The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  From here, at just over 80°N, it is easy to work out how much further it is to the pole. Each degree of latitude contains sixty minutes of arc, equivalent to sixty nautical miles, and a nautical mile averages about 1.8km, so the North Pole is just over 1,000km away (600 nautical miles). It’s the furthest north I have ever been.

  Andrée’s diary shows that the Eagle crashed at 83°N: 750km (460 miles) short of his goal. His idea of going to the North Pole by air was not entirely fanciful. By the time his remains were found, the airship Norge had flown there from Svalbard.

  With relief we leave Kvitøya to return to the Havsel and head south, travelling down the east side of Spitsbergen among the moving ice.

  Mateo has some bad news: another hard drive has failed but at least this time we understand why. The Havsel generates her own electricity to power everything from the radar to the washing machine, but whenever the ship’s heavier equipment is turned on – the crane, for instance, or the compressor in the freezer compartment – the power supply falters. A washing machine’s motor can survive this rough treatment but hard drives are more sensitive and a hiccup in the power can corrupt their data. How ironic that here, where we often feel deepfrozen on deck, we risk ruining our footage by opening the freezer door. At least now we know when not to use the drives and, in fact, we have been lucky, because the remaining copies of the footage have survived uncorrupted.

  The bears, though, have become no easier to find. By the time we leave the sea ice behind we have filmed no more hunting, but when we land on a small island called Halfmoon we find a family lying together on the shore. The two cubs are resting on their mother. One has its muzzle in the crease between her side and her hind leg. It’s a perfect fit and a liberty no one else would dare to take. From time to time she rolls onto her back, raises her head and invites the cubs to suckle, gently putting her paws around their shoulders. She eats nothing herself because there seems to be no food on the island: most of the birds have gone or finished nesting, she cannot hunt seals without ice and there is nothing left to scavenge on the shore. She is lethargic but too wary for us to approach, so the Havsel leaves Steinar, Mateo and me on the island, while the others investigate the mainland. With one eye on the family in case they move, we have a look around.

  There are bones everywhere. For many years the island’s cabin was used by hunters, who killed bears for their skins. A wooden box lying by the door shows how they did it. It once housed a rifle with a piece of meat tied to the trigger. The hunters put up tall poles next to boxes like this, knowing that passing bears would be curious. If they were drawn onto the island and smelled the meat, the bears would put their heads inside the boxes and pull the bait. The rifles were supposed to shoot them in the forehead but sometimes the bears were only maimed. Many were mothers with cubs and the hunters kept the orphans alive, for sale to zoos at the end of the year. In one season on Halfmoon Island, three men killed more than 150 bears. A string trigger lies undisturbed since the hunting stopped forty years ago, just as our habit of burning fossil fuels began to melt the places where they live.

  Some predictions say that by 2050 there will be far less sea ice in the Arctic during the winter and none at all in the summer. Others say that because the melting is speeding up exponentially this may happen within the next few years. What will happen to Svalbard’s bears remains to be seen. Some might find enough food on the land to scrape through the leaner times but many of those will go on to die in the winter, too thin to keep warm and lacking the stamina to hunt. Their population is likely to creep downwards until the remaining bears are too scarce to find each other and mate. As we have discovered, some summers are cooler than others, so the polar bears’ slide towards extinction in the wild will probably proceed in fits and starts. None of us will see the last of them die but we are surely going to miss these inspiring animals when they have gone.

  International travel puts a great deal of carbon dioxide into the fast-warming atmosphere and so do ships like the Havsel. Travelling widely in order to film polar animals and their melting homes is a dilemma I am still wrestling with. I hope and believe that the films we make will do more good than harm, or I would not want to be involved.

  The Havsel returns with the news that they have found two male bears eating the remains of an emaciated female. Perhaps the mother bear on this island is wise to keep a low profile. We leave her in peace, hoping that she will be able to keep her cubs safe in this place, which for so many years was deadly for bears.

