Twenty Minutes of Bear Watch on the Shore

Story Time is original short fiction. The characters, places and events in this story are invented.

The bear came round the point at 23:41, walking the tideline the way a man walks a pavement he owns, and I said, "Everybody up, please, back to the boat," in the same voice I use for lifejacket straps.

Eleven of them. Joar had the inflatable nosed onto the gravel with the outboard ticking over, one hand on the tiller, the other already lifting his radio. Six per trip. Joar's rule, the boat's rule, the rule of water that is three degrees in August and would stop your heart before your jacket finished inflating.

I put the binoculars up. Young male, yellowed at the shoulders, belly dark where he'd been swimming. Four hundred metres, maybe a little less. His head was low and swinging, reading the kelp line like a newspaper. Not running. Not interested in us yet. Interested in everything, which is worse, because everything includes us.

"Is that—" said the woman from Rotterdam, and her husband said, "Yes," and they both began walking towards the boat with their poles held out in front of them as if the poles were the important part.

Good. Ten of them were moving. The light was the flat grey-gold it goes at this end of the season, the sun low over the mouth of the fjord, the cliffs behind us streaked white and loud with kittiwakes. The tide was slack. Nothing on the whole shore was hurrying except me.

Graham Ackroyd from Leeds was not moving.

He was kneeling twenty metres up the beach beside a small cairn he'd built when we landed, three stones, careful. Between his knees he had a green plastic container about the size of a tea caddy. He had told me about it on the ship, the second night, over the bad coffee: his father had come here in 1961 with a survey party, measured this coast with a theodolite and a notebook, and brought home one photograph of this beach with the bird cliff behind it. Graham had spent his whole working life as a surveyor in Yorkshire. He'd matched the photograph to the map himself. This was the spot. I had said it was beautiful, and I had meant it, and I had told him he would have fifteen minutes.

"Mr Ackroyd. We're leaving now."

"Two minutes."

"There's a bear on the beach."

"I saw." He did not look up. He had a handful of grey in his fist and he was looking along a line only he could see, from the cairn to a white rock near the water. "Three stations. He'd always close a triangle. You don't leave it open, you've got no check on your error." He let the ash go, low, so the breeze wouldn't take it back in his face. "That's two."

I looked down the beach. Three hundred. The bear had stopped at a dead fulmar and was moving it about with his nose.

"Ingvild," Joar said on the radio, though he was thirty metres away. He uses the radio when he wants it on the record.

"First six," I said. "The slowest. Go."

I sorted them by knees. The Rotterdam couple, the retired teacher from Ohio with the new hip, the two sisters from Lyon, the young man with the very large camera who looked at me as though I'd insulted the camera. Into the boat, onto the tubes, hands on the ropes. Joar backed off the gravel in a long grey curl of water and opened the throttle towards the ship, which sat at anchor out in the fjord looking much farther away than it ever had before.

"Eight minutes," Joar said. "Maybe nine."

Nine minutes. Five people left on the beach, and me. I put the other four in a tight knot at the waterline where I could see them without turning my head: a Danish woman, her teenage son, a quiet man from Osaka who had photographed every lichen on the island, and his wife, who had her hand on his sleeve. "Stay together. Stay big. Don't run. If I say walk into the water, you walk into the water."

"Into the water," said the Danish boy, as if he were writing it down.

I unslung the rifle and worked the bolt and felt the round go home. It is a sound I hear every morning when I check the action on the ship, and every morning I take the round back out again at night and count it. Four seasons. I have the same round I started with in my head, though of course it isn't. The signal pistol hung from the lanyard round my neck, heavy against my sternum, a cartridge already in it.

Two hundred and twenty. The bear had left the fulmar and was coming on, unhurried, pausing to put his nose up into the breeze. He'd found us now. You can see the exact moment, a stillness in the head, and then the body follows the nose because that is what bodies are for.

I know the rules the way I know my own phone number. Inside fifty metres, a warning shot. If he keeps coming, the signal pistol, the shouting, the whole theatre. And after that, the other thing, the thing that ends with a report to the Governor's office and men from Longyearbyen with a trailer and a tarp, and a young bear on a steel table so someone can write down how much he weighed.

"Mr Ackroyd." I walked up to him and stood between him and the bear. "I am asking you properly now."

"He came here when he was twenty-three," Graham said. "He talked about it every Christmas. The light. The noise of the birds. My mother used to leave the room." His hands were shaking, not with cold. The container was still half full. "I'm not doing it badly. I'm not throwing him off a beach like rubbish because something's walking towards me."

One hundred and fifty. I could hear the gravel under the bear's paws now, a soft crunching, exactly like a person.

I could pick Graham up. He was sixty-eight and not big. I could pick him up and he would drop the container, and the lid would come off, and his father would go into the gravel any old way, and Graham would sit in the boat with his empty hands and say nothing for the rest of the voyage, and possibly the rest of his life.

I knelt down beside him. The stones were wet and cold through my trousers.

"Show me the third station," I said.

He looked at me for the first time. Then he pointed, a line to a flat place just above the tide wrack, maybe eight metres off. "There. That closes it."

"Give me some."

He tipped ash into my glove. It was heavier than I expected, and coarser, with small hard pieces in it. Behind me there was a crunch of gravel that was not the bear, and the Danish woman knelt down on Graham's other side and held out her hand without saying anything, and then her son, and then the couple from Osaka, the wife first. Graham poured into each palm. Nobody spoke. We shuffled down the line on our knees like people looking for a lost earring, and at the flat place we opened our hands one after the other, low to the stones, and the ash lay grey on grey and you could not have told it from the beach.

"Closed," Graham said. He put the lid on the empty container. Thirty seconds, perhaps. Not more.

"Good," I said. "Now walk to the water."

Sixty metres. I stood up. The boat was coming back, a white feather of wake still a long way out. The bear had his head up and was watching us with an expression I can only call attention, the way a dog watches a dropped sandwich. Fifty-five.

A flare fired into the air goes up, bursts, and comes down where the wind takes it, which on this beach was behind the bear, and a bear with something burning and spitting behind him moves away from it. Towards us.

I stepped down to the waterline, raised the signal pistol, and fired it flat and low across the slack grey water between us and him.

It hit about twenty metres short of him and kept going, skipping, hissing, a bright red fury on the surface throwing up smoke and steam, screaming the way they do. The kittiwakes went up off the cliff in one white sheet. The bear stopped as if he'd walked into glass. He lowered his head at the burning thing, swung it once, twice, and then turned his whole long body and walked back the way he had come, not fast, offended, along the tideline towards the point.

Joar ran the boat straight up onto the gravel. "In," he said, and we got in, Graham last, with his container held against his chest, and I pushed us off and swung myself over the tube with the rifle across my knees.

Nobody brushed their trousers. Every one of us had wet grey grit ground into both knees, and the Osaka man looked down at his, and then at his wife's, and left it. Joar looked at all those knees and then at me and didn't ask.

It was 00:01. The beach went small. The bear was a pale mark at the far end of it, walking north with his back to us, and halfway to the ship I opened the bolt and caught the round as it came out, and held it in my glove for a moment before I put it back in my pocket, where I would count it tonight.