It took us more than a week to cross the frozen sea. One afternoon we stopped to hunt seal. Malmo found a breathing hole in the ice, and pitching our tent we began a patient vigil. She had set on the surface of the water a thin rod made of antler, which she told me would bob up and down at the slightest disturbance. We were stationed downwind of the breathing hole so our scent wouldn't reach the sensitive noses of any seals nearby. Hours passed. Then the antler rod gently bobbed on the surface of the water. Malmo moved with a calm but amazing speed, grabbing her harpoon and striking down into the breathing hole with all her force. She held fast until the seal grew tired, its struggle lessening. Handing me a knife she told me to enlarge the hole so we could bring the seal up. I worked as quickly as I could, and finally Malmo was able to drag the seal up onto the ice. It was still alive, barely, and she used a club to finish it off.
I had had plenty of experience butchering animals on the farm, but killing the seal was eerie to me, with the vivid red of its blood against the sheer white ice.
By the time the moon was directly overhead, we had fresh seal meat. Before eating, Malmo sang. She did this every time she was about to eat what had been caught in a hunt, and that night, out on the frozen sea, I asked her why she sang.
"It is the way we live in peace with the animals in our world. We are not separate from the animals or the sea or the ice but part of the whole. And so we must treat the animals, the sea, the ice with respect."
"But is it not disrespectful to kill?"'I asked hesitantly, not wishing to offend Malmo.
She smiled as if at a child. "No. Because it is part of the cycle. We must hunt to survive. Disrespect would be to hunt when you are not hungry and then to treat the dead in a wasteful, unclean way. The words I sing are to ask forgiveness for taking the seal's life, and to send its soul safely to the spirit world."
As we reached the other side of the frozen sea, the surface became rough again and we had to take off our skis. The ice looked like it had exploded upward, making a towering forest of white. It was extraordinary. The glassy pinnacles rose as high as ten feet above us, and there were long, deep cracks in the surface. And the groaning, creaking sound was louder as the edges of the ice pack pushed more aggressively against each other. Occasionally there would be a loud cracking sound, like that of an enormous whip, and I would jump, my heart racing. Adding to my nerves was Malmo's warning that she smelled white bear around us and that we should be wary.
"I thought the white bear was your animal," I said uneasily.
"That will not protect us from a white bear that has not eaten in several weeks. Or a mother bear with hungry cubs."
We carefully made our way through the mazelike ice forest. My whole body was stiff with tension, my icicle-rimmed eyes darting from side to side as I watched for a white bear around every jutting spire of ice. And the cracks in the ice were widening; I could see black freezing water through some of them. The harsh cracking sounds grew more frequent.
It seemed to go on and on, the ice forest. I got occasional glimpses of what I took to be a shoreline, but it never got any closer.
As I rounded a particularly large tower of ice, my senses numb from constantly being on edge, there was a sudden blur of motion, white on white, and a snarling. I felt a burning line of pain along my jaw and was knocked to the ground, unable to breathe. I saw a spreading pool of red on the snow and realized it was blood—blood leaking from the throbbing on my face. But something was over me, blocking out the light, and I looked up into the face of a white bear, standing on its hind legs, teeth bared.
My breath came back then, ragged and gasping, and the strangest thing of all was that it wasn't the thought that I was going to be killed that frightened me the most but the primitive animal ferocity I saw in those small black eyes. They were nothing like the eyes of my white bear. In fact, there was nothing recognizable there at all, just the staring, voracious eyes of a predator that had found its next meal.
Neddy
MY FAVORITE PLACE in the old monastery was the reading room. It was located in what had once been the chapel, and tall arched windows of stained glass lined the walls. There were ornate bookcases filled with handsome gilt-titled volumes, though the majority of books and manuscripts were housed in other rooms of the building. In the center of the room were several long tables at which one or two people usually were seated on wooden chairs.
Hours passed by like minutes in the reading room. Blurred shapes of ruby red, emerald green, and rich sapphire blue from the stained glass would dapple the pages as I read the old manuscripts. And I feasted on the words handwritten by men who had lived hundreds of years before me.
It was on a sunlit morning in late winter when a curious thing happened. I had already finished my assigned work for the day and, for pleasure, was reading an account of a sea voyage undertaken by a Viking called Orm. This Orm was an explorer of sorts, and he had told his tales of discovery to a monk back in the days when the old Viking ways were beginning to fade and the church was becoming more and more the center of life in Njord. The monk had written down the Viking's stories, apparently just as Orm had told them, and I read the stories with deep interest.
Perhaps because of my ancestors, I had always been drawn to accounts of journeys of exploration. Unlike my grandfather and great-grandfather, however, my interest had never been in the actual exploring, and unlike my father, I had only a passing interest in charting the world. Instead I was interested in the history of exploration—who went where, when they went, and why they had gone at all. And I had always been particularly intrigued by tales of northern exploration, because of that time in my life when I had taken it upon myself to learn all I could of white bears.
As I sat in the reading room that morning, poring over the long-ago Viking foray into the frozen waters well beyond the northern tip of Njord, I turned a page to find a drawing that made me catch my breath. It was a simple line drawing, apparently done by the monk from a description by Orm the Viking. The drawing depicted a large white bear standing on its four paws facing a man (or I suppose it could have been a woman—the figure was too swathed in fur-skins to tell anything about it but that it was human). The two figures were virtually nose-to-nose, with only a hand's length between them, and they looked, for all the world, as if they were conversing.
My eyes eagerly sought the text that explained the drawing:
Driven off course, in a northwesterly direction me-thinks, we are pressed on all sides by ice. My men clamor to turn south. They fear being trapped in ice for the long winter. Nevertheless, I press onward.
The ice comes and we are hemmed in. My men are afraid. It is the full moon and one night, unable to sleep, I wake and walk the deck. The moon is bright and there before me, on the land, is an extraordinary sight. As clear as if it were day, I see them. A small man in fur and a white bear. They stand on the ice facing each other. I felt a thrill of terror; the bear was surely about to devour the man. I have hunted white bear and there is no fiercer foe. But, most strange and awesome, the white bear did not eat the man. Indeed, they seemed to be gazing into each other's eyes, with the look of blood brothers, or father and child. The hair on my neck stood up and I called to my men so that I should not be the only one to see such a sight. But the sound of my voice must have carried over the sea and ice, for bear and man turned toward me, as one, and then they turned back, as though annoyed at the interruption, and moved quickly away over the ice, side by side. By the time any of my men were awake enough to heed my words, the man and bear were lost to sight.