  Miles and Jason have decided that our last chance to film a bear hunting is to visit the huge seabird colonies on Svalbard’s west coast, so the Havsel moves on again.

  Once, in Yellowstone, I waited for two or three hours in the hope that the sun would light some blowing snow. There was a park ranger with me, to make sure I didn’t step into any hot springs. The sun finally appeared just long enough for me to film one shot. It lasted twenty seconds. The ranger said, ‘You could kick anyone’s ass in a waiting competition.’

  When you make wildlife films it is quite common to spend a long time waiting and it is usual for plans to keep changing too, but it is not always easy to be patient, especially if you are suddenly reminded of what’s happening in the outside world. Last night a message reached the Havsel from my home, where it is school holiday time. My young son has won the photography prize in our village show: He’s so proud, wrote my wife and I think back to when Rowan and I sat together, looking intently at the patterns of light and shade made by some tall grass, with our heads touching, while he chose which picture to take. I would have liked to be with him when he heard the news. Of course, filming bears in the summer means spending months away from home and it has been fascinating exploring Svalbard like this, but it would be easier to wait patiently if the filming was going better.

  When we drop anchor in Hornsund we know it will be our last chance this year to film bears hunting.

  The fjord is surrounded by peaks the shape of flat irons, set upright to cool: dark knuckles of rock shoved between streaks of white. A snow bunting flits past the dazzling slopes like a piece struck from the landscape. Ice sculptures float where a glacier meets the sea: some are frosty, others are as clear as glass or weirdly blue and textured like the skin of lemons. They chink together on the rise and fall of the tide and above them is a massive bird cliff. It’s half a mountain, cut off sheer by the sea, and the air about it is filled with specks of white, like a blizzard of petals blown from a cherry tree. They are kittiwakes, all calling their name. We pack the camera gear and lower the boat, to investigate the cliff. Halfway along the beach Steinar looks back and shouts, ‘There’s a bear!’

  We have walked right past him, lying on a snow patch just above the shore. He lifts his head and gives us an irritable sideways glance. I can see the whites of his eyes. I don’t trust this bear and he doesn’t seem keen on us either, but when the adrenaline subsides it’s clear that he really wants to sleep, so we set up to film him when he wakes. Crouched by the camera, I wait for him to do something, anything: for days.

  ‘Cold coast’ is what Svalbard means. One ship’s crew, stuck in the Arctic Ocean for the winter, used ice and a walrus skin to make a billiard table. For a while it helped them forget the cold. I rub my hands and look around me at the rocks and seaweed. Making a billiard table seems a bit beyond my means. This is the time to find out just how patient I can be.

  I like waiting and it’s rare to have as good a reason as this just to be still and do nothing except wait for a bear to wake up, but I do need something to take my mind off the cold, so I slowly sink into the stillness of this place, letting it into me. I listen outwards, finding new sounds, fainter sounds, ever further away. The ice pops and fizzes as it melts into the sea. Bergy seltzer it’s called: the sound of gases being reunited, of ancient air escaping from its prison after thousands of years and re-entering the atmosphere. The rocks beside my boots stack vertically like slices of toast, which tap gently when I move my foot. Ther
e are tiny aeronautical bones between the flakes of stone, thin struts filled with air: a kit of parts from which you could build a kittiwake. I lie back and watch the living birds circling hundreds of metres above me, like paper planes sailing out and back towards their cliff. Above them the sky is a grey quilt, billowing. Some of the birds are young ones, on their first, breathtaking flights into the abyss of air. They fly straight and level, rowing tentatively with their new wings. I wonder if they feel vertigo. Glaucous gulls are watching them too, and closing in on the most naïve. A young kittiwake panics and screams but the bear doesn’t even raise its head. It would be easy to miss these everyday, almost casual acts of violence, among the wheeling kaleidoscope of birds. Behind the clouds the sun turns across the sky. Its light is diffuse and shadowless.

