The Cage (19 page)

Butler faced him, impassive. “Both planes were heading into Churchill. If it's a daily flight and not just a coincidence,
then it'll pass us tomorrow on the trail. We'll bring the flare gun. If not, then we don't waste a day in this cold.”

David smiled weakly. “You know, I moved to California to get away from this kind of cold.” He looked at each person in turn. He was the only one who still spoke conversationally, when he didn't have to. He stood by, watching them prepare. “Anyone have some Blistex?”

Butler cleaned the rifles. They had four of them, long and heavy. They swung open with soft clicks and well-balanced weight, wood and metal. Butler cleaned each of them carefully, loaded them, packed the ammunition. He put straps on the rifles and gave one to each team member.

It was eight in the morning. Normally she would have just woken up. Smelled hot coffee. Walked slowly to the bathroom in her bare feet, working the sleep out of her eyes with her fingers. She slung the rifle across her back. It rolled against her body, a solid weight.

They made a last quick check. Nothing left in the bus they needed. Every cupboard opened, all loose wood ripped up and packed. The clean, designed environment gone. It looked as if the bears had broken in already.

They stood in the front room and ate the last of the unpacked raw meat, standing, chewing, not talking. Their teeth made grinding noises. David only ate one bite. He grimaced at its texture. “I never liked steak tartare,” he said. He threw the piece into the garbage. The other three turned to look at it.

David smiled. “A little fasting's good for everyone. Cleans
out the old system.” He thumped his chest like Tarzan. “No one has any trail mix, huh?” The temperature in the bus registered twenty-seven. He wrapped his arms tight around himself. “You know, I can't tell you how serious you all look, like an ad to join the fucking army. Can't we take this with a little graceful groveling and fear? Can't we make some jokes?”

No one had much to say to that. Beryl touched the elbow of his jacket, smiled at him. She did not stop chewing.

Just before they left she went back to her room, put her favorite roll of film in the front pouch of her parka. She knew the film would freeze. But it would freeze on the bus anyway. She wanted it close to her. She left the picture of her parents, holding hands, on the wall facing out to the snow. Steam from her breath had already frozen to the edges of the picture and the window. Steam from when she'd been sleeping, still unaware.

Butler walked out first. With a quick swinging motion he shot two bears full in the face, giving the second bear no time to do more than jerk her head back. Both bears fell over. The reports echoed loud against the sky and the bus and returned several times. The other bears watched the two fall, then whirled and ran away. Beryl recognized one of the dead bears as the female whose tongue had gotten stuck to the metal. The other lay on his side with one palm extended, the young male who had stood on top of her cage, who had slapped the bars. The fur of both shivered a little and then
stilled. The bodies lay heavy and white. Steam rose from the blood.

She wanted to lay her hand on the back of their wide flat skulls, to stand quietly by their side for a minute.

Jean-Claude and she lifted the sled down. It was heavy, a hundred fifty, two hundred pounds, a body between them. It cracked the skin of the snow when they set it down. They each put on their snowshoes and walked around the bodies. She found walking with the snowshoes awkward. She had to lift her toes up high, feeling like a heron. The wounds on her feet hurt for a while, then gradually numbed.

Butler led. He cradled the rifle across his body, in both hands, ready to jerk it to his shoulder and shoot. He held his head up higher than he had all week. He scanned for bears. He looked very tough except for the snowshoes, which gave him the exaggerated high step of Elmer Fudd.

David followed behind him. She could see the hood of his parka turning about as he looked for more bears. She couldn't see his face. The nylon made a raspy noise with each step forward. He stumbled as often as she did.

Jean-Claude walked beside her. They pulled the sled, the rope looped across their chests, like reindeer, like dogs. They walked forward, hand in hand. He moved slowly, smoothly. He wasted no motion. After a while their gloved hands let go, their fingers too cold to grasp.

She looked back over her shoulder. Their breath hung in the air behind and above them, gray and pall-like against the
frozen blue of the sky. The bears were already ripping into the bodies. More bears trotted in from all over. More than she had imagined could be around.

