The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  Steinar and I are also expecting to camp, so he takes me through the guns and ammo in order to avoid any similar mishaps. There are four signal pistols, which can fire flares, two handguns in holsters and two cans of pepper spray. We will also take a rifle.

  ‘Take care with the spray,’ he says. ‘If it goes in your face you’ll be really sick, in bed for two days.’

  He tells me that the guns will always be loaded because it will be too late to start fumbling for ammunition if a bear appears nearby: ‘In Longyearbyen there’s a polar bear incident about once every ten years, but five times a year people fire bullets by mistake. Film crews worry me the most because I think one day someone will pick up a gun to pose for a photo and shoot the photographer. Guns are more dangerous than bears.’

  We are going to a place called Mushamna, where there are two cabins close to a huge colony of Arctic terns. A few weeks ago a woman called Linda arrived to spend a year in one of these cabins. After talking to her on the radio Steinar has changed his mind about camping. Linda says that a large number of bears have been visiting her cabin – there were three yesterday – so Steinar is hoping we might be allowed to stay in the second cabin instead.

  A pan of noodles is bubbling on the gas stove. It is ten at night and we have just finished making the cabin habitable. It is almost filled by the single bed we’ve built from wooden slats, bales of straw (intended as bedding for Linda’s dogs) and our equipment cases. The tiny window is too narrow to admit more than a bear’s head but the walls are flimsy and so is the door. When it’s closed, bent nails stick through the wood like claws. For perhaps seventy years, summer and winter, this hut was home to a succession of fur trappers. They must have been hardy people and very familiar with bears. A hundred metres away is Linda’s sturdier cabin, built more recently using driftwood logs from Russia, which wash up on the beach. Beside it there are two kennels, an outhouse and a tall A-frame.

  Steinar has kindly chosen the first night-watch and once the noodles are done I’m going to turn in. He says he is happy, with a beer cooling in the stream, his cigarettes and coffee, a book and a view of the sun turning the northern sky to gold. He will wake me if a bear comes or when he can’t stay awake any longer. We are doing this, not just because the hut is too small for us both to fit inside, but because Linda was right about the bears: their tracks are everywhere. Earlier we followed footprints through the snow to where one of them had slid down a slope on its belly, giving a leisurely push on one side then the other, each time leaving the marks of five claws. Through the binoculars we followed the prints around the bay until they climbed an apparently sheer cliff and meandered to a halt, where the bear himself lay curled up. Young males like this one are particularly untrustworthy. Steinar says they have recently left their mothers and he describes them as spoiled, still expecting every meal to be provided: ‘They are insecure and they’ll have a go at anything.’

  It is obvious why so many bears are coming to the cabin. Linda feeds her dogs with seal meat, which she stores high on the A-frame. Its smell must carry for miles and the bears find it irresistible. Even though it is out of reach, they watch the meat store closely and they are clever enough to exploit any lapse. Jason told us earlier about a bear that had watched him all morning as he carried seal carcasses up a ladder to a similar store. When he stopped for a rest, the bear noticed that the ladder was still there and climbed it without hesitation. It knocked some meat down, then tried several times to descend the ladder head first, before realising it would be easier backwards. It’s this flexibility that makes bears successful as well as dangerous.

  As I fall asleep in the hut I’m aware that something is missing. We have not yet searched for the Arctic terns but their colonies are always noisy places and I cannot hear the cacophony of their voices. We will have to look into it in the morning.

  Steinar wakes me at six. It is cold and the sky is veiled. He points out that the bear in the distance has not moved. It is lying flat on its chest, watching us. He says they sometimes make the child’s mistake of hiding their heads but leaving their backsides showing. This one blends in so well with the snow and the stony ground that it would be easy to walk almost on top of it.

  ‘Remember – the bear that gets you is not the one you’ve seen,’ he tells me, and goes inside to ‘start the machinery’. Within minutes the wall at my back is vibrating in time with his snores. The hut blocks the view inland, so I walk round it, checking that there are no bears in that direction. Linda’s dogs are asleep outside their kennels. They should bark if a bear approaches, so I can safely look the other way.

  A single Arctic tern flies over. Sterna paradisea is his formal name, the paradise tern, and with good reason. He flies with slow wingbeats, exaggerating his shape and showing off his tail’s gorgeous streamers, which seem as long as knitting needles. He points his blood-red bill at the ground and his black cap glistens. A female takes off and flies close behind until he lands and droops his wings, crooked at the wrist. He points his tail skyward and struts on legs that are barely more than landing gear. I’ve probably just watched him walk as far as he will ever need to. He weighs about as much as a hamster, but he’s flown from the Antarctic to be here and three months from now he will make the same journey in reverse. The latest research shows that, in their lifetimes, some Arctic terns will fly the equivalent of three times to the moon and back. The pair take off and cross a snow patch where their shadows are banished by the rebounding light: ice-birds gleaming against the sky. But where are the rest of them? When Steinar was here at this time last year he could not leave the shore without being hit by terns defending their nests. This year there is still snow on the beach and the late spring seems to have forced most of the terns to move elsewhere.

