CHAPTER XXXVII
We find little difference here in Trömso since we left for the cold North. Then it was sunny but very cold, now all the snow has melted away from the hills and they are green with belts of dark alders that run up the corries from their reflections in the calm fiord. The rough main street of wooden houses presents the same series of little wooden doll houses, some made of upright planks, some of horizontal, in subdued harmonies of weathered pale green, blue, and worn slate, which would be a little sad but for the summer dresses of women and children, bright splashes of colour—scarlets and pale blues, vivid but harmonious, only a little noticeable on account of the uniformity of the black and dark blue clothes of all the men.
Is it coming back from the Arctic, where there are no people, or is it the atmosphere of Trömso that makes the character of each individual seem so distinct? You could sketch any of the figures, men or women, in the brightly painted street of doll houses, and the drawing would be recognised by anyone in Trömso.
Everyone seems to be at least on a bowing acquaintance with every second person he meets. Opposite this Grand (wooden) Hotel I see two of our men in dark suits and bowlers, each has a little tobacco in his cheek. I know this because I saw them put it in almost on the sly; each doffs his bowler as some acquaintance comes up. Larsen has barely time for one whiff of his cigarette between the sedate bows which they make to passers-by. Who could believe that a few days ago he was in old blue dungarees and sea-boots, hauling with us hand over hand on a narwhal line—and Larsen—it is difficult to realise that a week or two ago we saw him skeltering over a floe, a long, dark figure against the ice, blazing black powder cartridges and splashing bullets at three yards’ range into the ice in front of a three-year-old polar bear’s nose, to turn it. It strikes me that the way these fair-haired men stand, and move their heads, and their type of face, is rather like the men of Berwickshire or Selkirkshire. You could hardly tell a Selkirk man here from a native, but the average man of Trömso is perhaps smaller and thinner.
The women here are not so well grown and good-looking as those in Trondhjem. Half the men are teetotallers, at least in public. I saw rather a remarkable sight here at the table d’hôte, six men at table in a row, “travellers,” I think, each with a large burgundy or claret glass full of new milk beside his plate—very different in habits and the appearance we associate with their deep-drinking Viking forefathers. It really does look as if with milk drinking we may yet have peace to be amongst all men.
We go down the coast between the islands in sunshine—little cloudlets round the greystone peaks in the blue sky. This day is the Glorious 12th, and we are far from home—and we are more than content, to be comfortably on shipboard, glad to leave the northern ice regions, and yet we know that in six months’ time we will long to return. We watch the hills go past in luxurious repose from the luggage-covered decks—lovely hill-faces, wooded elk ground below, and higher up, slopes, with scrub and heather, just the place for dal ryper, the counterpart of our grouse, bar the white flight feathers, and above, the heather-grey rocks and stones, where you find the Norwegian ptarmigan; a glorious country, and so like our own.
No wonder in the ancient days our forefathers exchanged visits from these fiords to our Highland lochs and islands, and from old Alba to Lochlin, as described in the tales of the Ossianic times—friendly visits for feastings and marriages, and more often on bloody forays.
I wonder if the gentle ancestors of this little smuke pige that waits at our table formed one of the attractions of these round tours by our fathers. How delighted she was to stand for a few minutes and to have her portrait presented to her. On the previous page there is a fountain-pen ink jotting of what I remember of the original. Is she not a familiar type? We might meet her in Kent or Caithness.
I forgot to say we made arrangements, before we left Trömso, about our Port and Starboard bears. The Port bear goes to Spain, and Hamilton and I take Starboard to Edinburgh, to present him, between us, to our new Scottish Zoological Park, which promises to be the best in the world, and of which this writer had the honour of being first Honorary Treasurer! We will hand it over with the greatest pleasure, and then modestly withdraw; for the more you know of these two bears, the more you become of a retiring nature. I think we must have our Lord Provost to grace the ceremony of its presentation to the Park. The Right Honourable the Lord Provost, in his scarlet and ermine, and all the bailies, in reds and purples of various tints, what a grand spectacular effect! (Our company, we hope, would be excused.) And the Lord Lyon King-at-Arms we would have to come too, for colour effect, vermilion and gold, in his English tabard.—Ghost of Sir David Lindsay! with only one wee lion; and in the second quartering!
Fancy the bear’s contemplative pause after the address of welcome and before it has decided what part it will take in the ceremony. I must make a picture of this in oils.
Our Spanish comarados intended to take their bear to Madrid, but they hear the temperature there has lately been one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade, so they fear it would melt, consequently they decide to build a large iron enclosure across a small river which runs through their estancia and the cork woods of their northern hills. There was such a den or prison already in Spain, where I am told the bear, also a polar bear, worked out an honourable old age, fishing salmon and trout for the family of its owner. It must be a pretty sight to see a white bear beside the foam of a fall, waiting its time to clip out a silvery grilse or salmon.
The process of discharging a cargo of live polar bears is fraught with considerable interest. If they escape their captors’ ropes and chains they go overboard, and as happened here, two got loose and landed at the fish-market steps. Trömso natives are accustomed to visits from all sorts and kinds of people and beasts. Grand Dukes and Laps, walrus, whales, and bears, but not bears at large. They fled, and the bears tucked into the fish stalls, and the bill for their lunch amounted to one hundred kroner (£5, 10s.)—probably any other visitors might have bought all the fish in the market that day for ten kroner. They fortunately took to the water again after their meal, and were recaptured. Once a walrus escaped at Trömso from board-ship, and it also took to the water, and it was also recaptured! It loved the captain’s wife and she whistled to it and it came back.