The bears stayed behind with the fresh meat. They would have time to follow later.

After walking about twenty minutes, Beryl noticed that Jean-Claude was angling off to the left, while Butler walked straight on. Jean-Claude looked over at Butler. Twenty-five feet separated them before he stopped. “Butler,” Jean-Claude said, “where you going? The inlet's that way.” He had to raise his voice slightly because of the distance between them.

“What?” asked Butler, turning around. “Oh, come on. Going round'll cost us ten miles.”

“It's too big a risk. The sled is heavy. We're heavy. Sea ice is hard to judge.”

“Let's just try it.” Butler was smiling. Beryl wondered if he'd ever been on an expedition that had gone wrong like this. She wondered if he'd always imagined how he would survive, how well he would do. She knew he had enjoyed shooting the bears, feeling at risk.

“You can't judge it by looking at it. You can only judge it by walking across it.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Not a good idea.”

“Well, I'm going. I'm too fucking cold to walk extra hours out here.” Butler gestured to David and Beryl. “And they're going to be even colder. Think they can take an extra day
out here? An extra night?” He turned and walked away from them in the direction of the inlet.

The three of them watched him, the distance between them growing.

“Now this is fucked.” David grimaced, watching Butler. He looked back to Jean-Claude. “Well?”

Jean-Claude stood still, regarding David. He did not answer.

“Beryl,” David asked, “know anything about sea ice conditions on Hudson Bay in early winter? Want to make any suggestions?”

She and David faced each other without expression. His cheeks were flushed a mottled red.

“Well,” he said, “then I say it's a risk either way. I'm cold and my thermal underwear's giving me a wedgie. Let's try the shortcut.” He paced slowly after Butler.

Jean-Claude watched David walk, awkward in the snowshoes. Jean-Claude turned to Beryl, studying her as he had that first time in the airport. Beryl watched him.

He swung his snowshoes around and began to follow Butler.

The sun rose slowly behind them, stretching their shadows out in front like elongated insects, exaggerating each awkward wobble. The snow was hard-packed at first, the sky clear, no wind. Jean-Claude said they had made good progress, four or five miles. They had no way of really knowing. The landscape didn't change, no other creatures moved upon it. They saw the tiny cloud of Churchill in the distance, but it didn't get any bigger. Their breath and the squeaking of the snow were the only sounds. The heavy sled jerked against Beryl's chest with each step, bumping across the snow behind them.

After a while, even David stopped talking about the cold. Their pace became quicker, more confident. They kept warm enough, except for their hands and faces, her feet. They stopped at noon for lunch. The meat had frozen through. They lit a fire on the large ceramic platter Jean-Claude had
taken from the kitchen. They all crowded in around the warmth. Jean-Claude heaped a saucepan with snow, put it beside the fire to melt for drinking water. She couldn't feel the fire through her parka. She could sense it on her face only as dryness, as a bright light. She touched her face, no longer exactly sure what her skin was supposed to be able to feel, what gloves against her cheek had been like. Her feet had gone completely numb. She felt her weight when she stood on them as a pressure in her bones.

They held the meat over the fire on slivers of wood. None of them talked. Ten feet above them the smoke from the fire and the steam of their breath froze in the air. It hung above them, white and thick. She wondered if she stood on one of the men's shoulders and reached up, what it would feel like. A small tearing, the tinkling of broken glass.

The platter heated slowly from the fire, melted down through the drift. Snow and water slid in, putting out the flames. Butler and Jean-Claude lit the fire again, but the snow melted beneath the platter even faster. Finally they gave up trying to cook the meat slowly and simply tossed it into what remained of the fire. The beef sizzled in the boiling water and flames. The pieces were wet, charred on the outside and frozen in the center. David made a joke about Cajun-style beef. He slurred his words as though he were drunk, his lips moving too slowly. He held his chin down tight in his hood, against his chest. All of their faces were bright red except where the white spots were beginning to form. The water in the saucepan didn't get hot. It only melted, with transparent
chunks of ice remaining in the center. They each drank a mugful of water from it, spitting out the ice. Beryl noticed that they all drooled a bit with their numb lips.

