OTTERS SAVED FROM DEATH

They rented a house on the prosperous hill above Iowa City, a rental on a street of senior faculty and doctors from the university hospital. It was 1 ½ stories, red shingle, with a great messy oak out front and a lumpy overgrown yard in the back. In Lee’s dream, they were in the house, first downstairs and then trapped upstairs, running around the bed under the slanted ceilings as the polar bear chased them with their blood in its nostrils.

A few days later, they were on a walk outside Oxford, where Kate and Jenny lived. Kate and Lee walked on ahead, laughing and gripping and saying “I know!” about the sculpture department, while Jenny and Matt fell behind. Matt’s shoes were entirely inappropriate to the trail, and he felt like an old man walking over the patches of ice, his stride shortened, his head bent to watch his feet, and his entire frame unsure. He was telling Jenny about Lee’s dream. When he finished, he told her about his idea for a young adult novel featuring polar bears.

“And she knew?” Her face was bright with intelligence. “She thinks it’s going to kill you!” After they had laughed about the dream and its implications, she said, “So tell me more about this novel.”

Matt talked around the novel, and in doing so espoused his theory about writing. If he told her the story, he would lose the impetus to write it. He told her what he could: the town of Churchill on the corner of Hudson Bay, its proximity and relationship to the polar bears, the boy growing up there, his mother a wildlife officer.

Jenny clutched her chest with amused worry. “That sounds perfect. Write about what you know.”