Champagne and Polar Bears: Romance in the Arctic

320 Pages·2007·1.01 MB·English

by  Marie Tieche

CHAMPAGNE AND POLAR BEARS
Original title: Kinnvika 80° Nord
© 2005 Frederking & Thaler Verlag GmbH, München
English edition © Marie Tièche, 2007
All rights reserved.
The right of Marie Tièche to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent publisher.
Summersdale Publishers Ltd
46 West Street
Chichester
West Sussex
PO19 1RP
UK
www.summersdale.com
Printed and bound in Great Britain.
ISBN: 1-84024-567-0
ISBN 13: 978-184024-567-7
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Contents
Prologue.................................................................................7
Baiting the hook.....................................................................8
Testing times........................................................................42
Preparations..........................................................................70
Break out............................................................................103
Arrival.................................................................................127
Acclimatisation...................................................................136
Sorting out..........................................................................161
Turning points....................................................................194
Return of the light...............................................................223
Battles.................................................................................248
Life on ice...........................................................................271
Summer..............................................................................289
Epilogue: What next?..........................................................313
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Prologue
Those eyes. They were the faded blue of a clear winter sky,
a luminous, translucent, glacier blue. They had spoken to
me, invited me into a strange new world of isolation and
loneliness, treacherous weather, icebergs and danger. And
I had accepted. What had I done? I’d only met him in the
pub an hour ago and I’d just agreed to go with him on his
scientific expedition to a deserted, glaciated island 600 miles
(1,000 kilometres) from the North Pole. Just the two of us.
Me and him. No one else. We’d live alone in a little wooden
hut with just two huskies for company and to protect us
from polar bears; you know, those huge, white, ferocious,
man-eating creatures. They would be our neighbours for a
year. A whole year. No going home halfway through if the
going got tough. Twelve months or not at all. Giving up was
not an option. I must be completely mad. Round the bend.
Out of my tiny mind.
But that’s how it all began.
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Chapter 1
Baiting the hook
Snow-devils waltzed and tangoed down the road, scouring
the glossy ice-bound surface and turning it to frosted glass.
Under the clear skies it looked a bitter, raw night, cold wind
blowing off the glacier. Going to bed with a good book was
an attractive proposition, but I was getting fed up with my
own company of an evening and it was, after all, Friday night.
Come on. Make an effort. I drew the curtains together with
a vigour I wasn’t really feeling.
Shrugging myself into my warm brown jacket, I locked the
door to the bedsit and trotted silently down the stairs in my
thick wool socks. In the entrance hall I could hear, coming
from the room off to one side, the hum of the huge communal
freezer shared by all 12 residents of the building. Running
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Baiting the Hook
a freezer in these arctic temperatures was a bit strange, but
leaving frozen food outside would only encourage foxes, mice
and thieves. Three pairs of cross-country skis stood in one
corner, poles leaning drunkenly across each other in mutual
support, and a rainbow of thick jackets and scooter dresses (a
bit like romper suits for adults) hung on the coat racks above
the twenty or so pairs of assorted boots, shoes and slippers
left haphazardly on the floor. Some were old and dusty, their
owners having long since departed their bedsit, and probably
Longyearbyen too. I assumed most of the people came up
here to work in an exotic surrounding and to save money
for the future, for instance to get married or buy a house. I
wondered how many of the people were English like me.
(My name makes me sound a foreigner to almost everyone,
whatever their nationality, but I was named after my Aunty
Jean’s French pen-friend and ended up with a Swiss father-
in-law when I got married.)
I had come to Spitsbergen because that was where my old
flame and good friend Edwin just happened to be living.
He threw me Spitsbergen as a lifeline, a place to regroup
and recover from the stress of my failed marriage. It could
just as easily have been Borneo. I’d stayed with him for six
months on arriving in Longyearbyen, hoping that we could
finally mesh together in a successful partnership, but it
didn’t work, and I moved out into my own place here. We
were a bit estranged at the moment, but time would get us
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Champagne and Polar Bears
back onto a steady footing once more. We would always be
special to each other.
Dodging the melt puddles I shoved my feet into my
sensible, brown leather shoes, pulling on my snug hat and
windproof gloves as I pushed open the heavy, glass-panelled
door and braced myself for –20°C. The snow was hard and
rutted with scooter and ski tracks criss-crossing through
those of boots and the occasional dog. In between, the thin
layer of hard-compressed, slippery-smooth snow awaited
the unwary and unlucky.
Cautiously, I walked around to the end of the long, wooden
building and crept past the metal rubbish skips and down
the slope to the path, the snow a dull amber under the street
lamps, and breathed in the clean, cold air of a Spitsbergen
night. On the left, sandwiched between more rows of timber
flats and bungalows and the now frozen, snow-hidden river
beyond, the main road headed up the hill behind me, passed
the school and sports centre before petering out at Nybyen,
an outlying hamlet near the upper end of the valley where
most of the handful of students attending the tiny university
lived. Theirs was a journey of unequal halves, whizzing
downhill on their bicycles all the way from the top end of
town to the lower in the morning and toiling back up the
steady incline at the end of the day, a distance of some two
kilometres each way.
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