The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

After the excitement of the avalanche, life on the cliff returns to normal. The only mammals we see are Arctic foxes, scavenging lost eggs and dead guillemots and after several more nights it is clear that the sequence of polar bears struggling to find food in the summer, which Miles so hopes we will film, has eluded us again.

  Filming through the night makes planning more difficult because Bjørne is awake in the daytime, so ‘tomorrow’ means something different to each of us. Mateo, Ted and I have lost track of time to such an extent that we’re making weekday forecasts: ‘Today there is a strong chance of a Sunday, although patches of Saturday might persist in the north, with a possibility of Monday or even Tuesday later.’

  Mateo grew up in the back of his parents’ Land Rover, being driven around Africa and Asia, where his father painted pictures of the local people. Ted was an artist too, then a newspaper photographer in London. He covered everything from Pavarotti singing in Hyde Park to riots and fraud trials, but he is a gentle person who grew tired of being unwelcome on so many doorsteps, and he switched to filming wildlife. He drops the strangest stories into our conversations: ‘I fell into a sewer once, when I was walking down a street in Pakistan, straight in. Plop!’ Or: ‘Did I tell you about when I went to film lions and was bitten by a mouse?’

  Meanwhile, the Havsel is heading north, following the edge of an ice cap as large as Lapland: this section stretches for around 180km (110 miles) and everywhere the melting snow has crowned the ice edge with hundreds of waterfalls. Some are large rivers, gushing from holes the size of cars, but most are delicate cascades. We cruise below the cliffs as the midnight sun gilds the falling water, projecting its shadows onto the pale screen of the ice. At the foot of the cliffs Steinar sees a swimming bear. Ted and the others launch the Buster and spend half an hour shadowing him, while I film the cliffs and waterfalls from the Havsel’s deck. The stabilised lens shows the small spray of water blown by the bear with every out-breath. The camera seems to be flying alongside him and when Ted slowly zooms out, to show the meltwater cascading from the ice cap behind the swimming bear, it is as powerful an image of the Arctic in summertime as Miles could have wished for.

  Afterwards the bear climbs onto a sloping iceberg, struggling to grip its smooth surface, and lies down awkwardly. He might as well be resting on glass. He shuts his eyes and shivers. Bears are usually so well insulated by their layers of fat that they can remain comfortable for days in water that would kill a person in minutes, yet this bear is cold and tired. We have no idea how far he’s swum but the ice cliffs are sheer and the nearest pack ice is far away. The intimacy of Ted’s pictures reveals that life in the Arctic can be very hard when there is little ice, even for an animal as capable as a polar bear.

  Bjørne has refilled Havsel’s fresh-water tanks and for the time being we are allowed more than one shower a week, so everyone smells unusually sweet as we wait on deck for an eclipse of the sun. It’s the first day of August and this will be the only darkness we have seen since we arrived. We wonder whether polar bears lie down during eclipses, as domestic animals sometimes do. Miles hands out dark glasses so we can look directly at the sun. After the many nights we have spent searching, he is suspicious that his cameramen might also be tempted to lie down in the darkness. The sun is gradually shaved to a crescent but it dims as little as if a cloud had passed. There are no bears in sight, sleeping or otherwise. Several fulmars carry on flying unconcernedly around the boat and the cameramen stay awake too.

  We travel on and there is not a breath of wind. New land appears on the horizon: an island hidden by the Earth’s curvature, rising into view. Its snow patches stretch into white chimneys and its hills become undercut at stem and stern, like tea-clippers. A glacier turns into an hour-glass, pinched at the waist, and in time the top floats free to hover above the water. Spitsbergen grows buttes and mesas to rival Monument Valley and the distant pack ice smears into a white stucco city from which skyscrapers climb, while the sea builds dark walls about their feet. It’s a mirage called the Fata Morgana, caused by the still air settling into layers of different temperature. Explorers struggling towards the pole discovered to their cost that its fairy islands would melt and re-form elsewhere, like the bears’ world of ice and water.

