heart. A father and son …” she guessed.
But he stopped her words, by suddenly looking directly into her face.
“My father doesn’t have a heart,” he said.
Seven
The bear was out from Prince Leopold Island, close to Cape Clarence.
When the ships came past the Borden Peninsula in 1845, passing out of Lancaster Sound, Franklin would have seen the thousand-meter mountains that almost walled in Arctic Bay. It was an area full of narwhal, killer whale, bowhead, seal, and walrus, in season.
It was cold and clear today, minus thirty, but feeling more in the sunlight. The Swimmer had a male a kilometer behind her, a mature male of eleven hundred pounds, who had avoided her when he had not picked up a trace of estrus.
The team had come out to tag her.
Richard Sibley sat behind the lead biologist, with the biologist’s assistant and their researcher alongside him. The idea was to put radio telemetry collars on young females who had not yet had cubs. They would tranquilize her from the air, the biologist explained, once she had moved past open water. They didn’t want their infamous Swimmer returning to the sea while sedated.
As they passed above her, the bear suddenly began to move, front paws outstretched and the rear paws flexing outward and back. She was faster than a snowmobile, steady over the rucks of ice that would have forced a vehicle to maneuver.
They used a dart from a .22 caliber, leaning out of the side door.
The Swimmer barely looked up, propelling herself faster, weaving a little as if to avoid the gun. When the dart connected with her flank, her speed never altered. She kept up the same even rhythm, a moving cloud against cloud, hypnotic in her unchanging, shimmering pace, her blue shadow matching her.
And then she began to slow, her hind legs first showing the effects of the drug. She tried to keep running, the front paws pulling and the rear legs dragging, until she finally succumbed, suddenly lying prone on the ice, flattened to it, sunk into a deep sleep.
On the blinding white-blue of the snow they took blood samples from her, and ran an electrical current to test the reserves of fat. She was four on the Quetelet Index, an average covering of fat rising to five. She had hunted well, fed well.
They noted the extraordinary development of the hindquarters and shoulders. If she had been human, she would have been an athlete, honed to fighting weight, supple and flexed, the delineation of the muscle obvious even at rest.
They tattooed her lip for permanent identification and painted a number on her back.
As this was done, Richard Sibley stepped back.
He was experiencing the usual problems of taking photographs in subzero temperatures: his breath had coated the back of the camera with frost, and the lens itself was in danger of icing over. He put the camera under his armpit and backed away, staring down at the collar on the bear. They had rolled her onto her side temporarily, and her neck was extended along the ice, her front paw raised. Her strength and beauty moved him.
He looked away, closing his eyes against the snow streaming along the ground. He tried to see a photographic pattern. He focused on the shape of the human body against the bear, the tableaux they made with the emptiness of backdrop. He snapped off a reel of pictures, moving in to take the detail of her head, ears, and feet. Claws against ice. Collar against fur. Hand on her coat. Gun, bear, ice. The tattoo.
He could no longer feel his feet or hands. There was a warning numbness in his face, around his mouth. He got back in the helicopter, pressing his face into his coat sleeve, heaving warm breath into the angle of his curved elbow. He suddenly wanted to be gone, out of the sound, back to Winnipeg.
He couldn’t explain the congestion, the pressure, in his chest until they were airborne again, and he looked back at the female, now stirring on the snow.
He felt he had invaded her, been party to a swift assault.
And more than
But he stopped her words, by suddenly looking directly into her face.
“My father doesn’t have a heart,” he said.
Seven
The bear was out from Prince Leopold Island, close to Cape Clarence.
When the ships came past the Borden Peninsula in 1845, passing out of Lancaster Sound, Franklin would have seen the thousand-meter mountains that almost walled in Arctic Bay. It was an area full of narwhal, killer whale, bowhead, seal, and walrus, in season.
It was cold and clear today, minus thirty, but feeling more in the sunlight. The Swimmer had a male a kilometer behind her, a mature male of eleven hundred pounds, who had avoided her when he had not picked up a trace of estrus.
The team had come out to tag her.
Richard Sibley sat behind the lead biologist, with the biologist’s assistant and their researcher alongside him. The idea was to put radio telemetry collars on young females who had not yet had cubs. They would tranquilize her from the air, the biologist explained, once she had moved past open water. They didn’t want their infamous Swimmer returning to the sea while sedated.
As they passed above her, the bear suddenly began to move, front paws outstretched and the rear paws flexing outward and back. She was faster than a snowmobile, steady over the rucks of ice that would have forced a vehicle to maneuver.
They used a dart from a .22 caliber, leaning out of the side door.
The Swimmer barely looked up, propelling herself faster, weaving a little as if to avoid the gun. When the dart connected with her flank, her speed never altered. She kept up the same even rhythm, a moving cloud against cloud, hypnotic in her unchanging, shimmering pace, her blue shadow matching her.
And then she began to slow, her hind legs first showing the effects of the drug. She tried to keep running, the front paws pulling and the rear legs dragging, until she finally succumbed, suddenly lying prone on the ice, flattened to it, sunk into a deep sleep.
On the blinding white-blue of the snow they took blood samples from her, and ran an electrical current to test the reserves of fat. She was four on the Quetelet Index, an average covering of fat rising to five. She had hunted well, fed well.
They noted the extraordinary development of the hindquarters and shoulders. If she had been human, she would have been an athlete, honed to fighting weight, supple and flexed, the delineation of the muscle obvious even at rest.
They tattooed her lip for permanent identification and painted a number on her back.
As this was done, Richard Sibley stepped back.
He was experiencing the usual problems of taking photographs in subzero temperatures: his breath had coated the back of the camera with frost, and the lens itself was in danger of icing over. He put the camera under his armpit and backed away, staring down at the collar on the bear. They had rolled her onto her side temporarily, and her neck was extended along the ice, her front paw raised. Her strength and beauty moved him.
He looked away, closing his eyes against the snow streaming along the ground. He tried to see a photographic pattern. He focused on the shape of the human body against the bear, the tableaux they made with the emptiness of backdrop. He snapped off a reel of pictures, moving in to take the detail of her head, ears, and feet. Claws against ice. Collar against fur. Hand on her coat. Gun, bear, ice. The tattoo.
He could no longer feel his feet or hands. There was a warning numbness in his face, around his mouth. He got back in the helicopter, pressing his face into his coat sleeve, heaving warm breath into the angle of his curved elbow. He suddenly wanted to be gone, out of the sound, back to Winnipeg.
He couldn’t explain the congestion, the pressure, in his chest until they were airborne again, and he looked back at the female, now stirring on the snow.
He felt he had invaded her, been party to a swift assault.
And more than
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