Our bears’ cages, all tattered wood and iron bars, were lifted, bears and all, by the winch over the side, and of course sank almost to water-level. One of the iron bars was levered up a little with a crowbar, which gave, in Starboard’s case, an opening for his delicate paw, which instantly came out and tore the cage to smithereens, and out he came, and, evidently to his great content, wallowed about in the sea and washed his face, and took a dive or two and rubbed his paws, saying “Bé-waugh” and “B-e-a-r” frequently, and looked perfectly happy and amiable. Just to prevent him swimming ashore and going into the fish-market, we put a stout little rope round his neck, and he continued to enjoy his bath, whilst we made ready a new cage, each batten of which is covered with sheet iron on the inside and has the appearance of strength which I should desire for such an opening ceremony as I have above suggested, if I have to be present. When this cage was in order, our duty was to get the big strop or ring of heavy rope round his waist, so as to haul him out of his bath with our sixty-horse-power winch, and this was done with some escape of steam and some splashing and profuse remarks from the bear. Now he is in his new quarters, into which he cannot get his teeth, and he ruminates peacefully and eats and drinks what is given him. I wonder what his teeth will go into when he first comes out.
Christabel and William we are selling for much moneys by telegraph to a certain millionaire. They will make charming pets and William, as already mentioned, promises to be a musician as well, but they will never attain, in captivity, to the size that Port and Starboard may be expected to attain, for the latter have already spent several years on the floes eating seal galore.
Bears have gone up in price; very few have lately been landed, as far as we can hear, in Northern Europe. Recent years have been rather bad for expeditions. We know of several which have been wrecked; some of the crews are dead.[17] Gisbert is going to hang on with the Fonix at Trömso and may go North again in search of survivors.
Slipping down the Norwegian coast amongst the islands in a passenger steamer feels very luxurious after being in such a small vessel with always a certain amount of risk; and after views of ice and sea, bears and seals day after day, rocks and trees and little farms or fishermen’s houses nestling in the greenery, with mountains and snow-fjeld far behind them are very welcome. There is the “human interest,” which I have previously said has been remarked for its absence in the polar regions by careful observers.
“Starboard”
Photographed by Mr. C. T. McKechnie soon after its arrival in the Edinburgh Zoological Park.
... What a country this is to breed real men. Every boy in every one of these isolated farms must of necessity learn to row, to ride, to sail, to hunt, ski, handle an axe, do iron and wood work, besides his farming; and for one pound sterling a year he can be in touch with the centres of European news and civilisation. On the telephone—eighteen kroner a year they pay to send messages under the sea and over forests and fjelds to their township, say forty or fifty miles distant, whilst we belated people in these backwoods of Berwickshire have to pay nine pounds a year for the same convenience.
As I write we see two such natives enviably employed—two small boys—the day’s work done on the farm, they don’t go to school in summer—they are now managing a boat and fishing. With the glass I can see the bow is almost full of cod, haddock, and some codling. The elder boy looks about twelve years old. He pulls up two at a time, shimmering, iridescent, pink-tinted haddock. Who could believe the rather plain grey fish we see in the fishmonger’s could ever look like a chunk of mother-of-pearl?
Woods and islands, rugged mountains, grey fjelds, with snow in patches, pass hour after hour, till we come to the fiord of the old capital—Trondhjem Fiord. It reminds us of our Firth of Forth, on a larger scale, with more woods. For me Norway begins at Trondhjem going north, and ends there coming south. Southern Norway seems to have no tradition, no direct appeal to me. In the soft distance I can see height after height fading into the distance; to the north and east with the glass I can see the woods of Sundal in Stordal, where we have hunted elk, and seen the golden birch leaves falling, and the snowflakes drifting down into the green depths of the swaying fir woods. The water of the fiord is tinted with Stordal River. I recall its salmon and hear again its solemn roar when the mist hung low in the glen. What days of exertion these were, climbing and descending under the dripping pines, two men and a hound, stealthily, silently, with hardly a word for hours, watching through the woods for the gaunt form of a bull elk, days of such fatigue and nights of profound repose, alike haunted with the sweet melancholy of the saetar songs.
Why do such merry, cheerful people as bonders’ daughters sing such sad songs? Here is what I remember of one that haunts me now.
Its rhythm just suits your steps if you hum it, not loud enough to disturb an elk as you slowly ascend, step by step, through the wet pines in the morning to the high grounds, and the quick part helps you returning as you swing down the last of the hill-side from one red-leafed rowan to the next, down to the level; and months after, it comes to you when you are in a street and you see the woods and the river winding a silver thread at the foot of the glen and the welcome smoke of the log-built farm. Once I hummed it unconsciously on a dull, wet day at the quayside in Hull, standing amongst emigrants looking at the swirling and muddy river, and a Norse woman standing near with a white handkerchief for headdress began to hum it too—we could not speak to each other, but our thoughts were harking back to saetar and glen and hill—the charm of Norway.
Another haunting folk-song I heard here years ago—I must put it down to preserve it—at Vibstadt, Namsen Valley, on a hot midday I heard the bonders’ daughters sing it as they weeded lettuce in the blaze of light. They called it Barden’s Dod (The Death of the Bard), and we have the same air in our Highlands; it dates back to prehistoric times; and we call it “The Minstrel of the MacDonalds.” No one that I know sings or plays it now at home. But a year or two ago, on the top of a mountain in Southern Norway, as we rested at lunch, a Norse hunting companion began singing it, and I started, and he smiled and explained his wife was one of the little girls who had given it to me in Northern Norway twenty years before. The Norwegian words, I am told by a Norwegian antiquarian, belong to the Viking period.