“Look,” said David. “I’m going over here to this poster to look at this woman baking in the tropical sun on the beach. I’m going to channel my thoughts toward warmth and sun-tans and when you two have finished this discussion, you can call me over.” David walked to the poster and began to search his pockets for change for the candy machine.
Beryl noticed Butler watching the poster woman’s wet breasts as though they were going to do something interesting. “What happened to the snowmobile group?” she asked. He turned his head back to look at her.
“The snowmobiles died the second day. They were two hundred miles from Churchill. Without the machines, they couldn’t pull all the food and shelter they needed. Jean-Claude got three of the five of them out alive.”
A small man stepped in the door, closed it behind him. David walked back from the candy machine. The man paced toward the three of them with his hand held out. He walked in a painful and methodical way, something wrong with his right hip, a slight stiffness. Beryl knew just from looking that he’d left several bad situations by walking exactly that way for many many miles. He’d outlived even the sled dogs.
She would never have guessed he was only twenty years old. The harshness of the short but constant summer sun had bleached his eyebrows a pure white. His face moved stiffly as the faces of older people who have lived by the sea their entire lives. His skin blushed a slow pink except for three white spots on his cheeks the size of quarters. The pinker the rest of his features became, the more dead white the spots seemed. She realized they were caused by frostbite. She did not know if the blush came from the heat of the room or from having to greet them.
He took her hand. She felt a dry roughened palm like the raspy skin on the paw of a dog. She knew her own hand must feel soft and weak in comparison. His eyes rested on her, blue and level. She knew he was wondering how she would react if things went bad, if she would survive. He let go of her hand and shook hands with the others. Beryl wondered what he saw. Jean-Claude nodded, picked up some of their luggage and led the way toward the door. Beryl watched the men follow him. David tried to zip the front of his thin jacket while carrying two bags. The bags bumped him in the chest. He settled his face farther into the jacket’s neck.
Butler yawned and stretched his long arms until his back cracked. Then he grabbed three bags and sauntered out the door into the open.
Beryl touched the palm of the hand that had shaken Jean-Claude’s. Her hand felt soft, with the smooth fingers of a monkey. She could smell the clear air outside now and she felt something loosen inside her. She picked up her own bags and stepped toward the door.
Beryl guessed the temperature outside the terminal was in the low thirties, Fahrenheit. The wind blew about them like the wind she knew. It smelled of the sea, of salt. The air was like what she’d been used to breathing. The cold felt manageable. In the dark, in the car she could sense nothing of Churchill except that the road was very rough and there were no lights of houses visible until they were a hundred yards from the hotel. The hotel had a worn red carpet and a stuffed moose in the hall.
That night as she slept she confused the sheets of the bed with the white arms of a gigantic bear who waltzed her gently across the rolling flat plains of the tundra.
CHAPTER 9
In the morning, she went outside and stood in the parking lot of the hotel. All her life she’d lived where the landscape rose taller than she, cutting off her vision. She’d lived among houses and vacationed in the mountains. She’d driven along roads lined with trees. Here, the land rolled out flat. There were no trees. No buildings outside of town, no fences or power lines, no hedges or long waving grass to distract from the utterly flat line of the land pulling the eye out to the horizon. Most of the lichen and tundra vegetation stood no taller than a well-trimmed lawn. Except for the buildings, she could have been standing in the center of a golf course as wide as China. The clarity of the air hurt her eyes. The smooth horizon didn’t grow blue and hazy with distance. She wondered how far away the horizon was. She felt as if her eyes couldn’t quite focus.
The sky above soared open, clear and heavy with light for the complete circle above her head. The sky was a presence, a startling bright Bermuda-water blue. It stretched bigger by far than anything she’d ever seen. The sky dwarfed the land in size and color and depth. In order to live in this world, Beryl knew she would have to resist the vast width of the sky and remember which part of the world she inhabited.
