Bear Witness

by Mandy Haggith

  ‘There have been moments throughout the history of nature writing when a writer slips through the electrified fences that keep nature and society apart, and liberates not just a biological truth but also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mandy Haggith’s daring and at times beautifully worked novel is one such moment. This is what will happen. Read and learn.’ JIM CRUMLEY

  ‘A fascinating novel of radical ideas and what-if scenarios.’ LAURA MARNEY

  ‘Haggith’s evocation of landscape and wildlife is lyrical and vivid, written with a poet’s eye for detail. Her characters convince and entertain. This ambitious, visionary novel belongs to no single genre but encompasses romance, drama, comedy and literary fiction. Bear Witness is a big-hearted book [that] will make a significant contribution to the debate about the future of Scotland’s wilderness.’ LINDA GILLARD

  ‘A passionate and subversive book, written with a poet’s touch.’ JASON DONALD

  ‘Bear Witness takes you deep into thickets where government policy, science and environmental activism collide with one woman’s passion. A “what if?” with an emotional heart.’ LINDA CRACKNELL

  ‘A wonderful storyteller… Science, politics, romance and nature observation combine as [Mandy Haggith] explores re-wilding of both individual and land. This is a book with bite, relevant to contemporary debate about large predators but also a source of many other pleasures and surprises.’ KENNY TAYLOR

  For Bill and all the bears

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Mandy Haggith

  Copyright

  I have spotted footprints in the snow and scratches on trees, so I know they’re here, but I don’t actually expect to see one. After centuries of persecution, it is understandable that bears are shy.

  I’m out walking early this morning. It’s not that long after the spring equinox but already the days seem to be stretching towards that white, endless light of the Nordic summers, so when I woke it was light enough to want to get out. I can’t get enough of these woods, this breathtaking place.

  At night you could believe it’s still winter. The cold is biting and the snow is still a metre deep. Icicles hang from the roof of the hytte, dripping a little each day in the sunshine. We’ve even seen the Northern Lights, a ghostly green veil, like an algal bloom – just like in all the pictures you see, only colder. The air at night is nostril-shocking. It’s dangerous to be out in it too long. All your exposed skin starts sending alarm signals to your brain and you feel your nose getting colder and colder until you have to breathe through your mouth and freeze your tonsils for a while instead.

  But as soon as the sun rises, it’s all so different. Magical. There’s heat in the sun, real bodily comfort, and such incredible sights out here in the forest. Endless patterns of snow, ice and frost. Carvings made by just-melting streams. The animal footprints are dialogues written on snow: loping triangles made by a hare followed by the trot-trot-trot line of a fox on its trail; beautiful feather imprints and claw-etchings left by ptarmigan, tracked about by a lynx’s spoor; and of course the huge punctures in the drifts made by elk, their giant two-toed legs plunging into the depths with each great stride, and behind them the hungry paw prints of a bear.

  I stop beside the river, tired. I wish I’d learned to ski because tramping in the deep snow is hard going. Where snowmobiles have compacted the snow it’s relatively walkable but anywhere else it’s a matter of lunge and flounder, up to my knees or thighs each step.

  There are signs of beaver here: young birch trees gnawed right through. It’s hard to tell how long ago they were felled. Did I disturb the beaver preparing an extension to its lodge, or was it here a week ago, going after the juicy shoots, full of the rising sap? I’m entranced by the teethmarks on the wound, and when I look up I can’t quite make out the scale of the brown animal crossing the river.

  Then I see that it’s a big creature, up at the first bend of the river, where the water is shallow. It’s a bear! The wind is blowing in my face and the river’s conversational babble is an aural shield between us. I think of trying to get out my binoculars but I know the only thing I can do is to stay stock still. Any movement at all may give me away.

  She is halfway across the river. She looks over her shoulder and a cub bounds, splashing, into the water after her, calling out, I imagine, in complaint. I can’t hear it, but I can see that the cub’s mouth is open as it follows its mother’s lead into the snow-melt gushing river. It must be freezing, poor thing. Two big steps for the adult, a couple of jumps and a scramble for the cub, and they are gone, into the dark spruce shadows on the other side.

  I’m staring and staring but I can’t get another glimpse. They’re away, invisible again. Safe. But oh my, wow, I’ve seen bears! Mother and cub – it doesn’t get more special than that.

  I guess she didn’t know I was here. Just like I didn’t know they were here, on my side of the river, while I was immersed in beaver signs. I might have bumped into her on the track, or more likely got close enough that she would have heard my crunching footsteps or smelled me coming and hidden herself and her young one in the shelter of the forest. She wouldn’t have shown herself to me if she knew I was here. Or would she? Knowing she was putting the river between us, did that make her confident? No, it couldn’t be. What if I’d had a gun? She would never put herself in range like that, would she?

  I thank my aptitude for bumbling, lazily, curiously. I thank the luck that I was stock still at that moment. I thank the beaver for catching my attention. I thank the snow for making me tired enough to stop. It is a blessing. I don’t believe in anything that might choose to bless me, nor can I imagine why I might deserve any such thing, but I thank it anyway, whoever or whatever it is that gave me the benison of a bear cub on this spring morning.

