‘No, I’m going to listen and learn.’
Malcolm nodded.
‘But first,’ I said. ‘We have the best part of forty-eight hours to chill out and watch Norway go past the window.’
I got up and joined him looking out, put an arm casually around his waist. We had hugged when I met him from the Aberdeen ferry but kept a platonic distance as we had checked in for the Hurtigruten and eaten dinner in a harbour restaurant waiting for departure time. Now in the privacy of the cabin I wondered what I had been thinking of to spend two nights locked in a cabin with a man I barely knew, or only knew as a primary school kid. Had been quite intimate with as a primary school kid, in fact, but never since, until that one, drunken, grief-stricken night. Perhaps for good reason. What if we didn’t get on?
He bent down and kissed me. It felt OK. He was quite tasty, really.
‘What’s the view like from the bed?’ he said.
‘Perfect. Do you want a drink?’
‘Not really. I was thinking about something more along the lines of marauding and pillaging.’
The boat rolled. We stumbled towards the bed, grabbing each other and giggling. Once we began, we discovered a hunger fired by almost two months of anticipation. Quite tasty became quite satisfying, then more substantial, then delicious. Our bodies rocked with the swell of the boat. We took our time.
While Malcolm slept, I thought of Petr, that burst of newness in the danger of the forest, my self laid bare. It felt like a dream. This was different. It was physical and fun.
Malcolm and I revelled in each other, talking, telling, peeling off layers of stories to reveal ever more of ourselves. We moved from familiar to intimate. We laughed, kissed, played, bathed and slept as a single body. We swayed hand-in-hand for meals on trays in the ship’s cafeteria and stood wrapped around each other out on deck. We even indulged in the outdoor jacuzzi, lying giggling in the bubbles, watching fulmars and black-backed gulls wheel and soar in the wake and sea eagles beam across the ship like pirates.
The beer was bland and expensive and our bodies more intoxicating. We frequently found ourselves back in our cabin, indulging in our private view.
On the second night he told me he loved me. The next morning I said I loved him, too.
At Harstad we found it hard to stand on solid earth and wobbled our way to the Clarion Hotel Arcturus and a somewhat less luxurious room than we had grown used to.
‘No fluffy bath robe,’ I grumbled as I peered out over the harbour with its cluster of brightly painted wooden houses, pleasure yachts and fishing boats at anchor. A grey seal bobbed curious, circular ripples in the still water, and a raft of eider ducks made letter patterns as the outsized ferry boat honked its horn and disappeared around the headland.
The phone rang. ‘Dr MacArthur?’
‘Yes.’
‘Reception here. Anders Pederson is waiting in the lobby.’
‘I’ll be right down.’ The fun was over.
I returned to the hotel six hours later, bruised by two long meetings with pro-bear and anti-bear campaigners and a public presentation at which I had been ritually whipped and beaten with questions from an odd mix of fishermen, shopkeepers and retired urban executives, before being given a large bunch of flowers, a bottle of aquavit barely big enough for a single shot, a hand-carved wooden bowl and a standing ovation.
Malcolm had spent the day alone and though he’d attended the public meeting he had understood little of the rapid-fire exchanges in Norwegian between irate members of the audience.
‘I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but they sure feel strongly about it all,’ he said, bringing drinks from the bar to a table with a view out across the harbour and the black skerries beyond.
‘They seemed to like you, anyway,’ he grinned, pointing to the flowers. ‘A few too many to wear in your hair at the festival. Not sure I can fit them in my tent.’
I laughed for the first time in hours. ‘Thanks. God that was tough.’ I felt my shoulders unclench. ‘I never would have expected people to get so upset by this. It really brings out the testosterone in some of these blokes.’ I shuddered at the memory of one man standing in the town hall, red-faced, his right arm pointing at me like a gun, poking his finger like a bayonet, shouting, ‘You have no respect for us, for our livelihoods, for our safety, for the safety of our children.’
‘You know the guy in the hall, the furious one, the one in the red-checked shirt?’
Malcolm nodded.
‘He was right on one count.’
‘What was that?’
‘Roughly translated: fuck off home and see what Scottish farmers say to releasing fucking bears in their fucking villages.’
