Part 2 (1/2)

”Ha,” said Butler. ”Manatees are about as exciting as watching cows fart.” He pulled his mouth wide again into a semblance of a grin.

David smiled politely. His hands stilled and returned to his lap. Butler looked up the aisle.

Beryl found herself looking from one to the other. She felt responsible for breaking the silence between them. She tried asking lightly how they'd gotten into this field.

David said, ”Oh, I've known what my career would be ever since as a child I saw them filming an episode of Mutual of Omaha's *Wild Kingdom.' I was raised in the city-punchball in the alleys, baseball in parking lots. I can't describe the awe I felt at the presence of those powerful, brave and silent men who knew the wilderness. My awe continued even after the grizzly bear that Jim had to wrestle was rolled onto the set on a dolly, doped out of its mind.”

David imitated Marlin Perkins's slow and deliberate speech, as though he were always chewing on something leathery. David's mouth and eyes rolled energetically during his performance, and Beryl thought it wasn't so much an impersonation as an interpretation, a distillation of a character through David's habitual gestures and expressions. He clearly loved to perform.

Butler said that he'd had an older brother who used to take him on expeditions through the botanical gardens, where they would pretend they were Lewis and Clark trying to find the Pacific. Butler smiled to himself then and looked out one of the windows. Beryl noticed that he used the past tense in describing his brother. She felt David settle a little in his seat, but neither of them interrupted. Butler said that those times had been the best in his life. He'd decided on this line of work when he'd seen a beer commercial showing a film crew, after a hot tiring day of filming lions on the savannah, drinking beer and singing songs round a campfire. To him, this had looked a lot like what his brother would have chosen.

”Don't answer if you don't want to, but what happened to your brother?” Beryl asked, her voice soft, expecting Butler to describe how he had been killed in a freak accident or by a wasting childhood disease. She could feel the comforting sad expression forming on her face already.

Butler looked at her and she could tell he thought she was prying. ”He ran away,” said Butler, ”when he was fourteen. We haven't seen him since.” He sat back down in his chair, looked out the plane window. She could see only the back of his head now, the pink hollow at the back of his ear. His voice continued more quietly, ”His name was Stanley.”

Beryl tried to imagine growing up thinking about a beloved older brother who had left her behind, who could return at any time. She saw the young Butler on the front lawn each day playing only the games he would want his brother to find him playing. She imagined Butler thinking each day that if he were just a bit better, more the way his brother would want, then his brother would return home. She saw him applying for this job.

Beryl asked the men if anyone had seen them off at the airport. She wanted to be asked the same question. She wanted to say she had a boyfriend who'd said good-bye to her. She would live with these men for a month and she didn't want any s.e.xual tension. She had decided to name her boyfriend Max. Max sounded like the sort of name a long-term boyfriend should have. At home she'd left his name on the answering machine to scare off potential burglars.

David said a friend had kindly driven him in through terrible traffic; Butler had driven himself. Neither of them asked her.

Beryl knew her life might depend on these two men. She talked with both in turn, listening carefully to their responses. She realized later that they'd discussed their lives only in the past, saying nothing of the expedition.

CHAPTER 8.

Once they left Winnipeg behind they saw no more cities. After twenty minutes, there weren't even roads, houses, or cleared land. From the plane's window, she looked down at the pa.s.sing scenery for a solid half hour and didn't see even a power line. She felt she'd traveled back two hundred years. She felt she'd traveled to a different planet. At three in the afternoon they left behind the trees. The land swept on below, flat, gray-green, covered with twisting rivers and lakes of a crystal blue untouched by even dirt, for the Arctic has no substance as complex as dirt, only rock and sand like a newborn world. To have soil, it would need tall trees, crawling worms, bacteria, decomposition. Three feet below the surface the ground is eternally frozen, summer and winter. Time paces differently. A single day can last two months, the sun making slow circles at the top of the sky, round and round like a hawk hunting. Spring and fall don't really exist. Summer is a fast and desperate lunge.

Beryl was stunned by the expanse of flat terrain without even hills or mountains as boundaries. In country like this, big creatures could survive, living free for their entire lives without knowing humans existed.

About midday she noticed a wide brown river, very different from the ice-water blue of the others. She touched David's arm and pointed down to the brown swath, asking the name of the river. He held up his finger for her to wait and stepped to the pilot. When David sat back down, the small bush plane began to descend with a speed that floated Beryl's stomach up near her lungs and pushed her back in her chair with queasiness. When they leveled off she looked cautiously out the window. They glided perhaps sixty feet from the ground.

After a moment she realized she was now looking at a river of caribou. Large deer with small antlers and young that trotted along beside, their heads held up. The caribou rolled on below like water, pouring and eddying. They moved on with the patient, mindless stride of the indomitable. She looked as far back and forward as she could within her flat airplane window and she could see no end, she could see no sides. She'd never seen this many animals together; she'd never seen this many humans together. The movement simply continued, rolling south across land that looked as if it couldn't sustain life any bigger than birds and small rodents. Not even trees could live this far north. And here were ten thousand caribou.

The pilot shut off the engine for a minute and they coasted in sudden whistling silence. David held up his finger and mouthed, ”Listen.” After a moment she could hear it over the sound of the wind, the subtle echoing clicks of their hooves on the rocks, the hollow booming cracks of their antlers colliding. She strained forward in her seat and listened to the engulfing sound of a species on the move through an area named the Barrens.

As they flew up farther across the tundra Beryl began to be aware of a lightening in the air outside the airplane's windows, a clarity. She learned later it was because there was less dust in the air up here, less moisture. As they moved north she began to see details of objects far away, as if she'd been living in a fog all her life and not known it. The outline of a distant lake resolved itself as clearly as in a dream, as though it were pressed right up against her eyes. When she looked around inside the plane, which had been closed since Winnipeg, her fellow pa.s.sengers appeared darkened and slightly fuzzy.

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 s.p.a.ce 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-s.h.i.+rt. 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 s.p.a.ce-age clothing you're wearing, you'll freeze to death sitting still on top of a machine.”

David s.h.i.+vered. He touched his nose as though checking for frostbite and said, ”I hate the cold. I just f.u.c.king 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 a.s.signments 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 b.u.mped 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 gra.s.s 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 b.u.mps 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 b.u.t.ter 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.