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thing. None of the sailors would skin it and the captain told the cook to keep it for me and make me eat it as a punishment. They all gathered round to
watch, thinking I’d be sick, like I was on the voyage through the Norwegian Sea. I skinned the animal myself and threw it into a pot and boiled it for a while. Then I cut it up and fried it
in a pan. It tasted a bit like beef to me, maybe a bit stronger and more sinewy. But it was as good as anything else I’d eaten on board the HMS
Pickle
. I cured the pelt with salt and
made a hat out of it, with the tail hanging down the back of my neck, and they called me ‘Beaver Bob’ after that. I had that hat until I went aboard the
Ark Royal
and some
thieving bugger stole it.
    Once we got round to Vardo in the Barents Sea, we was given some shore leave. Now, there was nothing much to do in Vardo, but it did have the northernmost illegal boozer in the world – so
where do you think we went? It was just a wooden shack, really, and the choice of drinks was very limited. It was mostly stuff called akvavit and it tasted like petrol. We was drinking this akvavit
for a couple of hours when an Eskimo came in. He started giving it the big ’un about how he’d been six hundred miles over the polar ice cap with his reindeer and how he’d hunted
sea-lions and bears and narwhales on the way. I was very drunk by then, so I called him a liar. He turned to me with a serious scowl on his scarred face.
    ‘Who call me liar?’
    ‘I did.’
    With that, he had me by the neck and a hunting knife up to my throat.
    ‘You be dead if you not just a boy.’
    ‘I’m a better hunter than you.’
    Tommo and some of the other sailors stood up and the Eskimo put me down. He laughed.
    ‘We see.’
    He drank with us and, during the course of the session, I must’ve agreed to go out hunting with him the next day, even though I couldn’t remember doing any such thing.
    We slept on the floor of the hut and, as it’s winter time and mostly dark, it’s difficult to tell whether it’s day or night. The Eskimo wakes me after a few hours.
    ‘We hunt.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Mainland.’
    We goes across a stretch of water between the island of Vardoya and the Varanger Peninsula in a boat called an
umiak
, made out of driftwood and waterproofed with seal oil. We paddle it,
one of us either side, in the twilight of the northern winter and with him at the bow. He has an old over/under combo-gun, which combines a .22mag rifle barrel on the bottom, with a 12-bore shotgun
barrel on the top, and I has nothing but a knife.
    We tether the boat when we gets across and starts to trek inland. The country’s flat, without much cover, and I can’t see how we’re going to bag anything. The sun’s
scarce at this time of year when, suddenly, we puts up a brace of grouse. The Eskimo’s a crack shot and he brings down both birds with his hybrid gun. We trek on, with me carrying the grouse,
and the terrain becoming more marshy, with trees now and brown gorse, and I catch glimpses of animals in the distance – reindeer and wolverine and arctic fox, along with all kinds of birds,
many of which I ain’t never seen before and can’t identify.
    The Eskimo gives me the gun to test me out and I shoot an arctic goose. But the sound of that shot attracts the attention of some men across a stretch of water. They start to shout and wave
their fists at us.
    ‘What’s up with them?’
    ‘Better to go now.’
    ‘Are they gamekeepers?’
    ‘What is gamekeeper?’
    He starts to jog back in the direction we came from. I jog after him, carrying the dead birds. I find out later that some species on the peninsula, like arctic fox, are protected because
they’re being hunted to extinction for their pelts. I also find out there’s territorial rivalry between some Inuit tribes and the Sami. So the people who are shouting at us might be
some kind of rangers or other native types. I never get to know for sure.
    Anyway,