encamped there, and fine with this fate.
At night, as I wandered into sleep, I contemplated that my fires were likely the first in human history to ever warm that shore. I found this beautiful, and for flickering seconds tricked myself into believing that my misadventure had some larger purpose. Like Nansen or Sverdrup or Andrée. Men whose ambition drove them to inhabit these wild places, and whose reward came with riches as well as respect. If such thoughts strike yo
u as grandiose, you’re not mistaken. But there was no vanity in my thinking, only delusion. And delusion was a remarkable aid to sleep.
On the second morning from the last, I woke to a dramatic change in my circumstances. Since I’d set up camp there, my practice had been to cache the venison under a mound of stones gathered for just that reason. I arranged the depot about two hundred yards behind me. Back where I’d first seen what I mistook for a whale’s bones. My plan was not complicated. I wanted to protect my stores but also keep them some distance from camp. Though I hadn’t seen my ice bear—or even any sign of him—since the day he killed Mikkelsen, I seldom went long without fearing that he lurked right beyond the next hummock of snow, or barely below the landkall clinging to the shore. In those last days, I admit a part of me desired to see that beast. To look him in his narrow black eyes and commune with him. To feel his isolation as I now understood it, after nearly two weeks in his territory. I also wanted to test my revised boundaries of fear, for though I knew well my vulnerability when stepping aboard one of Svene’s killing boats half a season ago, and though my first few nights on that barren island were a lesson in abject horror, I found myself now almost amused by my old weaknesses. And surely this fellow’s curiosity would best him. I had often sensed since last seeing him that he sat waiting at some distance, in darkness or snow, regarding me as I now wished to regard him. A not small part of me had fashioned for us a kind of brotherhood. As though the ice bear understood my plight and was watching over me.
Of course, I now judge these as sentiments from a taxed and snow-blind mind beset by great loneliness. The true reasons he might’ve had for avoiding me until then are much plainer to see in retrospect. There was an abundance of seals, and he knew how to hunt them a hundred years before he ever set foot on the ice. Why would he trouble with some creature who might plug him with another round from the Krag-Jørgensen? He had no idea that gun was as useless to me now as the planks it was leaning against. Or maybe his taste for filthy human flesh had been cured by devouring my comrade. Perhaps the blood of man tasted of corruption and compromise, neither of which settled well in his bear belly. Or, most likely, he’d merely wandered off into the expanse of that infinite snow, happier in his isolation than in my pitiful company.
