Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

Gus is frowning in his dreams. He looks young and noble, like the first officer over the top at the Somme. Algie is snoring. His thick red lips glisten with spit.
    An hour ago, the weather broke, and a freezing wind came howling down from the icecap. It’s stillblowing, sucking and smacking at the tent. The icebergs are grinding in the bay, and now and then one breaks apart with a crash. Eriksson says that if this wind keeps up, it’ll clear them away, so I suppose that’s something.
    This evening after dinner, when it was still calm, we strolled over to admire the site of our cabin. It’s perfect. We’ve even cleared it of most of the bones. But I wish Algie hadn’t kept that bloody post. Gruhuken seems to have had a dismal past. I don’t want any of it poking through.
    And of course, he had to go on about how the wretched thing works. ‘Apparently, it comes into its own in winter, when the pack ice gets near the coast and brings the bears. They’re attracted to tall, standing things, especially with a slab of blubber dangling from the top. So all you’ve got to do is stay in your cabin with your rifle poking out the window, and wait till a brute comes within range. I confess I’m rather keen to give it a shot.’
    ‘Algie old man,’ said Gus, ‘I don’t think that’s on. We don’t want bears prowling around camp.’
    He and Algie wandered off, amicably bickering, and I strolled down to the beach.
    Crossing the stream, I found my way on to the rocks. It was nearly midnight, and the great sloping pavements gleamed in that deep, gold, mysteriouslight. From a distance, they appear to shelve gently into the shallows, but in fact they end in a nasty four-foot drop. The water’s deep, and you can see right down to the bottom, to huge green boulders and undulating weeds like drowned hair.
    Crouching at the edge, I watched the waves slapping, and the chunks of ice jostling and clinking. I heard that peculiar crackling as it talked to itself.
    I thought, if I fell in, I wouldn’t be able to climb out. I’d try to swim round to where it’s shallower, but the cold would get me long before then.
    As I was heading back, a shaft of sunlight struck the bear post. The wood was bleached silver, except for a few charred patches, and some darker blotches which must be blubber stains. I found it hard to believe it was once a tree in some Siberian forest.
    On impulse, I drew off my glove and laid my palm against it. It felt smooth and unpleasantly cold. I didn’t like it. A killing post.
    And yet I think I now understand the impulse which drives men to shoot bears. It isn’t for the pelt or the meat or the sport – or not only those things. I think they
need
to do it. They need to kill that great Arctic totem to give them some sense of control over the wilderness – even if that is only an illusion.
    *
    Just now, a shadow sped over the tent, and I got such a fright I nearly cried out.
    Steady on, Jack. It was only a gull.
    The wind is blowing hard, and the dogs are howling. They’re restless tonight.

15th August, the cabin at Gruhuken
     
    The cabin is finished, and we’ve moved in!
    It went up in three days, as everyone worked like Trojans, and it’s beautiful. Black all over: walls covered in tarpaper, roof in felt, with the stovepipe poking a little drunkenly from the top, like the witch’s hovel in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The two front windows are such different sizes that they resemble mismatched eyes.
    Between them there’s a small enclosed porch, above which Gus has nailed a pair of reindeer antlers: a nice baronial touch. If you turn right and go round the corner, you find the outhouse, which Algie pompously calls the lavatory. At the rear, the eastern half of the cabin is backed by a lean-to of packing cases and wire netting for the dogs, while the western half abuts the boulders. The whole cabin is surrounded (except for the doghouse and the boulders) by a boardwalk abouttwo feet wide. When you’re