北极并非是所有人的假期首选，但它的确有非常多吸引人的地方。对于那些想要尝试别人不曾做过的事的人而言，这大概是你能到达的最遥远的地方。对于那些追求极限体验的人而言，这里有着这颗星球上最严酷的生存环境。对于野生动植物爱好者而言，这是一次近距离观看世界上一些最令人惊叹的生物的机会。而对于那些关注新闻的人来说，这场极北之地的旅行，是为了赶在全球变暖对这片惊人又脆弱的土地造成不可挽回的伤害之前，来到这里亲自看一眼。
一起去看北极熊
作者：Emma Duncan
译者：王乐颖 & 文诗韵
校对：李林治
编辑：徐唱
Hurry While Stocks Last
纪一次匆忙却也回味无穷的北极之旅
本文选自 1843 | 取经号原创翻译
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It’s near midnight and we’re sitting in an inflatable rubber boat a few yards from the edge of the ice, watching a distant polar bear. He’s not putting on much of a show – staring glumly into a hole, waiting for dinner to pop its head up – but there’s a lot else going on: a couple of reindeer, moving slowly across the frozen land; an Arctic fox, pale brown against the white, running fast; a black guillemot, with smart white patches on his wings,
paddling
around our little boat with his bright red legs visible in the clear water; seals lying fatly on the ice, their fur glistening golden in the sun.
时近午夜，我们坐在离冰面边缘约十几英尺的充气艇上，望着远处的一只北极熊。它没什么动静——只是闷闷不乐地盯着一个冰洞，等着它的晚餐从洞口中伸出头来。但周围的景象却很精彩：一对驯鹿正踱步穿过冻土，一只毛色浅棕和雪白相间的北极狐飞奔而过。一只黑色的海鸥正在我们的小艇旁
蹚着水
，翅膀上有着漂亮的白色斑点，水里扑腾的鲜红色脚掌在清澈的水中十分显眼。胖乎乎的海豹瘫在冰面上，毛发在阳光下闪闪发亮，透着金色的光。
paddle
/'pæd(ə)l/ v. to walk or stand with no shoes or socks in shallow water in the sea, a lake, etc 蹚水
The bear, curious or hungry, lumbers towards the edge of the ice and wanders up and down, peering irritably at us. Then he tenses as he sees what he has been waiting for: a bearded seal in the water in front of him. The seal slides towards him; the bear readies himself to dive; the seal bobs a little closer, and the bear plunges in. But the seal is too far away, so the bear clambers back onto the ice. A close run thing for the seal, I think: that’s the last we’ll see of it. But it reappears, and the bear
flounders
into the water again. Then another seal turns up. The two approach the bear in turn, disappearing when he dives. He falls for it every time.
那只北极熊，大概是好奇或是饿了，慢吞吞地朝我们走来，在冰面边缘来来回回地走，非常恼怒地端详着我们。在翘首以待许久后，它看到了水里那只留着小胡须的海豹，变得紧张起来。海豹快速游向它，它准备好一跃而下；海豹只是靠近了一点，它便一头扎进了水中。但海豹离的太远了，北极熊只好手脚并用，十分笨拙地爬回冰面上。我以为这将是我们最后一次看到这功亏一篑的捕食。但它再次发生了，北极熊再一次
扑腾
入水。另一只海豹出现了。两只海豹轮流靠近北极熊，然后在它跳进水中的瞬间消失不见。每一次，北极熊都会中计。
flounder
/'flaʊndər/ v. to struggle to move or get somewhere in water, mud, etc 挣扎
We sit silently in our boats about 20 yards away, barely moving or breathing. The guides keep their guns to hand, but don’t seem worried. Bears are fast on land but slow in the sea.