The town itself huddled against the ground. The one- or two-story prefab houses were all painted in dismal gray, beige and white. They had small windows. The parking lot was dirt. The concrete road heaved with cracks and bumps from winter. In front of the houses were parked pickup trucks and jeeps, vehicles that could drive on these roads and on the tracks past the airport and the town dump. No highways led out of town, for there was no place to drive to. The backyards of the last houses merged with the tundra that rolled outward, uninterrupted for five hundred miles. Everything from cars and fruit to vinyl siding and alcohol was brought in by plane or train. The town earned its income from fish and tourism.
Beryl thought that the buildings drained the surrounding scenery of beauty and balance. The dull colors, the dirt streets, the broken and heaving concrete. On the far side she could see boulders and then the road leading to the town dump, the sea open and gray beyond.
From the start of summer until the sea freezes again sometime in November, there isn’t much for the bears to eat. They prefer to eat seal, are designed to hunt seal from the top of the ice. During the summer, when the ocean has melted, the bears lose up to one-third of their body weight.
Forty miles to the east of Churchill is Cape Churchill. The sea off the cape freezes the earliest of any place on Hudson Bay because of the fresh water pouring into the bay from the Churchill River. In October the bears begin to arrive in the area around Churchill in greater and greater numbers, waiting patiently without food through the months of October and November. They break into deserted cabins and haunt the town dump, licking the insides of old peanut butter jars clean with delicate black tongues. Then wander heavy and ghostlike through the streets of the town at midnight, chuffing thoughtfully to themselves like people with things on their minds. The moment the ice is strong enough to support their weight, they stalk off across it far from humans to their winter hunting grounds, to the frozen ocean and warm seals.
The bears don’t respond predictably to people. Sometimes they run away, short tails flicking up in alarm. Sometimes they step forward, swinging their heads from side to side, sniffing. Sometimes they seek out and stalk humans, drifting behind them silent and white.
The townspeople keep their children and animals inside. Their houses have boarded-up windows, peepholes in doors, back steps with nails and cut glass sprinkled across them. They have a patrol car just for the polar bears. It cruises about at night with searchlights on the top, sirens, infrared binoculars.
When Beryl arrived, no humans had been killed by bears for three years. The townspeople repeated the fact with pride. They valued their tourist trade. Every visitor during October and November went out to the town dump in closed cars to watch the polar bears eat garbage.
The expedition began at the town dump. They would be staying for a week in Churchill to get pictures of the bears who lived on the garbage there. The morning after the team arrived, they drove out in a little Japanese van with a sunroof and no windows along the sides. Already five or six cars were parked by the garbage, no one dumping anything. People in the cars drank coffee and waited, watching for the bears, their windows closed tight. David stood up as soon as the van stopped, got his camera out and began to crank the handle to open the sunroof.
Beryl felt surprise, but said nothing. Here there would be no cage around them. The other two men weren’t even looking out the windows for bears. They were pulling out the coffee thermos and donuts. Cautiously, she peered out the front and back windows. Nothing to see but garbage, stri
pped bodies of cars, old fridges, sea gulls pecking. David stuck his head and camera out of the roof.
He quickly jerked back inside. “You know, I hate when people throw away perfectly good couches. This one’s even a sleeper.” He saw her expression, smiled over at her. “Come on up,” he boomed. “No bears in sight.”
She collected her camera and film and slowly stood up next to him, putting her head out of the hole. She looked around. The garbage lay in piles all about like hills. She didn’t know if she could capture the clarity of the air on film. She found herself staring up at the sky. It shone as blue and hard as a lid. She thought if she had a long enough arm she could reach up and push that arctic sky off and behind would be her own sky, cloudy, soft and insubstantial.
David was filming already. He moved quietly and carefully, his body twisting around as smoothly as a camera dolly, panning across the garbage. His face hung motionless behind the camera, blank. The only tension showed in his left eye, which he squinched closed to see better out the right. As she looked at him now she couldn’t imagine him talking loudly in his booming voice or caring about others as he touched their hands.