‘They’d probably say, fuck off back to Norway.’
‘You don’t think they might say, “Oh good, enhanced biodiversity will bring economic opportunities for us to diversify into ecotourism,” or something like that?’
‘Nope.’
‘Ah well, better stick to Norway for the time being, eh? At least here I only understand half the swear words.’
‘And you get scenic boat rides between jobs.’
‘True.’
‘If you release bears on an island like this, will they swim over to the mainland?’
‘Yes, we hope so.’
‘Ah. No chance keeping them on the Isle of Rum or somewhere, then?’
‘Not a chance. They’d do great at triathlons except they don’t ride bikes very well.’
‘Ha ha.’
I yawned. ‘Knackered.’
‘I see that. Bed time.’
‘Goody.’
‘Not that knackered, then?’
‘Nope.’
Tromsø’s bear debate was a bit less defensive but they were further removed from any of the proposed release sites and the town was packed full of ecotourism businesses and naturalists. I was given an exquisitely carved wooden bear and fox. I had been told it was from a local folk story about how the wily fox tricked the bear into ice-fishing with its tail, which froze off, thus leaving bears ever since with nothing more than stumps.
I joined Malcolm for dinner after the meeting, considerably more cheerful than the previous night.
‘That one went a bitty better,’ I said. ‘And now I’m off scot-free for three whole days. Time to go wild at the festival.’
We had one more night of expenses-paid luxury in the Rica Ishavshotel looking out across to the world’s most northerly cathedral. Next morning we stashed all our good gear in the left luggage room and light-packed it over the bridge and out of town to the world’s most northerly music festival. We set up the tent among an encampment on a field, thankfully not yet a mud bath, and prepared to party.
While southern Norway was flooding, the north, unusually hot for the time of year, was having perfect festival weather. We stripped to shorts, vests, sandals, shades, and smothered each other in suncream, then stripped some more. Eventually we peeled our sweaty bodies back out of the tent and headed out towards the music. We danced madly to the Zen Grasshoppers and collapsed with a beer when some Swedish band we had never heard of came on.
We wandered off along a line of stalls for every environmental organisation imaginable, from eco-warrior bands like Earth First to WWF’s global ‘Panda’ brand. I gazed lovingly at willow baskets made by the local Tromsø community woodcraft association and Malcolm seemed to be seriously considering buying a T-shirt from the local branch of the farmers’ union with a horned helmet logo and the words ‘Farmers are Hard’. I told him it would be like having a T-shirt saying ‘Farmers are Trying’, but that seemed to make him more rather than less keen. Then I heard the sound of a ram’s horn: a weird, high-pitched wailing, like a voice from a previous millennium, a sound hand grasping down the fjord from the mountains, seeking help.
‘Utla!’ I grabbed Malcolm by the hand. ‘Come on, it’s Utla.’
‘What are you on about? What the hell’s “Utla”?’
‘Listen.’
<
br /> That call again, the call of a hollowed-out, curled horn of a mountain sheep. ‘It’s Utla, they’re a bunch of old Norwegian hippies, but they’re great, you’ll love them.’
I dragged him away from the farmers’ stall, but not before he’d completed his transaction. He tore off his sweaty vest and stuffed it in his pocket, pulling on his new ‘Farmers are Hard’ shirt as we headed for the main stage.
‘I hope you don’t regret that,’ I said, though he did look good in it, bright white and lean against his harvest muscle tan.
A thumping drum kicked up behind the horn. I tugged his hand and ran. We kept moving forward, stomping as we hit the loose outskirts of the crowd. I fell into step with him and we shifted into a single unit, his arm around my shoulder, mine around his waist, pushing inwards until we reached the throng. Even then, I wanted to get closer to the stage. The horn wailed and warbled. The drum pumped a perfect heartbeat.
‘It’s pretty weird,’ he said in my ear.
‘Wait, they’ve not started up. It’s Viking music.’
I stopped pushing and then Håkon Høgemo started up a tune on his fiddle and Malcolm squeezed me. ‘You never said it was fiddle music. Weird fiddle.’
‘Hardanger.’