我们坐在距离20码以外的小船上，安静地几乎一动不动，仿佛呼吸也静止了。向导们手里拿着枪，但他们看起来并不担忧。北极熊在陆地上敏捷，在海里却很慢。
Fed up, the bear wanders off to have a go at some eider duck, but they fly away contemptuously. And the seals haven’t had enough yet. They come closer, closer, so in he goes again, and again, for an hour or more. The seals are either trying to exhaust him, which would be a slow but effective way to kill a predator in a place where energy and survival are so closely linked, or amusing themselves playing chicken. Since it can’t be in their interest to use that much energy to reduce one bear’s chance of survival marginally, I reckon they have to be doing it to amuse themselves. Slipping around in the water as they do certainly looks fun. When we leave at 1am, they’re still at it,
taunting
the weary bear.
北极熊受够了，晃荡着去了绒鸭那儿寻找捕食的机会，但绒鸭却十分不以为意地飞走了。另一边，海豹们还没玩够。它们越来越靠近，引诱北极熊一次又一次入水，来回持续了一个多小时。这些海豹要么是在试图耗尽北极熊的力气，毕竟在这片土地上能量和生存是紧密的联系，所以这可能是个缓慢却有效的法子，要么这些海豹就是在逗弄北极熊给自己找乐子。鉴于耗费这么多能量只是为了稍微降低北极熊的生存机率这对于海豹而言并无获益，所以我估计它们一定是在给自己找乐子。看着海豹在水里自由来回穿梭是极有趣的。当我们凌晨1点离开时，它们还在那儿
戏弄
那只疲惫的北极熊。
taunt
/tɔːnt/ v. to try to make sb angry or upset by saying unkind things about them, laughing at their failures, etc 戏弄
I slip gratefully into bed and shudder for a long time, realising that the excitement has taken my mind off how very cold I am. It is my first day in the Arctic.
我十分满足地滑进了被窝，并在被窝里被冻的发抖了很久。我意识到兴奋占据了我的大脑，让我根本没意识到我到底有多冷。这是我来到北极的第一天。
A holiday in the Arctic isn’t on the top of everybody’s list, but it has multiple attractions. For those who want to do something others haven’t done, it’s about as far off the grid as you can go. For those who want extreme experiences, it offers one of the toughest environments on the planet. For those with a penchant for wildlife, it provides the chance to see some of the world’s most remarkable creatures up close. And for those who pay attention to the news, a trip to the Earth’s northernmost regions provides the chance to catch a glimpse of this remarkable – and fragile – environment before global warming changes it
irrevocably
.
北极并非是所有人的假期首选，但它的确有非常多吸引人的地方。对于那些想要尝试别人不曾做过的事的人而言，这大概是你能到达的最遥远的地方。对于那些追求极限体验的人而言，这里有着这颗星球上最严酷的生存环境。对于野生动植物爱好者而言，这是一次近距离观看世界上一些最令人惊叹的生物的机会。而对于那些关注新闻的人来说，这场极北之地的旅行，是为了赶在全球变暖对这片惊人又脆弱的土地造成
不可挽回的
伤害
之前，来到这里亲自看一眼。
irrevocably
/ɪ'rɛvəkəblɪ/ adv. that cannot be changed 不可逆转地
That last factor, says Will Bolsover, founder of Natural World Safaris, the company I travelled with, is his customers’ main motivation. “The polar ice caps are receding. People want to see them now,” he says. Given the nature of the threat, it is not obvious that visiting the Arctic on a boat that uses 12 tonnes of diesel – enough to drive my car nearly nine times round the Earth – in ten days is in the ecosystem’s best interests; still, it is a great way of seeing the place. Being on a small boat rather than a cruise ship gets you close to the wildlife. And Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago 650 miles from the North Pole – offers some of the northernmost land on the planet and thus a chance to see the land mammals as well as sea creatures, and the flora as well as the fauna, that live in this extraordinary environment.