  At night the sea is glassy and we launch two boats so Steinar, Mateo and I can look for bears while Ted films icebergs. He finds one striped blue and white, like a boiled sweet. Others have turned turtle and show their dirty undersides, studded with stones picked up by the glaciers on their way to the sea. As the ice melts they will fall and embed themselves in the seabed. Drop-stones like these are found wherever icebergs have drifted, some as far south as Portugal at the height of the last ice age. The oldest bergs become tinkling fretworks of glass and we leave Ted happily gliding around one of these, where three abstract shapes, like sculpted torsos, are all that show above the surface. He calls them his Henry Moores.

  The coast is patterned like a Dalmatian, without a single leaf to interrupt its simplicity. Walruses dive in the shallows, blowing spray. They are busy feeding, angling their backs abruptly as they plunge. Fulmars paddle around them, dipping for food, then pattering into flight as we pass, kissing their own reflections as they glide away. A bear paces along the water’s edge, watching us but taking his time. The sun is exactly behind him, lighting a single incandescent line, which defines his head and flank against the blackness of a cliff. He decides to climb, engaging all his claws, and crests the rise as though it is no effort at all: a white bear cut out of black rock. Bands of light roll towards him like muscles moving within the cliff. He lies down to see what we will do and we drift offshore, wondering the same thing.

  I look over the side of the boat where the sea’s surface is freezing and silver shapes glint there, as elaborate as ferns or ostrich plumes. The world’s underlying physics is more obvious in the Arctic, where crystals are endlessly made and remade, but never quite the same. The boat fractures the ice-feathers and they sink, spinning into the darkness.

  Bears can cross this boundary between liquid and solid more easily than any other animal, swimming through the skin of ice while crystallising water crackles in their ears. Just as the lives of wolves are defined by the way they live in packs, and those of cats by their solitary stealth, polar bears, above all, are the animals that search most relentlessly. It is this place that has made them so, which in a sense has caused them to be. They personify the Arctic’s austerity, with its long, cold intervals between astonishing outbursts of life. To know these bears is to know the place that made them.

  The sun is higher now. We have been out all night and the bear is still watching us, but it has chosen a hard place to approach and Steinar is not keen to try. He will explain why later.

  On the way back to the ship a cloud of Arctic terns rises from an island, calling ‘kria!’ High above them are two points of light: a courting pair, spiralling around each other. The water by the boat is as smooth as polished stone and in its darkness all I can see are the bright points of the circling terns.

  Bjørne meets us, leaning on the Havsel’s rail: ‘You can live long on the memory of a night like this.’

  Steinar says that for years he worked as an expedition leader, taking visitors around Svalbard by ship and using inflatable boats to land on remote shores. On one occasion a group of people in his care were attacked, without warning, by a bear. The situation was quite like today’s, with the bear above the group, which was hemmed in between the shore and a cliff. Steinar fired twelve flares but the bear ignored them and kept coming until, four metres away, he shot it dead.

  Like many of Svalbard’s bears, it had been darted and measured by biologists some years before. Their records showed that it was twenty-seven years old. By the time it died it had lost most of its teeth and half its weight: it was starving. The police watched a video taken by one of the tourists and told Steinar they had never seen so clear a case of the need to shoot a bear in order to protect lives, but he still agonises ov
er it: ‘I don’t ever want to do that again.’

  At the edge of the pack ice we find two walruses resting on a floe. Bjørne says he once spoke to a man who came here in the 1930s, when it was legal to hunt them. In some years only half the hunters survived the season. The alarmed walruses attacked their boats in herds, knocking the men into the sea and dragging them under. It sounds like a tall tale, they are just large seals after all, but we take him seriously and approach them slowly in the Buster. As we come closer their size becomes apparent. They are about three metres (10ft) long, muddy brown and wrinkled, lying face to face with their hind flippers entwined to keep warm, which evidently matters to them more than hygiene. Their smell is eye-watering, like blocked drains in a fish market. Mateo says, ‘They must have an amazingly strong urge to reproduce.’

