The Cage (6 page)

The effect would intensify as winter approached. Already snow was forecast for the weekend. She looked back out the airplane window at this new planet.

At Churchill the final member of the group was late. None of them knew what Jean-Claude, the local guide, looked like, but he would be easy to spot; the airport was empty except for a candy machine and a folding table with tickets spread across it. Beryl, used to the mammoth gleaming airports of New York and Boston, stared at the plain plywood walls enclosing a space the size of a living room. The walls didn't even
have windows, only a single large poster of a woman stepping out of the surf with
HAWAII
written across her wet T-shirt. Beryl saw Butler and David glance toward the poster and she watched their faces. David simply looked amused. Butler looked from the woman's face down her body as though she were a real person standing there.

“Jean-Claude's only twenty years old,” said Butler while they waited, “but he's been guiding groups since he was fourteen. He's earned a lot of respect for his knowledge of navigation and the weather here, but his fame comes from his ability to survive bad situations. Unbelievable situations. Three years ago, one group—financed by some snowmobile company—wanted to cross Hudson Bay in the middle of winter for an ad to show the power of their machines.

“People who haven't been out in real arctic weather for a while just don't understand. Materials change. Metal can break off in your hand. Rubber and plastic crack. Even gas gets thick. It doesn't work so well. The moisture from your breath and sweat freezes instantly on clothes, hair, sleeping bags. There's no way to defrost the stuff and get the ice out. By the end of a long trip, your sleeping bag can weigh thirty pounds. To unfold it you have to jump on it to break the ice.

“These snowmobile guys had done all the experiments on their machines beforehand, all these laboratory tests, but they didn't understand the cold. No matter what space-age clothing you're wearing, you'll freeze to death sitting still on top of a machine.”

David shivered. He touched his nose as though checking
for frostbite and said, “I hate the cold. I just fucking hate it.”

Butler looked surprised. “The cold's great,” he said. “It makes you feel stronger when you get back inside.”

“Naw, it doesn't. I feel like a wet hanky. It gets into my bones. I really prefer assignments in the tropics. I only took this one 'cause they promised me Venezuela in January. Tree slug mating season. They grow to be monsters down there.” He held out his hands to demonstrate. “They actually perform the nasty in midair, on this rope of slime hanging off a tree branch. With my luck the slime'll break and they'll land splat on me, still bopping away.” He wrinkled up his face and rubbed his nose with the tips of his fingers. “But at least I'll come back with a tan.”

Beryl watched the way Butler pulled his mouth thinner listening to David. She asked how people had gotten around in the Arctic with just dogs before.

“Oh,” said Butler, “but it's much easier to get around with dog teams. With dogs you have to keep moving all the time to keep them going: cracking the whip, running alongside, balancing the sled, sometimes pulling right along with them. At night, even after moving all day, you have to run in a fast circle for twenty minutes slapping your gloves together just to get your hands working well enough to set up your tent, to light the fire, to warm your food and unfreeze your water. It's the strangest thing, cold like that. It works on you slow. Your body just won't do the simplest tasks.”

“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.

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, stripped 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.