  Rain ticks as it hits my coat and the landscape backs away softly behind the drizzle, like the pictures my children once made at school from layers of tissue. I sit with my back to the wind, nursing the camera as well as my hopes that the bear might wake up soon. Below the cliff a little grey ghost of a fox appears, as pale as the rocks and thin as a rake. Run, squat, run: it is constantly moving and dotting its scent onto the landscape. It must smell a quite different place from the one I see and hear. It stops abruptly, aware of something: me, or perhaps the bear? And away it goes, as quickly up the slope as down.

  At last the bear is moving. He stands and stretches his back, yawns massively and then falls as if he has been poleaxed. He lies there, curled up with his head on the snow and his ears filled with the sounds of kittiwakes.

  From the fjord comes a long gasp. Smooth white shapes are rising and falling among the ice: they are belugas, a tight pod of whales swimming towards the glacier. Grey youngsters dive flank to flank with their pale mothers. They have no dorsal fins to scrape the cold ceiling of the sea but as they swim they lift their tail flukes, shaped like the ace of spades carved in ivory. What does their ice world sound like? They have been called the canaries of the Arctic and listening to the puffs of their breath I wish I could plunge my head into the water and hear them sing. When the sea freezes the bear may come across these same whales, trapped in shrinking holes in the ice, and with inconceivable strength – belugas weigh twice as much as him – he might haul one out to eat. In summer they are safe and the bear pays them no heed.

  I catch myself dozing: it’s a dangerous complacency, given the company I am keeping, but the bear does nothing except rearrange his bed. I can see the wind blowing across his back, lifting his fur and showing that underneath, his skin is dark. Every now and then he stretches one leg, like a dog might if it was very relaxed. Most of the time, though, he moves so little that I wonder if in fact he’s died.

  Days pass. A highlight is when twenty barnacle geese fly over me and then over the bear, looking down at us both. One of their feathers comes to rest by my hand, striped black and white and beaded with moisture. It flickers in the wind, wanting to fly. The muted colours of the geese and their wildness fit this place well, but I also know them from the other end of their migration, in Scotland, where they spend the winter on the Solway Firth. When I see them there next I will think of today and look at them differently, these geese who know bears, but I must leave here before they do. The ship is waiting to take us back to Long-yearbyen. We have run out of time.

  As we pick up speed and head for the open sea, I look through my binoculars and find his pale shape, still lying there below the cliff. I realise now why the bear had not once gone looking for birds. Instead of hunting he is saving energy and living off his fat. It is only August, and the sea will not freeze until November, but already he is waiting for winter.

  Filming Svalbard’s bears has taught me something: wildlife cameramen are not really patient – polar bears are patient.

  – SEVEN –

  A BIG BUNCH OF GEESE

  While polar bears have little choice but to stay put and wait for the ice to restore their freedom to roam, North America’s lesser snow geese leave the north before the winter freeze, then migrate back to the Arctic when the spring comes. Their immense flocks are a spectacular sight and a controversial one.

  Ice has been shunted into ridges on the shore. The holiday houses lining the lakeside are blank-faced, with blinds drawn across their dark windows. In one snowy yard there’s a metal lamp post, a sodium-vapour parody of the cosy one in Narnia, lost among the trees. There is no wind or tide to act upon this lake, yet the ice groans and strains, making oddly human sounds where there are no people. Coyote tracks pattern the snow. My hide has been here since yesterday afternoon and its roof is speckled with frost flowers, which I brush to dust as I unzip the canvas. With the help of my colleague Mandi, I must set up the camera inside its stiff cloth walls then start my wait while it’s still dark, but the metal feet of the tripod are sliding on the frozen beach. I could melt it by peeing on the shore but perhaps there’s a less awkward and quicker fix than that. Should I sacrifice my flask of tea? I’ll miss it if I am still in this hide ten hours from now, but the light is coming and we’re in a hurry: the tea it is.

