The Ice Child (19 page)

The narwhal had already come, breaching the water from their winter in the polar ice fields. The bear sometimes heard the noise as she descended into the ocean. Ringed seal, her target, made barks and yelps like dogs; walrus were the bass and baritone; narwhal and beluga sounded in curious, alien harmonics, saturating the water with their signals.

She had closed her ears to it now, however; curling her huge front paw, she dropped her muzzle below it, covering the only part of her body that radiated heat. She was blissfully at ease. Cold couldn’t touch her; only heat, or prolonged exercise out of water, could raise her body temperature. She was an ice machine. Now, as the wind picked up, she slumped slowly to one side, the snow piling on top of her. She was fat with seal, and craved sleep.

Her mate had lain down ten feet from her. For the past few days he had been shadowing her, mesmerized by the smell of estrus in her urine. On the first day of scenting her he had not been alone in his lust; three other males approached. Two had been far too young to bother him; crouching, they had merely observed him from a safe distance. But an eight-year-old male of nine hundred pounds crossed his track barely four hours later. The eight-year-old approached him, weaving a little, his head up to catch his opponent’s scent. He raised himself up onto his hind legs, assessing the enemy, eyeing the female. He fell back down to the ice with a grunt from the arthritic pain in an old injury.

They walked toward each other with the characteristic ambling pattern; then the rush began. The heavier male was bigger, but he was also older and slower, and hungry. His bad temper erupted into slamming swipes of his paws, raking claws deflected over the younger male’s shoulders. It was certain that they could injure, if not kill, each other, if it came to it. But after only a few minutes the older male retreated, rolling his head at the sound of the roar from his victor. In another continent, in other temperatures, it might have been taken for a lion’s: a deep, rumbling, echoing boom.

He and the female mated that day. Over and over again they consummated their union on the ice. The long Arctic day was calm; they roamed the broken floes, stopping from time to time to assess the current. Toward evening they found the bearded seal.

Bearded were the best the male could bring her: bigger than ringed, adults could weigh up to five or six hundred pounds. Bearded seal were eating mechanisms, sucking up crustaceans, especially whelk, which they managed to rid of their shells. Between dives they rested on the ice floes, their stomachs stuffed, sleeping on their drifting white platforms.

The male lowered himself soundlessly into the sea, his huge body disappearing underwater. From time to time he surfaced, his eye on the seal’s dark gray body a hundred yards ahead. The female dropped to the ice behind him and watched. He negotiated the ice channels underwater, and, from time to time, rose to the surface, with only his nose and eyes showing. His gaze was fixed: the seal turned its head, but did not see him, and flopped back again, turning her body with a lazy thump of blubber.

At fifty yards the male bear disappeared. For a moment the ocean was utterly still. Then the male exploded from the water, grabbing the seal by the head and following the impact of his claws with a huge blow from his snout. He didn’t move like a heavy animal, but exactly like a cat, unbelievably fast and lethally accurate. Death was instant. The water reddened, the carcass was returned to the ice. Good hunting.

In his life the male would eat every available food source: seal, musk-ox, whale, narwhal, walrus, geese, carrion, seaweed, berries, eggs. He needed a lot to maintain his body weight, to keep the thick layers of fat. For most of his time far out on the ice, he would be followed, at a respectful distance, by his personal shadows—arctic foxes, who depended on his kills for their own survival.

The Inuit respected bear like no other creature. To them he was a religious object, a mythical being. In the early months of the year the appearance of the star Aldebaran, in the constellation of Taurus, was linked to the bear. Tracing its journey across the sky in the late afternoon, from northeast to northwest, it was called
nanurjuk
, the spirit of the polar bear, in Cumberland Sound, the sea known so well to the whaling ships; in Repulse Bay, to the west, at the southernmost tip of the Gulf of Boothia, it was
kajurzuk
, meaning a reddish color; in Coronation Gulf, far to the west above Great Bear Lake, the star was
agleoryuit
, the pursuers.

Aldebaran was a bear held at bay by Inuit hunting dogs, a low-shining great white star, with its scattered skirts of the Hyades. The three stars of Orion’s belt were the human hunters, racing behind their dogs. The bear hung forever in the night sky, center stage in an eternal drama of light.

The ice storm lasted until the morning, when it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. For a while nothing stirred in the featureless landscape, where the newly sprung carpet of grasses and saxifrage had been swallowed up. Then the female began to move. She got to her feet slowly and shook her body free of its snow. She raised her head and scented the frozen air. The light blazed in the white-blue sky. In a few more hours the colors of the Arctic spring would begin to emerge again: the low, smoothed rocks where she had been lying would reveal their bright orange lichen. Everything would look as it had looked twenty-four hours earlier.

But the Swimmer, beginning to walk now, felt a change. During her sleep she knew that something had altered. The world had moved.

She did not look back at the sleeping giant behind her. Her mate was outlined in the blanket of snow, and he wouldn’t wake for another hour.

And by then she would be far away.

It was unlikely that she would ever see him again.

Fourteen

Alicia sat in the conservatory of Franklin House and looked down at the letter.

She turned it over, frowning.

“What do you think?” John asked.

He and Catherine were seated opposite his mother: the low table, with the neatly laid tea tray, was between them. It had begun to rain, and the drops made a soft pattern of sound on the roof.

“I honestly don’t know what to think,” Alicia said.

John leaned forward. “He’s a good photographer,” he said. “He has a great reputation.”

Alicia laid the letter down, among the cups. “I don’t doubt it.”

“Well?”

She took off her reading glasses. For a second her gaze lingered on Catherine. “Let me get this absolutely right, John,” Alicia murmured. “You want to go to Canada during the summer vacation. To work with this man.”

