Dark Matter Read Free Page B

the
Isbjørn
, and its skipper, Mr Eriksson. He’s a hardened sealer and trapper who’s overwintered on Spitsbergen a dozen times. I’ve never met a trapper, but I’ve read about them and I know my Jack London. They’re the real thing. Battling the elements, shooting seals and polar bears. In Norway, people look up to them as ‘true hunters’. All of which I find a bit daunting.
    The books say the golden days of trapping werewhen Spitsbergen was a no-man’s-land. I still can’t get over that. The idea that until a few years ago, a wilderness not far from Europe belonged to no one: that a man could literally stake his claim wherever he liked, without seeking permission from a living soul. It sounds wonderful. But it came to an end in 1925, when the islands became part of Norway.
    The stories they tell of that time! Marauding bears. Lethal accidents on the ice. Men going mad from the dark and the loneliness, murdering each other, shooting themselves.
    There’s even a name for it. They call it
rar
. Armstrong shrugs it off as a ‘strangeness’ which comes over some people when they winter in the Arctic. He says it’s simply a matter of a few odd habits, like hoarding matches or obsessively checking stores. But I know from the books that it’s worse than that.
    And they talk of something called
Ishavet kaller
, which seems to be an extreme form of
rar
. It means ‘the Arctic calls’. That’s when a trapper walks off a cliff for no reason.
    One time, not long ago, they found four men on Barents Island starved to death in their cabin, despite having piles of ammunition and guns in perfect working order. The man who wrote the book says they’d been too frightened to leave the cabin –
for terror of thedeadness beyond
. It makes a good story. But how could he possibly know?
    Rar. Ishavet kaller
. Cabin fever. Nerve strain. I can understand why it used to happen in the old days, when men were utterly cut off, but it’s different now. We’ll have a gramophone and the wireless.
    And maybe, after all, that’s for the best. I mean, compared to those trappers, we’re amateurs. Algie’s the only one who’s ever been to the Arctic, and that was only six weeks’ shooting in Greenland. No sense biting off more than we can chew.

27th July, the Isbjørn, somewhere in the Norwegian Sea
     
    I’m writing this in my cabin. My cabin. OK, it stinks of seal blubber and it’s only slightly bigger than a coffin. But still. The
Isbjørn’s
beautiful, a jaunty little sailing ship, just how I imagine the one in
Moby-Dick
– only with a 50 h.p. Diesel engine that belches greasy black smoke. The ever-accurate Hugo tells me she’s a ninety-foot sealing sloop (whatever that means), and that the crow’s-nest, three-quarters of the way up her mast, is the mark of a true sealer. Inside, she’s mostly hold, with four tiny cabins off the small saloon (I’m in one of these). I don’t know where the crew sleeps, or even how many there are, as I can’t tell them apart.They’re all splendid Nordic types with formidable beards and amazingly clean overalls.
    Mysteriously, they don’t stink of seal blubber, but everything else does. The rancid, oily smell has soaked into the woodwork. You can taste it in the drinking water. Hugo and Algie are looking green, and I’m feeling a bit queasy myself.
    Somehow, we got everything on board, and the crew didn’t drop any of my wireless crates. They’re safe in the hold, thank God, not on deck with the dogs.
    Those bloody dogs. I know we need them for the camp on the icecap, but I wish we didn’t. According to Algie (our self-styled huntsman and dog-driver), Eskimo huskies are the toughest and best able to stand the cold, which is why we had them brought all the way from Greenland. Eight of the brutes: filthy and overexcited after nine weeks cooped up in the holds of various ships.
    To the upper classes, dogs are a religion, so Gus, Hugo and Algie already adore ours. They tell me they’re