A car tire burned hazy black smoke off to her left. She began to photograph the people waiting in the cars. At first they looked curiously at her and David, then they lost interest. She assumed that a lot of camera crews came up here. At the hotel this morning she’d seen a small notice board with WELCOME NATURAL PHOTOGRAPHY TEAM on it, their names spelled out below. Butler still didn’t have a first name. She wondered if he’d told the hotel staff to write it that way or if he’d crept down last night under the cover of darkness and popped out the letters of his first name one by one.
Her name on a public board startled her. She hadn’t yet realized what a small town this was. One thousand people lived in Churchill, the largest human outpost for several hundred miles. It took such effort to live here. In the winter people kept engine block heaters plugged into outlets so the cars would start. The small town was perched on the sea; everything in it smelled of salt.
She was getting some good background pictures in spite of the awkwardness of the gloves she had to wear against the cold. The people all looked off slightly to the left. They talked, sipped coffee and ignored her.
As Beryl shifted the camera, she saw something white to the left of her. She thought it was a refrigerator. She continued to snap photos. After another three pictures, she realized the people were watching the fridge. She turned toward it. Two yards away from her stood a large white bear. Even with the two feet of van added to her own height, the bear towered over her. She’d never seen such a large animal so close. It breathed her smell in, no noise, but she saw its nostrils open and its chest expand. She felt her mind still like the water of a pond.
She remembered her dream, dove down into the van, hitting the back of David’s knees and taking him with her. His camera cracked against the roof as it came through. Looking up she saw a large paw questing about the hole in the roof, black pads, yellow nails. Claws scratched against the metal of the van. From the front seat Butler and Jean-Claude looked back dumbfounded, still holding their coffee.
Beryl jumped up and, keeping her head back, turned the little handle to close the roof. From the half-closed sunroof she heard her first polar bear sound, a small irritated chuff. Then the muffled whump of weight hit the side of the van, knocking Beryl down. She watched out the windshield as the bear stalked slowly away with the fat-bottomed pride of a senator. People in the other cars were laughing.
In that first moment as Beryl had faced the bear, she’d thought it was going to move its paw toward her and they would again begin to dance.
“Shit shit shit,” David said as the bear walked away. “I didn’t get it on film.” He ran to the front of the van and filmed what he could of the bear’s retreat.
Butler began to guess excitedly at the bear’s size. He offered out each of the numbers with pride and possession, as though in guessing the animal’s height or weight, he laid claim to it. “Standing—nine feet tall,” he said. “A thousand pounds. Paws—twelve inches wide. Medium-size one.”
Jean-Claude kept his face turned from the rest of the group while they talked about the bear. So far he hadn’t talked much with any of them. He looked out over the trash in the direction the bear had gone, to where the tundra ran, interrupted only by oceans, for the width of the world.
CHAPTER 10
That second night in the Arctic Beryl dreamed again of the bear. This time they were sitting across from each other at a candlelit table where two large silver domes covered the plates in front of them. Beryl’s date sat with the natural grace of the active. His fur gleamed with health. His body was too large for the table and his legs and feet pressed over into her side of the table. She tried to keep her feet decorously tucked under her chair, but he needed even that area, and his heavy weight leaned against her no matter which way she moved. She pitied him for the depths of his need. She wondered if he would be offended if she removed her plate from the table and ate her food off the ground. His black nose wrinkled slightly at the smell of the food, and the corners of his mouth were wet. The waiter’s hands reached smoothly forward to pull the covers off the food.
The next day they saw thirteen bears. The garbage dump was thirty miles from where the animals gathered in greatest density, and Beryl knew that their migration to this area had only begun. The bears would continue to arrive for another month. Still, at least one bear was visible at all times, snuffling through the garbage, gnawing on a tire or walking purposefully toward the van.
The bears seemed to be willing to give anything a try as food, eating the foam rubber out of couches, tugging the seats off snowmobiles, chewing on vinyl car roofs. Standing up in the van Beryl saw one bear sniffing a closed can of paint, putting his teeth to each edge, curling his lips back, then turning the can over to try again. Each time the bears found something they considered edible, they looked content, chewing hard, strings of drool rolling from their mouths.