‘Sounds like a Shetland tune.’
‘Now you know where the Shetlanders got it from.’
‘Let’s get closer.’
He stood behind me and we started weaving forwards through the crowd. We got close enough to see Terge Isungset still banging on his biggest drum, its pounding eerie with the mourning fiddle sound. Then the stringed instrument stopped abruptly and there was an echoing silence, in which someone in the crowd whistled. Then all hell broke loose with a romping melody on Karl Seglem’s sax, backed by a complex syncopation of percussion and thick chord harmonies on the big Hardanger fiddle.
Malcolm paused. I turned back to him. His mouth was open, a wide grin forming. We shifted our forward pursuit into a skipping, swaying lilt. This was hoedown farmer music, harvest dancing music, passionate rural land music. They reached the climax and stopped, then flew into a reel, another that could easily have been from Shetland. We danced like we had in primary school, laughing as we did so.
‘Thank you, Mrs Mackay!’
‘Aye!’
And then, stop. Cheers. Roars. Silence from the band. A weird creaking, as if from a glacier. Then an impossible sound of a waterfall, a trickling stream, a waterfall again, a gushing river, then back to the trickling stream. Isungset was conjuring sound from what was apparently just a random bundle of sticks, one of many of his strange collection of forest instruments. The other players made bird songs, weird sounds from the hills, ice creaking and rocks groaning, and then they launched into a springlike song.
We bounced and birled. We were nearly at the front. I was exhilarated both by how brilliant Utla were and by how much Malcolm was loving them, too. We grinned and hugged in the crush, not losing each other, no question of that, sharing the heat, the beat, the passion, the fashion, the fun, the sun, the music… and there was Tanka, jumping like an idiot just in front of us.
‘Tanka!’ I yelled. No way he could hear me, but Païvi did. She and I spotted each other at the same moment. Païvi grinned and poked Tanka. He turned. I elbowed forwards. ‘Hey Tanka! Hey Païvi!’
‘Hey!’ Tanka bawled. ‘Wild!’ No need or possibility of conversation.
‘Favourite!’
‘Yeah.’
Malcolm looked Tanka up and down. I saw Tanka check the T-shirt. Wait for it, I thought.
We jumped about and sweated more than seemed humanly possible in an hour. We shouted ourselves hoarse. We danced and danced. And sadly, it was, despite encores, eventually, reluctantly, jubilantly, over.
‘Fucking magic.’ Malcolm was blown away. ‘How come they’re not massive in Scotland?’ He was sweaty and beaming.
‘Beats me,’ I said. ‘Best band in Norway, in my view.’
‘They don’t need to get better than that. They’re amazing. That drummer guy, how many arms has he got?’
‘Not to mention the fiddle.’ Païvi was there.
‘Exactly. Jimi Hendrix reincarnated, that’s what I think.’ Tanka slapped me around the shoulder.
‘With some sort of mad Viking Miles Davis thrown in for good measure,’ Malcolm grinned at Tanka. ‘Who’s the guerrilla?’
‘Who’s the farmer?’ Tanka asked in return.
They both looked at me. They were both right. Tanka was in camouflage gear, tall, scrawny, hair spiked, ears, nose and eyebrows all sporting hardware. Malcolm was fresh off a haystack, sun-drenched brawn in rugby shorts and trainers, and the T-shirt didn’t help. I looked at Païvi. We laughed.
‘Tanka, this is Malcolm, the sexiest farmer in Scotland, and this is Païvi and Tanka, Finnish eco-warriors.’
‘Hey.’
‘Hey.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘You Scots are so polite.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s a national custom. Good to see you guys. Beers, food, party!’
We partied, ate and drank copiously. We danced more. Then Tanka said, ‘It’s too hot. We’re going back to our tent, in forest, you want to come?’
‘Sure.’ I looked at Malcolm. ‘Fancy cooling off?’
‘Totally. It’s blistering out here.’
We followed Tanka and Païvi out of the festival compound and into the forest behind.
‘How’d you wangle this?’ Malcolm asked. ‘We tried coming up this way and got sent straight back to camp in the field.’
‘A friend of ours is running security out here. It’s no problem.’