自然世界之旅——我此次旅行的同行者——的创始人威尔·博尔索弗说，最后的这一点是他的顾客来北极旅游的主要动机。“北极冰盖在融化。人们想现在看一眼。”考虑到威胁的本质，在10天里花费12吨柴油乘船来北极旅游对生态系统并无好处这个事实不易察觉，毕竟这差不多够我驾车环游世界9次了。即便如此，这依旧不失为游览此地的好方式。乘坐一艘小艇，可以比坐游轮更加近距离地观赏野生动物。而距离北极650英里的挪威斯瓦巴特群岛——这片星球上最北端的地方——令我们有机会观赏陆地上的哺乳动物、海洋生物、以及生活在这边非凡土地上的动植物群。
Our trip was structured much like a traditional African safari. Our lodge was the Freya, a Swedish class 1A icebreaker built in 1980 for maintaining lighthouses. She had made a smooth transition from her previous, tougher life into the leisure economy thanks to a recent, and very thorough, refurbishment. Without being flashy, she was so comfortable that when I got home, I realised I needed a new bed. The crew – Swedish, but all with good English – kept the engine
purring
and the passengers warm, safe and exceedingly well fed.
我们的旅行安排跟传统的非洲旅行差不多。我们的住处在芙蕾雅——一艘1980年生产用作维护灯塔的瑞典1A级破冰船。这艘破旧的船在最近经历了一番彻底的重新装修后，已经顺利变成了休闲经济的住处。它没有浮夸的外表，它是如此舒适，以至于当我回家后意识到需要换一张新的床。船员是瑞典人，但英语都说得很流利，他们保证了引擎
轰隆作响
，让乘客们感到安全、温暖，并获得极好的饮食照料。
purr
/pɜː(r)/ v. to make a low continuous sound; to move making such a sound 轰隆作响
Our jeeps were Zodiacs, the rubber boats kept on the Freya’s deck and lifted by crane into the sea whenever the guides – Ronald Visser and Annette Scheepstra, serious Dutch academics – spotted something interesting through their binoculars. Then we would clamber into the Zodiacs in our spacesuit-type protective clothing and zip round the coastline, up fjords too shallow for the Freya, getting thrillingly close to animals, birds, glaciers and icebergs.
我们的交通工具是橡皮艇Zodiacs，它绑在芙蕾雅甲板上，每当向导罗纳德·维瑟和安妮特·斯齐普斯特拉这两位严肃的荷兰学者在望远镜里发现有趣的东西，起重机就会把它吊到海里。然后，我们就要穿着宇航服一样的保护服，爬进Zodiacs里面，快速前往海岸线，来到对芙蕾雅来说的浅水区，准备好和动物、鸟儿、冰川和冰山来一次令人激动的亲密接触。
My companions were an international lot – British, American, Canadian and Taiwanese. Some of them offered a delightful insight into worlds and places of which I knew nothing. Some did not. The enforced intimacy with fellow passengers on a small boat threatened to be a downside, but the problem was mitigated by three factors: the comfort of my cabin, into which I retreated with pleasure; the huge number of books I had loaded onto my Kindle, with which I passed the time between Zodiac outings; and the relaxing effect of being unplugged from the modern world, which made me uncharacteristically tolerant. After a week spent with no internet access or phone connection, my urge to throw overboard the woman who cried “Wow! Coool! That’s so greeaaat!” at every passing iceberg had dissipated.
我的旅伴来自世界各地：英国、美国、加拿大，还有台湾。他们中的一些人和我分享地球上某个角落我不知道的有趣知识；有些人则没有。被迫和一同出游的人在一条小船上朝夕相处是个缺点，但问题被三个因素缓解了：舒适的客舱是我的享乐一隅；Kindle上下载的大量书籍，是不乘Zodiac外出时的消遣；还有完全从现代世界隔绝后的放松，让我的脾气变得异乎寻常的好。在度过了没有互联网和电话的一周之后，那个在经过每一座冰山时都惊呼：“哇！好酷啊！棒极啦！”的女人已经消失了。
The guides treated us somewhat like children at the seaside. We needed to have one long outing a day, and sometimes two, to keep us amused. Sometimes we would be woken in the middle of the night to check out a promising beast that the guides had spotted; though since there was no darkness, the distinction between day and night was artificial. When there weren’t bears around, we would visit bird-nesting cliffs, or a glacier, or a solitary walrus lying on an ice floe, tusks to the sky, enjoying the sun in much the same pose as many a portly pink gentleman on a British beach.