  I feel so many confusing things. Sheer joy, of course, but tempered by so many other sensations. It almost seems a bit naff to try to write them down, they sound so abstract. There is fear, the innate terror of the predator, which is a kind of bodily, visceral thrill. There’s frustration that it’s so brief, so fleeting, the encounter. How long had it lasted? Seconds only. I wish it had been longer. I wish I had my camera there, ready to catch the shot. I could have had a prizewinner. Yet of course it’s imprinted in my mind as deeply as the footprints in the snow, and though I’m disappointed not to have a picture, I also know there’s something truer in my sighting for having been unaided by technology. Yet I am left with no proof, and the scientist in me knows that the evidence of my eyes only is no evidence at all, really.

  When the next wave of emotion bites, I get up and set off back to the hytte. The wish that I had someone with whom to share such moments is unavoidable. I suppose it’s called loneliness. It’s familiar, anyway, and it washes through me. Then it gives way to the strongest sensation of all: a kind of hunger, a greed, triggered by those few seconds – to do it again, to repeat the thrill, to see more bears.

  Part One

  It was the coconut smell that alerted Callis to Yuri standing beside her – that strange shampoo he used. She lifted her head from the microscope and flinched at his tense grey eyes, too close, as if he were about to kiss her. She glanced around. Had anybody seen? She tried to limit any physical sign of her recoil, but knew he must have registered it.

  She hit the button on her phone and pulled the plugs from her ears. The music of Arvo Pärt was replaced by lab clatter. ‘Sorry,’ she said. It seemed to have become her default greeting.

  ‘Your father has just called,’ he said. ‘He couldn’t reach you. He says it’s urgent.’

 
There were two missed calls on her phone. She always kept it on silent and must have been too engrossed to notice them coming in. Her father could only have bad news. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked, sliding down off her stool, fumbling to put the slides back into their case.

  ‘You must call him.’

  She looked about at the interrupted work.

  ‘We’ll tidy up. Go.’ He waved over a technician.

  She stuffed her headphones back into her ears, slung her bag over her shoulder and started dialling as she left the lab. Out in the wood-lined corridor she heard the familiar policeman’s telephone voice.

  ‘MacArthur.’

  ‘It’s me Dad, what’s up?’

  ‘Cally. Thanks.’ His voice shot up a register, as if he were choking.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Is something up with Mum?’

  There was just the sound of his breath. Then, ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘What?’ She held the phone away from her and frowned at it, then ripped the plugs from her ears and put the device to her head, as if holding it by her ear in the old-fashioned way would make it more likely to tell the truth, or somehow take her closer to her father.

  ‘Dad?’ she said. ‘Sorry. What are you saying?’

  ‘In the night. She just was gone, this morning, in bed. I couldn’t wake her.’

  She could hear him sobbing. She had never known him to cry. Men like him don’t, not in Aberdeenshire, not anywhere, really. Except of course they do, really, when their lifelong love is a corpse in the bed beside them.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I told you. She was just there. She died in her sleep.’

  The strips of the parquet floor stretched long and thin in converging lines.

  ‘Have you called an ambulance?’

  ‘Aye. There’s nothing they can do. They’ll do a post-mortem, find out, you know… But we know already.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was a brain tumour. We found out about a month ago.’

  Callis slid down the wall into a crouch.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ she said. Impotent I-want-my-mammy tears welled up into her eyes. She heard herself squeaking. ‘She never said. You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘She meant to. She was going to, love, she was. We didn’t think it’d be so sudden.’

  Callis felt the floor melting beneath her. ‘I’ll get the ferry.’ She surprised herself by how calm her voice sounded.

  ‘If you want to fly…?’

  ‘You know I don’t fly.’

  ‘No, I know. But if you want to, I’ll pay.’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t dream of it.’ She knew he couldn’t really afford it, not these days, and anyway she had staked her career on her knowledge of climate change. It was ideological. Apart from which, the ferry meant time to think. An aeroplane would be far too rushed. ‘I’ll get the boat tomorrow, if I can get a ticket. I should be home by Sunday night.’

  ‘I’ll pick you up. You’ll let me know when you get in.’

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘Aye, don’t worry about me. Just you get the ferry now.’

  She heaved herself to her feet, sliding her phone into the pocket of her white lab coat. She knew some of the other Institute staff joked about her uniform behind her back, as a British affectation, but she didn’t want acid on her clothes. Even though today she had only been identifying pollen grains from a soil sample, which carried no risk of splashes whatsoever, it was still lab work and it felt right to don the coat. It made her feel the part. That and the music – sacred choral works to block out the background chat. What part did it make her feel, exactly? Was it an act, this job? Surely not. It was Science.

  Suddenly, the walls of the corridor were too smooth, the shiny wood too polished. She pushed open the half-closed lab door and made her feet tread across to her workstation, where Yuri was peering at her slide rack and notes. She wondered if his coming in person with the message was just a ruse to scrutinise her work.

  He looked up as she approached and she saw his eyes, darting, and understood just how much her rejection of him had soured their friendship. Behind his face, painted with concern, the predatory question was still there in his eyes.