Malcolm nodded. He looked impressed.
They were camped on a little rise in the woods, with as much of a view as it’s possible to get in dense birchwood. I sat with my back up against Malcolm, who leaned against an old spruce tree. The throb of the festival was just below us, the cheers of the crowd like a motorway roar. The cool of the forest was bliss. Just below us was a white van with Taiga Tunes emblazoned on the side. Païvi skipped down to the vehicle, opened up the back door and rummaged among stacks of musical equipment including two huge speakers. She opened up the bottom of one speaker and crawled inside it, then emerged with a growl and grinned in that elfish way of hers.
‘The woofers that only go woof if you bring a dog,’ Tanka said.
Païvi returned with incense to keep the mosquitoes and midges at bay.
‘Are you guys in a band or something?’ said Malcolm.
‘Yeah, Taiga Tunes, it’s our band. That’s our band car,’ said Tanka.
‘Truck,’ Païvi corrected. ‘Two of the others could not be here this weekend so we’re just audience for a change.’
Tanka was busying himself with a brew over a Trangia stove.
‘What’s that?’ Malcolm said.
‘Forest food,’ grinned Tanka. ‘Magic.’ He wiggled his fingertips.
‘Count me out,’ Malcolm deadpanned.
‘How about you?’ Tanka looked at me.
‘I’m a government official, remember?’
‘So what? You’re not working. You need to relax!’ Païvi said.
‘True, especially after what I’ve been through recently. I’ll be glad if I’m never shouted at by anyone ever again for consulting with them, not to mention having to find the precise source for every single grain of pollen I’ve ever looked at down a microscope.’
‘Time to check out of the race and party!’ Païvi did a little jig.
I couldn’t help but melt. I so wanted to play with these guys. I wasn’t sure why, I barely knew them, but they made me happy. ‘Go on then, I’m up for a little trip,’ I said. ‘Not too strong now, it’s been a while since I had mushies.’
Malcolm shot me a concerned look.
‘Have you ever?’ I asked him.
He nodded. ‘Tons as a teenager. Never again. I vowed. Never again.’
‘Do you mind if I do?’
‘Yo
u go ahead. You’re your own woman. I’m just not up for it any more.’
‘Bad trip?’ Tanka asked as if he’d not understood.
‘Yeah, man. Bad trip. Count me out. I’m cool, don’t worry about me.’
‘I’m not worried about anything.’
Païvi and I laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’ asked Malcolm.
‘It’s an Utla song,’ I said.
Tanka hummed, pouring his brew into three tin cups. We sipped and screwed our faces up as we swallowed, then laughed again. And again. And again.
Later – who knows how much later as time had ceased to function as normal – we strolled down to the festival zone. Malcolm headed off to buy beer. I wandered among jewellery, funky clothes and smoking paraphernalia. I became deeply absorbed in the patterns on a display of silk scarves, stroking them until the stallholder asked me to leave them alone if I wasn’t buying. I had begun to feel lost and was wondering where everyone else had gone, when Païvi appeared, as if from nowhere, holding a string on the end of which was a big balloon in the shape of a bear’s head. She soon spotted Malcolm and had me giggling once more.
We watched a couple of bands then, as night fell, returned to the safety of the woods where Tanka had gathered wood and lit a fire. Païvi tied the bear balloon to a branch of a nearby tree so the rest of the bear appeared to be hidden behind the trunk. She related an adventure she had had when a bear had raided the food store on a camping trip, climbing up to a high branch where they’d stashed their food bag. Tanka followed with a tale of a bear that learned to open the doors of 4x4s.
‘We should have left some mushrooms,’ said Païvi. ‘I was told by a Cree leader you should always leave some food out for the bears to stop them needing to raid to get their share.’
‘There are no bears here,’ I reminded her.
‘But they’re coming back, and we should remember how to behave towards them, we should prepare.’
‘Prepare for bears!’ Tanka said. It was the perfect toast. He, Païvi and I thunked our cans together, chortling, then put them down. I wasn’t really interested in drinking. Malcolm emptied his can and popped another one open, drinking in a determined manner while the three of us tranced out to the flames.
Bear Witness Page 18