在海上，导游们像对待小孩子似的对待我们。我们需要一天出去一次，有时是两次，才能开开心心。有时候我们会在晚上被叫醒，去看导游可能发现的一只野兽，不过由于北极一直是极昼，昼和夜的分隔似乎只是我们的感觉。周边没有熊可看的时候，我们会去参观鸟儿结巢的悬崖，或是冰川，或是一只孤零零躺在浮冰上的海象，它大牙朝天享受着阳光，姿势好像一个英国海滩上粉嘟嘟的绅士。
There were other entertainments. The ship’s engineer invited me to join him in a sauna. I went in with my swimming costume on; but he and the cook were in there naked, so, keen to follow Nordic sauna etiquette, I took my swimsuit off. Then the captain turned up in his trunks, so I wondered whether it was all an elaborate joke against the Brit. But they were Swedish, and serious and kind, so I doubted it. When the crew went into the sea for an Arctic dip, I followed; the endorphin rush from the shock of leaping into near-freezing water kept me high for hours.
我们还有其他娱乐活动。船上的工程师邀请我和他一起蒸桑拿。我身穿泳衣欣然前往，但他和船上的大厨什么也没穿。所以，为了学习北欧人蒸桑拿的风俗，我脱掉了泳衣。结果，船长也来了，还穿着游泳时的短裤衩，所以我想这会不会是一个专门为英国人精心设计的笑话。但他们是瑞典人，而且既严肃又友善，所以我不太相信。当船员跳进大海享受北极潜泳时，我加入了他们；跳进快结冰的水让脑内的内啡肽急剧升高，我兴奋了好几个小时。
Although the trip was advertised as a polar-bear safari, bear-expectations were kept low: we were told that it was possible that we would see none. But, in the event, we saw so many that I became
blasé
, and stopped getting out of my bed at the 3am knock. That is a problem with safaris: the novelty wears off. Your third polar bear looks very much like your second, which looks like your first.
尽管旅行的广告上说这次旅行是北极熊探索之旅，但我们对于北极熊的期待一直很低；我们被告知有可能一只都看不到。但结果我们看到了非常多的北极熊，后来简直有些
麻木
了，我也不再每天早上三点钟起床看熊了。这是探险旅行的一个通病：新奇感会慢慢消失。你看到的第三只北极熊和第二只北极熊很像，第二只又和第一只很像。
blasé
/'bla:zei/ adj. not impressed, excited or worried about sth, because you have seen or experienced it many times before （对某事物）不稀罕，认为司空见惯
What didn’t wear off was the joy of the landscape. Svalbard’s Dutch name, Spitsbergen, means “jagged rocks”, and the striated mountains powdered with snow make ever-changing black-and-white patterns. The snow reaches down to the sea, and the white meets the smooth blue water, and the sun glitters on all of it. I found the clear, silent brightness of it endlessly uplifting.
但看到美丽风光的喜悦一直没有消退。斯瓦巴特群岛的荷兰名是Spitsbergen，意思是“嶙峋的岩石”，线条分明的山脉上覆盖着皑皑白雪，创造出一幅不断变幻的黑白画卷。白雪一直延绵到海面，和缎子般光滑的蓝色海水相交，阳光就在海面闪烁跳跃。我想，这幅清澈且沉默的明亮画面，会永远鼓舞人心。
The profusion of bears was partly luck, and partly because, global-warming notwithstanding, the polar-bear population appears to be growing. It is hard to count a white animal in a white landscape, when it can travel many miles a day and its enormous territory is divided between four nations, but it seems likely that the population is still bouncing back after centuries of hunting. Walruses are easier to count: their numbers have certainly increased dramatically since the 1950s, when there were only a few hundred left in Svalbard. At the last count, there were nearly 4,000.