  Each walrus has two tusks like curved daggers, the colour of sun-bleached wood. One dozes with its tusk points resting on the ice, propping up its head. They have blunt whiskers as thick as coat hangers to feel for shellfish, which they suck from their shells. Bjørne tells us that some of the males use their powerful suction to kill larger prey, sometimes even other seals, whose brains they can pull right through their skulls.

  One evening we anchor near a yacht. It’s one of very few to venture this far north and Steinar studies it as the skipper ferries his passengers to the shore. A female walrus and her calf swim nearby, blowing water like small whales. The calf is interested in the yacht’s inflatable boat and, when the mother starts to look agitated, Steinar calls the skipper on the radio. He quickly hauls his dinghy out before she can vent her anger on it but the walrus attacks the rudder instead, then tears off a plastic fender, stabbing it repeatedly with her tusks.

  The skipper calls Steinar back: ‘I owe you a beer for saving the inflatable …’ but the walrus has finished with the fender and, rearing half her length out of the sea, she brings her tusks down on the suspended boat, ripping a large hole in its side. The skipper is philosophical, saying that it makes a change. His previous dinghy was punctured by bears.

  Meanwhile, our own equipment is giving us trouble. My camera uses tapes but Ted’s and Mateo’s footage is recorded on memory cards and the information has to be downloaded to a hard drive for safekeeping. The drive makes two copies automatically but something has gone wrong and one of them has been corrupted. There is now a risk that the drive has used the faulty one to replace the only remaining good copy. Ted and Mateo spend hours in the Havsel’s hold, studying manuals and making fine adjustments as the ship rolls and yaws.

  ‘It’s like working on a roller coaster,’ Ted says. ‘Perhaps the drives are just seasick.’

  He is putting a brave face on it, but the thought that his unique shots of the swimming bears might be lost is gut-wrenching. We have put as much faith in our technology as Andrée had placed in his balloon.

  I have never seen anything like the pack ice. Floes ride over each other and the pressure has shattered some and hoisted others into gleaming spires. In direct sunlight the ice looks white but under clouds it is almost lilac, with blue icebergs embedded in it like ranges of hills. This is the conveyor that brings so many bears to Svalbard, but it will not be easy to find them in all the chaos. Seven-tenths of the sea is covered with ice and Bjørne steers his ship through it from the crow’s nest. He travels fast and rams the floes. The bow rises, resting the ship’s weight on the ice. It gives way with a crack, allowing the Havsel to move on, heeling, as Bjørne aims towards open leads. Sometimes the ice is older and harder than it looks and the ship clangs and lurches, leaving red paint on the bobbing rubble and a twenty-degree kink in the wake.

  We take turns sitting on the wheelhouse roof to scan for bears. I rest my elbows on the sill and for hours I let the ship point my binoculars wherever she is heading. It’s a trance-like way to search for minute differences, for the cream of a bear’s fur among the cooler shades of the ice, or for movement caused by muscles rather than wind or the ship. It is essential to have a clear notion of how polar bears look: how sleek and grey they are when they first climb from the sea, or their hummockhipped shape when they lie stretched out like a dog. These are old skills I’m sure, as old as being human.

  In time it works, but the first bear we find is a few kilometres away and it heads in the opposite direction as the Havsel grinds closer. We find a few more but they all move away. When we are finally close enough to one to launch the Buster, it slips into the water and vanishes. We pass the remains of a bearded seal, just a heap of bones and a streak on the ice, but the bear has gone. After many hours of searching we discover that the easiest way to find them is to stop moving and go to sleep. Within two hours a large male bear has come to us.

  The Inuit have a word, ilira, for the fear that accompanies awe when you are watching a polar bear. This bear is very close and the Havsel is surrounded by ice, so when he stands on his hind legs his head is almost level with my feet. He seems to be looking for a way to climb aboard. While I film him from the bow, with his eyes filling the frame as he stares at the lens, the others launch the Buster on the ship’s blind side. They are much quicker these days and by the time the bear lowers himself into the water they are ready to film him swimming, with his submerged fur swirling like cream in black coffee. He pulls himself onto another floe, his shoulders working like a weightlifter’s, straightens his front legs and pile-drives them into a seal’s birthing den, under the ice. The den is empty and he turns back towards the boat.