  Once I am in and perched on a stool I tuck a spare coat across my knees. My fingers and toes will be the coldest now. On the ice nothing stirs. It is still too dark to film. In the distance I can hear the forlorn wail of a train: a sound that defines modern America’s Midwest, just as wolf howls did a century ago. The railroad runs beside the Missouri River, which made this lake and then left it behind: an abandoned oxbow in the prairie, surrounded by the plough and stubble of winter cornfields. It must be fun here in the heat of summer, to judge by the boat docks and the sundecks and barbecues of the houses opposite. Their downstairs walls are made of plain concrete and each has a dark line, well above my height, like scum on an old bathtub. There’s a similar line on the tree beside my hide, on all the trees in fact, as if someone has obsessively marked the same level everywhere. This lake has changed, left its mark and changed again.

  Flood and drought, heat and cold: the Midwest knows all about swings between extremes and so do the birds I have come to film.

  A few years ago I spent some days in the autumn, filming on the shore of Hudson Bay in Canada. It was warmer there than here, despite being so much further north. On the salt marshes around the bay there were polar bears. It’s the furthest south they ever come and they looked out of place in the September sunshine, the more so because those marshes seemed very much like the ones at home, where brent geese had made dark patterns in my childhood skies. There were geese on Hudson Bay too, but these were lesser snow geese. Their gleaming white skeins were a constant backdrop to the bears, as we filmed them testing each other’s strength by wrestling. White bears and above them white geese, writing patterns in the sky. These bears, like the ones in Svalbard, were waiting for the sea to freeze but the geese were preparing to leave, feeding up before their long push south. Towards the end of our filming I watched thousands of them smoothly forming their travelling ‘V’s, with several hundred birds to a side, all heading towards the major river they would follow into the heart of North America.

  It was the beginning of one of the world’s great natural events – a continent’s geese moving from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico – and now, from this hide, I am hoping to film the same birds heading north. This spring migration is a more urgent affair than their autumn journey: every day counts because the Arctic summer is short and they must not waste time getting there. Like America’s early explorers and the railroad-builders who came after them, many of the migrating birds follow the course of the Missouri River. Last year’s youngsters will be guided north by their parents, as snow goose families have done every spring, time out of mind. In some years they decide to break their journey here and when they do I’ve heard their flocks can be breathtakingly large. That’s what Mandi and I are hoping to film: the way these geese behave when they are in numbers and how their predators react to them, but we cannot tell whether this year’s extreme cold will help us or hinder. If they com
e and I am waiting in the right place, the sight should be spectacular, but if the weather suddenly warms up and the geese hurry north, they may decide not to stop here at all.

  The sky is lightening. There are dark shapes scattered through the winter trees, silhouettes, shuffling their feathers against the dawn. They are bald eagles: powerful hunters as well as opportunistic scavengers. They are migrants too but for now they are waiting, like me. One small part of the lake has not frozen and vapour condenses above it in the intense cold. As the sun breaks Missouri’s flat horizon its first light gilds the vapour: shifting, twisting shapes of water, taken to the air. Blurred by the distance I can hear voices: people perhaps, or the yelping of dogs.

  North America once had another exceptionally well-travelled bird, a migrant named for its willingness to move – it was the passenger pigeon. Passager means ‘traveller’ in French. People spoke in awe about the sound of their passing: of thunder, of canon fire and cavalry. Their numbers were famous too: some flocks darkened the sky for three days and one colony covered 2,000km2 (500,000 acres). The weight of the nesting pigeons broke branches from the trees and they could be shot, twenty at a time, by firing blindly into the air. No one who saw such abundance imagined it could ever end. Snow geese, they say, are unimaginably numerous too.

  The voices resolve themselves, coming closer: they are geese, drawing fine lines across the sky, pencil lines, overlapping. Their voices grow stronger as they come, merging into a clamour. Overhead the lines waver. The geese are hesitating, considering whether to come down. From their height they must be able to see the larger lake a few miles away, where Mandi is waiting. It is their only alternative but it’s completely frozen. Among all the fields this oxbow lake is calling to them with its open water, offering a chance to rest, to wash their feathers and drink.