看到大量北极熊一半是运气，一半是因为，尽管全球在变暖，北极熊的数量似乎仍在不断增多。虽然在白茫茫的土地上搜寻白色的动物本就困难，而且这片广袤的土地还被分成四个国家，但似乎在经历了几个世纪的捕猎之后，北极熊的数量还在反弹。海象的数量清点起来就容易一些，过去在斯瓦巴特群岛上只有几百只海象，但从20世纪50年代起，它们的数量就有了大幅提升。最新估算显示，数量在4000左右。
In the short term, it is not the supply of wildlife that is under threat in the Arctic: it is the peace. For some of the trip our ship was the only vessel in that vast, white emptiness, but for much of it we had company. Sometimes there was a sailing boat in the distance, sometimes a cruise ship. Tourist numbers have nearly doubled in the past decade, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t do so again in the next one. According to Katy Kao, a Taiwanese member of the party, “the Chinese are crazy for the Arctic. They have three places on their checklist: the Himalayas, the Antarctic and the Arctic.” She has no interest in the Himalayas but has already done the Arctic three times and Antarctica once.
短期内，受到威胁的不是北极野生动物数量，而是宁静的环境。在旅程中，有时候我们是唯一的一艘船，白色的巨大空间；但在大部分时间，我们都是有伴的。有时候，远处会有航海船，有时候则是一艘游轮。游客数量过去十年间翻了一番，而且游客没理由不再来一次北极。这次旅行中的一个台湾人凯蒂·高说：“中国人对北极很狂热。他们的旅游必去清单上有三个地方：喜马拉雅山、北极和南极。”她对喜马拉雅山没有兴趣，但已经去过三次北极，一次南极。
When we head towards the best place for a walrus encounter, there are already three boats there, so we make for another beach. It is a less reliable walrus haven, but luck is with us. We pull the Zodiacs onto the shingle about 50 yards from a pile of them. They slowly start to
lumber
into the sea, and I assume that’s the last we’ll see of them. But instead of disappearing, half a dozen of them roll towards us, and stop about four or five metres away. They are vast, Jabba the Hut (1) creatures, weighing over a tonne; their skins are warty and knobbly; their tusks are maybe a metre long. We lie on the beach, taking pictures of them; they wallow in the shallows, taking stock of us. We click and whirr; they stare and snort. After 20 minutes or so, they get bored, roll into the waves and make off into the deep; we pile into the Zodiacs and return to the Freya. There is a pleasing equality about the meeting: both parties are intrigued by the other’s weirdness. But for the walruses, as for us, strange creatures are interesting only when they’re scarce. As the numbers of humans rise, their novelty will wear off.
我们来到看海象的最佳地点时，那里已经有三艘船，所以我们去了另一个海滩。这个地方海象不像前一个多，但是我们运气很好。我们把Zodiacs拴在离一群海象50码的卵石海滩上。它们慢慢地朝着海洋
挪动
，我猜这是我们最后一次看到海象了。但它们没有消失在茫茫大海中，有六只海象反而开始慢慢靠近我们，在离我们四到五米的地方停下了。它们是像星球大战里赫特人贾巴那样巨大的生物，重量超过一吨；皮肤疙疙瘩瘩，牙齿大概有一米长。我们躺在海滩上，不停拍照；它们在背阴处打滚儿，打量着我们。我们噼里啪啦按着快门；海象一边盯着我们，一边哼哼。大概20分钟以后，它们就烦了，一滚两滚滚到了海里，潜向深处；我们走向Zodiacs，回到芙蕾雅上去。这次照面双方都被彼此的古怪所吸引，都很高兴。海象和人一样，看见少的东西才觉得有趣。看见的人一多，新鲜劲就过去了。
lumber
/'lʌmbə(r)/ v.to move in a slow, heavy and awkward way 缓慢吃力地移动
Emma Duncan是 《1843》 的编辑及《经济学人》前副编辑
摄影：NICK COBBING
地图： LLOYD PARKER, 其余摄影： RONALD J.W. VISSER
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