Framed poster
An arctic tern framed poster, with Hakon Bendiksen inside: black cap, white cheeks, coral-red bill. He is number 36 of Animal Kinhood, my series of animals who dress and live like people, and he is a carpenter: he shims and relevels the houses of Longyearbyen, in Svalbard, raised on piles that the ground keeps moving.
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Foto: Peter Pearsall / USFWS (dominio público) Sterna paradisaea
In August the wood moves more.
Breeds on Arctic and subarctic coasts, islets and coastal tundra — Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, northern Scandinavia and Russia, the British Isles, the Canadian Arctic and Alaska — on shingle beaches and predator-free islets. Winters in the Southern Ocean, tied to the sea ice and to the most productive waters of the southern hemisphere.
He walks into the house, stands in the entryway and raps twice on the wall with his knuckles. Then he waits a second, listening, before he touches anything. He does it in houses he isn't going to fix too, and in his mother's he does it at the same spot, next to the back door frame. Nobody remarks on it anymore. If you ask him what he is listening for, he shrugs and moves on.
There was one in the bottom row that kept going. He shimmed it twice — the second time lying down and opening it up from below — and in the next fall measurement the number had grown again. A pile had come off its axis and that was no longer a job for shims. They emptied the house. The measurements of that house are still in his notebook, with a line drawn under the last one. He doesn't open that page again: when he is looking for another, he flicks past it with his thumb without looking.