  In the Arctic, conditions change so much from one year to the next that the risk of failure is very high, for birds and for people too. Arctic terns live a long time, so they can offset occasional bumper years against several bad breeding seasons, but it is much more of a gamble if you have to stake everything on one attempt, like the balloonist Andrée, or us.

  To keep myself awake I walk along the beach, holstered like a gunslinger and feeling ridiculous. Steinar has left the rifle propped against the wall. I have not dared to ask him whether he has ever had to shoot a bear, in case the answer is yes.

  On the sea, two red-throated divers yowl like cats and, where a ridge cuts off my view inland, a little face pops up as if it’s spring-loaded. It is the colour of coffee and cream, heart-shaped with copper eyes and a black button nose. It’s an Arctic fox: all nerves and curiosity. It ducks behind the ridge and reappears closer. The American writer Barry Lopez described one, ‘tapping the air all over with its nose’, and this fox does that now, scenting me and deciding whether to approach or flee. A pair of terns dive to peck its ears. It ignores them, searches left and right, then crouches to paddle at something with its paws, and quickly eats one of this year’s few eggs. The terns are in a frenzy, but there is little they can do on their own. A busy colony in full cry would be a different matter. The fox finishes its meal and bounds away like a hare.

  It’s a long time before I notice the bear and then the surprise is like a jolt. Shimmering air blends her shape into the stones, but she is definitely coming this way. Steinar leaves the hut before I can call and I am grateful to have him standing by me as I film. The bear leaves the water’s edge and turns towards us. There is something fascinating about the way she lifts and places her paws, folding each one below her belly while it travels, then flicking it at the last moment to place it deftly on the ground. Around each one there’s a fringe of fur, muffling the sound of her feet on the pebbles. She sticks out a dark tongue, as if she’s tasting the air, coming closer all the time. Through the camera I can now fill the frame with her head. She is not looking directly at us, but I can see her eyes turning. They are small and brown. She is fifteen metres away, crossing the stream where Steinar cooled his beer, the same stream I am standing
in, filming her feet scattering spray: a polar bear splashing through water, an image of the Arctic summer.

  She is so close that I can see her whiskers catching the light, as the fur does on her long throat when she sniffs the air. From the corner of my eye I see Steinar braced like a policeman in the movies. He is cocking a gun. She is far inside the safe distance we were shown on the rifle range, the distance at which we were supposed to open fire to guarantee a kill, but the training course was about aggressive bears: bears that have not responded to flares, bears that are charging at us. Steinar has read her body language and he is aiming a flare pistol, not his revolver. He knows that she wants to reach the A-frame with its delicious smell of seal. She passes without a backward glance.

  The dogs bark. The door of the larger cabin opens and Linda hurries out with her rifle on her back. She too is holding a flare launcher. She aims it above the A-frame and fires. There is a loud explosion and a puff of smoke against the sky. The bear scrambles wildly for a grip on the stones, sprints to the shore and swims away. It is the sixteenth time Linda has had to scare a bear away from her cabin, and now she has to coax her dogs from their kennels. They hate the bangs too.

  When the bear has gone, Linda asks us to help her fish. Laying her rifle on the beach, she wades into the water and I can see why she has been reluctant to do this on her own. It would be a compromising position to be found in by a bear. She pays out a net and fixes it to a buoy offshore. An hour later she pulls the net in and untangles a beautiful Arctic charr, a fish like a salmon but with a red belly and fins edged in white. Linda invites us to dinner.

  We find her standing by the window of the kitchen-cum-living room, making fish cakes and watching three Arctic foxes chasing each other across the beach. On the snow bank in the distance is the pale smudge of the sleeping bear. This is one of several cabins owned by Svalbard’s governor and loaned to people on the condition that they live as traditional a life as possible, which includes hunting for food and trapping foxes for their fur. Norway’s claim to these islands is contested by Russia, and in future it may be necessary to prove that Svalbard has long been occupied by Norwegians who have lived off the land. The benefit is that a few lucky, self-reliant people like Linda can borrow a cabin in the high Arctic for a year. In the summer at least, life here is not as tough as I was expecting: she offers us wine and apologises that she has no dill, although the fish cakes are delicious without it. The winter will be a different matter.

  Linda tells us that last year a man was living here with his teenage sons when they had an accident. The boys set out on a three-day trip by dog sled, to visit a trapper in a cabin in the neighbouring fjord. Their dogs chased a bear onto thin ice and both sledges broke through: the boys found themselves swimming. They managed to climb out and searched for their emergency beacon to call for help, only to realise that they had packed it on one of the sledges. One of them had to dive back in to retrieve the beacon and by now both were in desperate need of shelter and warmth. By luck the accident had happened close to an unoccupied cabin where they had spent the previous night. They made it back inside and barely managed to start a fire with their frozen fingers. The rescue helicopter picked them up an hour or two later.

  ‘The last thing everyone does before they leave a cabin is to lay logs in the stove and put matches beside them,’ says Steinar. ‘It’s such a simple thing but it has saved many lives.’