  She stopped a few feet away, shielding herself with her bag.

  He stepped forward into her space, the repellent waft of coconut shampoo forcing her on to her back foot.

  ‘My mother’s dead,’ she said, not believing how matter-of-fact it sounded. ‘I need to go home.’

  ‘Of course.’ His hands stretched towards her. Then, as if realising she had placed herself out of arm’s reach, he put his palms together and pointed his fingers towards her like a priest making a blessing. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She nodded. Paul, the technician, was already clearing her work into files. ‘I’ll get my things. I’ll be away until after the funeral. Maybe a week?’

  ‘I understand. Compassionate leave. It’s not a problem. Send me a message when you know your return.’

  She turned away from him, the hunger in his eyes setting her rigid, but as she walked towards the door, his voice stopped her.

  ‘Callis.’

  She looked over her shoulder. His hands had separated, opening out, as if beseeching her. ‘My sorrow to your father.’

  She nodded again, hitched her bag on to her shoulder and closed the door behind her.

  Early the next morning, six-ish, it was light in that bright April daylight-all-the-time Nordic way. A part of Callis was calm, and she had already begun to gather objects into a bag, packing things she knew she needed (clothes and toiletries, money and passport). But the rest of her was going into meltdown, grabbing things almost at random: books she had never even opened yet; the knitting she had abandoned two winters back, sick of the pink; three skirts for the funeral, none of which she had worn in ages. A teddy bear went in, then came back out again. Her camera kit likewise. Years ago she had mastered travelling light, but that day nothing that she had mastered mattered.

  Her phone was on the counter, filling the kitchen with chart music. The weather report was the usual saga of flooding. The news came on and the gunman told his tale. She stood with a bowl of muesli going soggy and started to cry, then put the cereal down and sat right there on the cold slab floor, like Alice, ready to drown in a sea of her own tears.

  The farmer on the radio told how he had shot the mother bear and captured the cub, and as an act of symbolism, a reminder to the Norwegian people of their roots as the tamers of the wild, he had taken the little animal into Trondheim, and at the foot of St Olav’s statue, he had taken his gun, rested it on brown fur and pulled the trigger.

  An onlooker described how he had heard a bang and realised it was a gunshot, and then he’d noticed a man standing shouting in the middle of the roundabout where Kongens gate meets Munkegata. He said blood and bits of the cub’s body were splattered all over the base of the patron saint’s statue and the farmer was bellowing about the right to protect oneself from predators.

  Callis wasn’t sure if she was crying for the bear cub, or for her mother, or for both. Perhaps with fury for not having been told about the tumour. Perhaps just for herself, alone in a hopeless place. She was leaving that morning anyway. She only wished she had been at home to say goodbye. She hadn’t said goodbye. She hadn’t said anything that really mattered. And now, barely a mile from where she worked, some bastard had shot a bear cub. For all she knew, perhaps it was the very one she’d seen only a couple of weeks ago.

  The radio said that scientists were reporting that the bear was possibly the last denning female in Norway. Callis hadn’t realised they were that rare. The announcer introduced a Professor Scazia from Romania, spokesperson for the International Conservation Union. ‘It is a tragic day for bears,’ a deep voice said in English.

  Some blockage had burst in her. Something happened on that kitchen floor she never could explain: as if, on hearing
of the death of the bear, a new life-force surged inside her.

  The deep radio voice continued. ‘The bear numbers in Norway have already been drastically reduced in recent years by Aujeszky’s disease, also known as pseudorabies. We cannot allow conservation efforts to be thwarted by the barbarity of a few individuals. We must not let this year be a year only of loss. I ask the people of Norway not to give up hope.’

  She picked herself up, packed a few last things: a pen, some jewellery, sensible shoes and waterproofs. She remembered her keys, then left. Halfway down the street, she turned, went back, got her oldest, most worn-out-with-love teddy bear and strapped it to her rucksack, apologising to it about the rain, then had to run to the station to catch the tram.

  That was the start of it. A quick tram journey down into Trondheim, a short walk to the terminal and twenty-four hours of ferry to chew over her life. She was tired and emotional and yes, had had a bit too much gin as well. She was glad to have a berth to herself. She could not have handled conversation.

  She got out the last letter from her mother thanking her for the birthday gift cookery book. She had written, as always, about the weather. Spring was coming late, the trees were slow to put on leaves. What gales! What frosts! The cherry blossom ruined!

  Perhaps she should have guessed how ill her mother was that night she had dreamed about her, after she had phoned not wanting anything in particular, just wondering if all was well. Now Callis realised she should have wondered in return, but instead she had kept her head too firmly in her pollen counts and the paper for the Warsaw conference on pine.

  Cancer. Her mother had been unable to say the word, could not commit it to paper, but perhaps she might have whispered it, or used some euphemistic phrase, if Callis had only called her back in time. At least it took her fast. Should she be thankful for that?

  She cried a bit more, then had another gin, and sat watching her life spool past in her mind like a box of cotton bobbins, spilled and tangling, unravelling into a drunken stupor.