One bear found a deflated plastic clown with a bell in the bottom, the type little kids punch. Each time the bear chewed on it, the bell rattled. The bear swiveled her ears toward the bell, slapped at it halfheartedly with a paw. Beryl dropped her head back down through the sunroof, told Jean-Claude to drive closer, to a spot up sun of the bear.
As she zoomed in on the bear’s half-closed eyes and exposed black lips, the bear chewed gingerly through the clown’s red button vest. The plastic squeaked.
Butler spoke from the front of the van. “Up here in the Arctic there’s almost nothing that’s naturally poisonous. The plants are all edible. No poisonous snakes or insects. Polar bears are born curious. No caution in them. They explore just about anything new, chew on it. With humans, this hasn’t worked so well. The bears’ll seek out each new garbage dump, campsite and oil rig. Sniff all around, lap up some antifreeze. Get shot out of fear.”
David and Beryl quickly worked out their bear watches. Only one of them filmed or photographed at a time. The other swiveled about in the small sunroof, steering clear of the lenses, staying watchful. They were constantly pressed up against each other, either back to back or front to back. They moved their legs in unison.
Pressed against him, Beryl felt the way he worked with the camera, the way he braced his legs, shifted his weight, focused, the silent vibration of the camera pressed against both of them. She saw firsthand his ability to predict which direction a bear was going to turn, while she, who was able to see outside of the limiting focus of the lens, wasn’t able to guess at all. Once, when he had followed the leisurely, rambling path of a young bear for over twenty minutes without making a mistake, she’d turned to look at his face and saw his lip lifted in concentration, the sharp whiteness of his teeth gleaming below.
When David saw it was time to retreat, he would cradle her shoulder, push gently down. She responded immediately. During her turn to warn, she pulled gently on his sleeve. They descended smoothly. By t
he end of the day, she understood that he was probably gay. She had no more problem leaning up against him than she did against her mother.
Each time they left the sunroof, they sank as one creature, winding the top quickly shut after them. They would hear from outside a snuffling above or below, the rasp of hair coarse as a brush against the metal of the van, a thumping against the side. They would wait. Whenever a bear began to approach the front or back windows, Jean-Claude would turn the car on, shift the gears to reverse or forward as needed. He would hold the brake delicately down as they all looked through a thin sheet of glass at the creature padding forward.
The bear would approach slowly, its wide back swaying. About ten feet away it would push upright, its long neck and head rising higher than their van, its belly spread broad and strong. The bear would stand in front of them, sniffing, uncertain, then step closer, holding a single clawed paw out for balance. The van would roar in reverse. They would all laugh nervously while Jean-Claude circled the vehicle around, moving to another spot.
Each time a bear stepped in closer, Beryl imagined it charging forward, Jean-Claude frantically stepping on the gas, the van rocking backward, the bear running faster, the glass breaking, cold air suddenly in the van, blood on Jean-Claude and Butler. Jean-Claude trying to get out of his seat, the bear reaching in …
Driving back into town for lunch, Beryl asked David why Jean-Claude allowed the bears to get so close to the van.
“Oh,” said David. “It’s the same as safaris in Africa. There the tops of the jeeps are open. I mean right on open, not even a screen, so everyone can stick their heads and cameras out of the van and lean over the side to take pictures of the lion or cheetah taking a nap five feet away. And I mean literally five feet away. Conceivably any lion could just hop right into that hole, make scrambled eggs of everyone inside and no one could do a thing. But it never happens. The lions aren’t quite sure what they want to do. Contrary to popular belief, humans aren’t high on their list of edibles. They’d rather chomp on an antelope. They’re confused by the jeep’s smell and metal exterior. So enough time passes and the lions get used to the jeeps. They get used to cameras, to the smell of mint deodorant, to Kansas accents rolling across the savannah saying, ‘Oh, isn’t she pwetty!’”
The Cage Page 5