  To survive here for a year, Linda will need to know all these tricks and more. Her bookshelf occupies the length of one wall: medicine sits alongside polar history, dog diseases beside cookery books. She talks about the year ahead: how the social life will soon fade and that from September until Christmas she expects no visitors. She worries that some of the bears are becoming used to her flares, while her dogs are doing the opposite, bolting inside when they see a bear, in case Linda makes more frightening bangs. She and Steinar discuss the case of a man who shot a bear to protect his dogs. Svalbard has clear rules about this: it is only legal to kill a bear if it is threatening a person’s life, but the man argued that, by killing his sled dogs in winter, that’s exactly what the bear was doing. With her own dogs outside the cabin and the winter approaching, these are vital concerns. As we leave to go back to our vigil, Linda says she doesn’t expect to be lonely through the dark months to come. Most of all, she says, she is looking forward to having time.

  It is my turn to be on watch through the night and I sit outside the hut, realising that I am beginning to grasp what it means to be a polar bear: it is normal for them to walk 100km (60 miles) between meals, or to swim twice as far in water that, even in the summer, might never reach 6°C (43°F). It is normal too for the females to fast for six months, while they give birth and suckle their cubs in dens under the snow. They can dive ten metres to the seabed, run as fast as a horse and crush a seal’s skull with a single blow, then climb to the top of Svalbard’s highest mountain, just to see what’s there. Afterwards they might sleep for a week. No other animal on Earth can do all these things and few are so resourceful. It’s clear, though, that with hardly any terns nesting, we will have to look elsewhere if we are going to film hungry polar bears hunting birds.

  The night passes quietly, no bears visit and in the morning we pile our equipment cases on the shore and wait for the Havsel to pick us up. The sound of her engine throbs through the fog. There’s the usual flurry of loading, of hurried goodbyes, and we climb into the inflatable boat. When I look back, Linda is halfway to her cabin: a small upright figure with her dogs at her side. I wonder at her resilience and that of the trappers before her, who spent their winters in the little hut with bears at the door and only their dogs to help them. I admire the quiet confidence that comes with solving your own problems, using skills acquired through decades of experience rather than on training courses: lessons learned as much from failure as success. Most of us who have specialised as cameramen, accountants or whatever else, have lost the chance to be as self-reliant as Linda or Steinar. Our ancestors had their kinds of skills and it’s our loss that most of us do not.

  As the Havsel leaves the fjord I wonder what it will be like here in a few months’ time, when the terns have flown south and it is pitch dark at noon. Then Linda’s only link to the outside world will be the satellite phone she uses to collect emails. To avoid spam messages she has asked her friends to include a password in the subject line, so each email she receives will be titled ‘sol’: the sun.

  Meanwhile, we have bears and nesting birds to find. Steinar says we are going to one of the most impressive bird colonies in the Arctic.

  AN UPDATE ON SVALBARD’S BEARS

  Svalbard’s polar bears come ashore from a large area of the Barents Sea, which surrounds the islands. For a century, hunters killed 300 bears here every year. Their numbers have been recovering since the hunting stopped forty years ago and there are now about 3,000 bears in the Barents Sea population, but their boom times may be coming to an end: some are noticeably thin, perhaps because they are competing with each other for food, and in the south of Svalbard, female bears have fewer surviving cubs in years with less ice. The same effect has been seen in the Beaufort Sea in Alaska. There, in 2005 (a year when the sea ice reached a record low) a fifth of the female bears could find no food and polar bears were seen hunting and eating each other for the first time. In another low-ice year, one collared bear in Alaska swam almost 700km (435 miles) in nine days, searching for ice and seals to hunt. Doing so cost her a quarter of her weight and her cub’s life. As climate change melts the ice more polar bears will face these risks. Being forced to spend more time ashore is also likely to bring them into closer contact with people.

  For now, many of Svalbard’s bears opt to live on the sea ice all year, while fewer ‘fjord bears’, like the first one we filmed, stay close to the islands. Linda became very familiar with some of these during her year in the cabin at Mushamna, especially the ones attracted to her store of seal meat. It was catch 22: she needed her dogs to
protect her but their food was irresistibly attractive to bears.

  Her blog contains a fascinating account of her year. Early on she wrote, ‘I enjoy the beauty of the changing light. I know why I am here when I see white mountains and clear sky, with stars and a glimpse of the aurora. It is nothing but beautiful,’ but by mid October the sun had set for the last time and it would not rise again until the following March. Then the first determined bears came calling in the dark. She recounts that at times there were too many for her to leave the cabin unattended.

  ‘I made good use of the little window in the door. I got a glimpse of the back of the bear standing by the stair and was happy for a solid door! I chased him but did not dare to follow him further away.’ She found relief in the full moon, which seemed incredibly bright in that snowy place.

  ‘I keep wondering who turned the light on. The mountains are shining. It’s like a fairytale landscape when the soft light gives shadows to sea cliffs covered by ice and snow.’

  Just before Christmas the governor of Svalbard sent a helicopter to deliver presents: fresh fruit, mail (including a small Christmas tree) and a companion who would stay for the next month or so. There were still bears to chase away (on around 300 occasions in total) but there was also time to decorate the tree and do country dances. On Christmas Day, looking forward to the light returning, she wrote, ‘For now the star on top of the tree is our sun.’