OTTERS SAVED FROM DEATH

The bears were moving again. With black-skinned noses they searched the air, smelled ice in the distance. They stirred, stretching at the shoulders, shaking the sleep from their back haunches. Mother polar bears nudged cubs from their summer dens and marched them to the coast. The biggest of the bears had never left the beach, too warm to move. Now even they became animated as bears began collecting at the cape. And in D20, commonly known as the polar bear jail, the cages trembled with a new restlessness.  The waters of the Hudson Bay would soon be covered with a lid of ice and wind-blown snow.

Price was laying in the backseat of a truck moving in and out of the frozen mud ruts on the road that led out to the Churchill dump.  The dump attracted the bears, mothers with cubs to feed during the summer when there were no seals; young bears who had not put on enough weight during the winter; bears getting too old to hunt. They ate trash, their hunger more powerful than the rubbish fires meant to deter them. An hour ago Karen Bouma had gotten a call: a large bear had been seen outside the dump.

The truck made a metallic clap and the equipment in the back rattled like thunder. Price felt himself thrown into the air, where he seemed to hang for a second before crashing back down. He lay still, his eyes closed, as if nothing had happened.

“How he can sleep, I don’t know.”

It was Jim, who was bald and wore wool caps all the time, even inside. Jim called Price ornery. Ornery sounded like Oreo.  He heard the nylon rustle of his mother’s yellow jacket. The heat pouring through the vents sounded like airplanes. His body jostled with the truck. It reminded him of when he was in the back of Marge’s taxi, when he was playing dead with his check pressed into the plastic seat. Marge babysat a group of kids in off-season, including his friend, Geoff, who was in the backseat with him. She had hit a bump, and Geoff had said, “You’re not dead, I saw you move!” He couldn’t argue, not because Geoff was right, but because he was dead.

“You’re not shooting him with darts, now? That cocktail is strictly for bears.” Jim again. Then there was silence, the rattling truck, the roaring heat.

“He’s my little man,” his mother said, the words reaching him distantly. It was as if he could hear her smile underneath her curly hair. One arm hung off the seat and his hand touched the cool, gritty mat on the floor, so different from the heat spilling over him. The darkness behind his eyelids grew, and the orange light spots fell and flattened out into a wind that blew in wisps across a smooth expanse of snow.

When he woke up, the truck was idling and his skin felt hot and itchy. He sat up. The left side of his face was red with lines that matched the folds of the jacket he had used as a pillow. The frozen sea from his dream lingered in his mind, and for a moment he peered out the windshield from between the front seats without really seeing anything. Then he saw Jim, headed for the tree line.  He was speaking into a radio, his breath coming out in clouds from the side of his head, and then holding the radio to his ear to listen. A rifle was balanced in his right hand, the barrel tipped down to the ground like a dog hunting down a scent.

He sat in the truck for what seemed like a long time while Jim walked across the hard expanse and towards the scraggly trees.  At the tree line, Jim’s legs disappeared down a slope.  He reached to his side, as if to balance himself, and then even his wool hat disappeared down into the distance.  There was no movement ahead.  Price glanced to his left, where the town dump was invisible behind a rise in the land but which revealed itself with the oily black smoke rising off its fires. But there was no sign of mother’s yellow jacket, not anywhere across the frozen mud crossed with strips of snow, not in the trees beyond.

The cab of the truck was had cooled off even with the engine still mumbling under the hood, but Price was not prepared for the slap of cold wind that hit him when he opened the cab door.  He started off for the trees himself, unsure of his footing and holding himself against the cold. His jacket was in the truck.  He kept moving, crossing the spears of snow while the wind cross him, blowing in strong, cold gusts off the bay. Halfway across he looked back at the truck. He wanted his jacket, but the white truck was far away now even as he seemed no closer to the trees.

Already hunched down and with his arms crossed tightly against his chest, he ducked down further into the cold and moved forward. He moved without looking, instead watching his grey velcro shoes, one after the other, twisting now on a frozen ridge, now crushing a clean outline into the icy snow.  When the base of a thin tree appeared, he could see down into the shallow where Jim had disappeared and where his mother, in her yellow jacket, was kneeling over a mass of white fur.

Karen Bouma was breathing heavily, taking in needles of cold air in through her nose and pushing out short sighs of warmth. Kneeling before the polar bear, both hands were clenched around fistfuls of its dense fur. She pushed on its chest, her knees lifting off the ground, and opened its lungs again by leaning back and pulling with all her strength at the clumps of fur.  They had been at it for ten minutes, Jim working to keep the bear breathing before she took over. The dose of tranquilizers in the dart had been miscalculated; it had looked like a bigger male. She had had to drag Jim off the bear when he got tired, he felt so horrible about it. The polar bear’s natural rhythm continued to slow. She clenched her fists and pushed, encouraged by the puffs of warmth that emanated from the broad black nose.

A cry went up behind her. It was sudden, like a flock of birds leaving a tree. Still pulling the fur on the polar bear’s chest with the weight of her whole body, Karen Bouma twisted to see her son, the son she had left in the truck, struggling and kicking in the air.

“I got him,” Jim said, both arms around her protesting son.

“Thank you - it’s okay. Put him down,” she said.

“Then it’s my turn on the old man.”

“No, I’m okay,” she said between breaths.  “Keep him there. Behind that tree. Price, baby,” she said, “there’s nothing to worry about, honey.” She wasn’t looking at him but was hunched fully over the bear, curly hair sticking out from between her hat and the puffy collar of her yellow coat. “Nothing to worry about at all. Where’s your jacket? We made Mr. Polar B. Bear sleepy but we made him a little too sleepy, so we’re just staying with him until he wakes up a little bit. You know better than to be in the cold  without your jacket.”

Jim gripped his shoulder and he felt the Deputy Wildlife Officer crouch beside him.

“Just like I wake you up for school. We’re going to wait until we wake up Mr. Polar Bear a little. He’s even harder to wake up than you are.  So we’re going to wait. And you, little man, are going to keep me company. Can you do that?”

He stood quietly, and it was as if he was floating, a feeling like when he played dead with Geoff and there was a bump and for a moment his body hung dead in the air. The polar bear had fallen onto its side at the bottom of the shallow, between two thin trees that bent under its weight. He had seen them before, in person, in the Polar Bear Jail, but this one seemed to much bigger, his mother yellow coat the size of its front leg. Where its ear should be, there was a lumpy growth, like black cauliflower. His body stopped floating and panic crawled up his chest and into his throat. Without knowing it, he was crying.

“I’ll take him back.”

“No. Leave him be” she said. “It’s okay to be scared.” His mother kept pushing and pulling at the bear. “I’m scarred too. But there’s nothing to worry about. What does mommy do?”

She asked him several times before he managed. “Protect the town.”

“That’s right. Mommy protects the people who come to Churchill from getting hurt by the polar bears. But what else does Mommy do? What does Mommy try to do more that anything?”

He didn’t know.

“Mommy protects the bears, the polar bears. And I’m doing everything I can to save, to protect this bear. And I need you to keep me company, keep me going. I need you to talk to Mommy. I know you better than I know anyone, anyone in the world. But I always want to know more. So tell me about yourself. Who are you, little man? Pretend I don’t know you at all.”

The quiet of the wind was in his ears, and then he located the whine of a stronger wind, above him, winding through the knots of tree branches.  Her whole body worked over the bear, and it terified him that he was now a part of this. Something was wrong with the enormous animal lying in the shallow. Without knowing it, he was crying, focused on the deformed ear and the black lump growing there. His mother protected polar bears.