Everyone ate the meat as she'd been doing for several days, chewing efficiently, no conversation. She and Jean-Claude crouched together on one side of the fire, leaning against each other. A wind began to rise, sweeping in at them from the north. The sky was no longer clear. The arm that leaned against Jean-Claude was the only warm part of her. On the other side of the fire, Butler and David kept their distance from each other. Butler held the rifle across his lap, looking around carefully every few minutes. He wanted to shoot more bears. Still none came closer than half a mile, scenting the air as they passed then trotting methodically on toward the bay. While they were walking, they had all looked back now and again, searching the snow behind them.

When they packed up to leave, she kept a frozen chunk of beef in her mouth to suck on as she walked. Butler and David now pulled the sled.

That afternoon walking became much harder. The snow no longer squeaked beneath their feet, hard-packed. The edges of the snowshoes sank into the drifts if they didn't put their feet down exactly flat. They would have to struggle for balance, jerk the shoe out and walk on. The snow swirled about them at each gust of wind, stung their faces, melted in their eyes. The sled dug itself down into the powder. Every five feet Butler and David had to lift the front of the sled up and
over. David couldn't lift or pull as well as Butler. At one point David slid sideways and the sled tipped. Some wood fell off. Butler cursed. David took a while getting up, wouldn't look anyone in the eye. Beryl could see a thin sheen of sweat across his face. His breath wheezed. Their hands wouldn't grasp, so it took time to pack the wood on again. Jean-Claude worked five minutes to make a knot tying the wood down. Beryl stamped around, slapped her arms against her sides. David stood still, his face sunk deep into his hood. They walked on.

She thought it was getting colder. They had no thermometer. The smudge of Churchill seemed no closer. If anything, the horizon seemed farther away. The plain of white snow stretched out in front of them, beautiful, sparkling, misleading. A mound in the foreground could turn out to be a hill many miles away or a bear sleeping much closer. Butler looked around constantly, scanned the whiteness for dots of black, the bears' noses easiest to spot from a distance. He'd swung his rifle across his back now, but he reached around often to touch its weight. Of all of them, he walked the most easily. He seemed full of energy. She could hear him sometimes sucking the air deep into his lungs as though he'd just stepped out onto his porch in the country. Jean-Claude walked on with his head down, concentrating, his feet moving smoothly.

She turned her face to the white circle of the sun, keeping her eyes open. She felt no warmth. Her eyes didn't hurt. She felt nothing.

At several points during the day, one of the men would drop back, face the way they had come and hitch down the front of his pants. Steam rose from the urine.

Early in the afternoon she couldn't wait any longer. She let them walk ahead while she crouched upon the snow, pulling down her pants. None of the men looked back. She spread her legs farther. She had to look down once to make sure she was urinating. She was no longer capable of feeling more than the general movements of her bones. Her body existed only in vision.

The warm urine melted a hole straight down through the powder. The snow had refrozen even before she stood up.

She hurried to catch up with the men.

They reached the inlet when the sun hung about halfway down the sky. Jean-Claude had them wait while he walked slowly along the edge of the broken ice, studying its color, the thickness of the shattered pieces that angled up above the others. He unpacked the sled, made three other sleds from the blankets, packing the weight of the wood and supplies evenly across all of them. He created a long leash for each blanket sled.

“It's about a mile and a half across here. I'll cross first. Butler next. David, then Beryl. Beryl,” he said, “you're the lightest. You get the worst position. Take the sled. It'll spread the weight better. Ice changes thickness fast. I'm going to pick a path across the best of it. Follow me exactly. Exactly where
I walk. Drag the blankets as far behind as possible. If they start to sink, let them. Sea ice is different from freshwater ice. It gives beneath you. Don't stand still no matter what. Keep thirty feet of distance between us, the sleds far back. If one of us goes in, keep walking. Don't try to be a hero. You'll just go in too. OK?” He looked at each of them. They nodded. He looked at Beryl the longest. There was snow, she saw, in the white of his eyebrows.