  Miles had hoped to film him underwater with the polecam but the bear is so big and confident that the four-metre pole now feels rather short and the Buster soon backs off, switching to the stabilised camera. The boat follows as he swims, filming him searching the floes, ducking under some and snaking his long neck to peer over others. From the wheelhouse roof I can see three more bears in the distance: a female and her two small cubs. The male has found no seals and he easily shakes off the boat, so when I radio the news about the family, Miles decides to switch to filming them. As the boat turns her way the mother starts towards it with her cubs at her heels. When she leaps between floes they hesitate and then bounce across a floating ice bridge, which bobs and rolls under their weight. When she slips into the sea to cross a larger gap the cubs hurl themselves after her with their legs spread wide, making enormous splashes, then roll in the snow to rub themselves dry. To check where she has gone, one stands on its hind legs with its forepaws crossed, looking impossibly attractive. From the Havsel’s wheelhouse roof I can see Jason trying to keep a gap between the mother bear and the boat. He is momentarily blocked by ice and suddenly she is very close. The Buster lurches forward and away.

  ‘The best bear of the season,’ Jason calls on the radio, and when they climb back aboard the whole team is beaming. Miles says that he and Ted had been watching the bear family so intently on their monitors that they’d lost track of where they were, and even which way the camera was pointing. It was only when he asked Ted to include more in his shot than just the bears’ heads that they discovered the lens was already zoomed as wide as it could go. The bears were right behind them, on the edge of the ice a few metres away. The mother was showing every sign of wanting to join them in the boat and Jason moved it just in time.

  In the wheelhouse Ted shows us the pictures. His shots of the two running cubs, determined to keep up with their mum, are extraordinarily touching. Miles’s gamble with the stabilised camera has paid off handsomely, although we still have no shots of a bear catching anything on the ice or ashore. If we could find seals and a hunting bear here we could try again but now the wind intervenes. Bjørne is worried: ‘The ice is closing up. I don’t like it at all. We must not be caught between it and the cliffs.’

  Like the rest of us he has slept for only two hours in the last two days but the strengthening wind means he must move the Havsel immediately. We watch the rest of Ted’s shots while holding on to the table and walls, as the Havsel smashes a passage away from the lee shore. The ship vibrates so
strongly that the fire bell rings on its own.

  Jason suggests that we try to reach Kvitøya, the White Island, at Svalbard’s most north-eastern point. Sometimes walruses give birth there, he says, and their pups might attract bears, but the ice is so thick this year that no one has been to look.

  There is fresh snow on the deck when we reach Kvitøya two days later. The island is almost completely covered by an ice cap, leaving just a few places where we might land a boat. They are small patches of rock and gravel, as cold and barren as Mars. This year there are no walruses on the ice-bound shore, and no bears. A single line of Arctic fox prints is the only sign of life.

  In this desolate place, the bodies of Salomon August Andrée and his companions were found, thirty-three years after their balloon disappeared. No one had looked for them so far from the route they had planned to fly. Andrée’s diary and Strindberg’s camera were recovered. The film had been perfectly preserved by the cold and it still held pictures documenting the end of the expedition. They showed the Eagle with its basket upturned and ropes everywhere. Andrée’s diary told that for two days they had been blown to and fro, crossing and re-crossing their path, while the balloon leaked hydrogen through its millions of stitch holes, accumulating ice until it grew too heavy to fly and finally settled on the frozen sea. Desperate to stay airborne, they had already jettisoned much of their food, but the men dragged all that remained from the wreck and set off south, walking for almost three months and shooting seals and bears to eat. They sent messages by homing pigeons, supplied by a newspaper. Only one was found and it did them no good because it had been released before the crash. Kvitøya must have seemed an unwelcoming haven but they had reached their limits. By October 1897 all three men were dead. Some of them may have been killed by bears, if not directly then through parasites, caught by eating their undercooked meat.