Information »Always North«

Vicki Jarrett’s »Always North« finds a strong metaphor for the eeriness of the rapidly
changing climate and for the destructive power of humans. The short story works with
elements of thriller and mystery and thereby achieves a lot of suspense.
The short story tells the tale of a ship’s expedition into an endless sea of ice and a mysterious
encounter between the crew and a polar bear. As the ship pushes on further and further into the
ice, mysterious incidents start to happen more frequently. Dead bodies of animals, skinned and
headless, probably seals, suddenly appear on board. There are technical problems, the ship’s
machines have lost their temporal coding, it seems time can no longer be measured the way it
usually is. Suddenly a huge polar bear manages to get on board. All the food has disappeared
from the galley. The crew is faced with death, either being killed by the polar bear or starving
to death. But the bear doesn’t attack. He sees allies in the sailors, hunters, who like him, want
to hunt seals. It turns out: the skinned seals were an offering to the crew. A strange alliance is
formed between bear and human, in which the crew becomes more and more like the bear.
Vicky Jarrett then developed the short story into a novel »Always North« (Unsung Stories, 2019).
The first part of the novel consists of log entries by a software engineer, Isobel, who is part of
an expedition into the polar ice in the arctic summer of 2025 with her partner Grant, in order
to search for undiscovered oil fields there for her company. Izzy is a young and restless woman,
with a variable sense of morality, who excuses her participation in the semi-legal expedition into
the protected arctic wilderness by saying that someone else would just take her place it if she
weren’t doing it. But the expedition seems to be ill-fated. Even before they leave, the company
receives a visit from a group of climate activists, who confront them about their shady business
and the damage that an expedition like this might cause to the polar bears’ environment.
Despite all the objections, the Polar Horizon sets out to sea, following the channel made by a
nuclear powered ice-breaker in the dangerous polar region.
In the middle of the ice, the crew encounter a mysterious polar bear, who is supposedly responsible
for the death of the captain’s brother 20 years before. Inexplicably, the bear is still alive,
apparently defying the laws of nature. When there’s a problem with a sonobuoy, Isobel and some
of the other crew members are forced to leave the ship and, by doing so, come closer to the polar
bear. They barely manage to escape its claws. Shortly afterwards, the ice-breaker disappears,