“He’s offered me a job.”

She smiled at him. “Actually, he hasn’t offered you a job as such,” she observed, “as the position is unpaid.”

John glanced at Catherine too. “Okay, then,” he said. “As you put it, a position. For six weeks.”

“I can’t understand why he should want to do that,” Alicia replied.

There was a silence; a silence during which John could be heard taking in a deep breath. “Because I’ve been writing to him.”

Catherine laid her hand on John’s arm. “Because you have been nagging him day and night,” she said, smiling.

He smiled back at her; looked at his mother.

Alicia was not smiling. She inclined her head to the letter, then back at Catherine. “And you come from this part of the world?” she asked.

“No, Mrs. Marshall. But my father lives in Arctic Bay.”

“This part of the world.”

“It’s a long way from Churchill. Churchill is on Hudson Bay.”

Alicia pursed her lips.

“Mother,” John said, “it’s an experience.”

“But why there?”

“A huge number of bears congregate in that area.”

Alicia got to her feet suddenly. Tension was spelled out in her rigid shoulders. She gazed at the garden beyond the windows. “Only last week you were offered a summer at the Spitalfields excavation,” she said.

“Everyone’s been there.”

She looked at him. “I asked for that place for you. To help with your coursework.”

“I know,” he said. “But I didn’t ask for it, did I?”

“John,” Catherine murmured, a warning.

“You may not have asked for it, but I’ve arranged it for you. You might thank me.”

“I want to go to Churchill,” John reiterated. The tone of his voice was rising. “I spent last summer at a bloody excavation. How many chances like this come along? None.”

“It isn’t as if your course has anything at all to do with Arctic civilizations.”

Now John got to his feet too. “It isn’t about coursework,” he said. “It’s just something different.”

Alicia met his gaze with a stony expression. “I know exactly what it’s about,” she told him. “Following some pointless crusade, the same as your father. And you come here asking me to finance it.”

Catherine now got to her feet. She walked to John’s side. “It’s really nowhere near the Franklin sites,” she said.

Alicia’s expression hardened. “Would you mind very much not continuing your lesson in geography?” she said. “John is only interested in this particular place and this particular job because the man is chasing a bear
that has been seen on Franklin sites.
” She folded her arms in a gesture of triumph. “Oh, you think I don’t understand,” she said. “Perhaps you think I’m unable to call up an Internet site, when you tell me a person’s name. I know full well who Richard Sibley is, and his connection with Franklin, and his obsession with this particular bear. Which,” she added, “if you ask me, is nothing more or less than eyewash.”

“But nobody did ask you,” John fumed. He snatched the letter up and stuffed it into his pocket. “I knew you wouldn’t get it,” he said.

“And to think,” Alicia said, “that I haven’t heard enough of Franklin in my lifetime.” She stepped closer to her son, in an attitude that was half cajoling, half threatening. Looking at her, Catherine felt a chill run down her spine. The attachment, on Alicia’s part, was plain to see, hard to witness: it was almost as if John was her partner. She looked at Alicia’s hand on John’s. She was gripping him tightly. “What has your father ever achieved in searching for them?” she asked, softly, insinuatingly. “One small copper canister. Why do you want to compete with your father?”

“I’m not fucking competing with him,” John retorted, coloring suddenly and pulling violently away.

Alicia stared at him.

He turned on his heel and slammed out of the room, leaving Catherine behind.

The two women looked at each other.

“You had better go with him,” Alicia said.

“I’ve not influenced him, Mrs. Marshall,” Catherine said quietly.

“Haven’t you?” Alicia asked.

She walked to the conservatory door and pushed it open. The scent of the garden flooded in. Catherine glanced at the severely manicured lawn, clipped back hard, the blades of grass packed tight, like a bowling green. It was not a place to lie in the sun. Even to walk. Only to admire.

Catherine picked up her shoulder bag and followed John.

He was out in the hallway, dialing a cab.

“Don’t leave her like this,” Catherine said.

“I’m only asking for airfare,” he said.

“She doesn’t like to lose you.”

The cab firm answered. He gave them the address, replaced the receiver. “This bloody stifling house,” he muttered.

“She adores you,” Catherine told him.

She was struggling with the idea that Alicia was actually right. John might dress the Sibley offer up as being a new venture, but it was really the old venture, the old obsession. And in one thing John’s mother had hit the nail absolutely on the head. Catherine knew how much John wanted to outdo his father.

“Ask my father,” John was muttering, repeating what Alicia had said earlier, before the second discussion of the letter had begun.

“Well,” Catherine observed, “you could try.”

John laughed. “Oh, yeah, and like, he’d be willing to listen.
He’d
give me the fare, just like that.”

“I’m sure he’d listen, yes.”

John crammed a hand to his forehead, totally exasperated. “Did he ever listen to anything I’ve wanted?” he demanded. “Do you think there’s a hope in hell of his listening now, now that this woman is monopolizing him?”

Catherine eyed him warily. “You mean Jo Harper?”

“Who else?”

Catherine bit her lip for a second before replying. “For what it’s worth, I think she’s nice. And she’s making your father very happy.”

“Oh, yeah,” John replied viciously. “Yeah. Happy. Great.”

He wrenched open the door and went out onto the drive. The rain was still pattering through the magnolia, whose petals littered the ground.

Following him, Catherine stepped ahead and barred his path. Her eyes ranged over his face. “You are jealous,” she said, wonderingly.

He said nothing. He pushed her aside and began to walk. She ran after him.

“You are surely not jealous of your father’s happiness?” she demanded.

He stopped. Stared at the ground. “What do you think I am?” he said. “If he’s happy, fine. Why should I care?”

She looked at him intently. The rain was wetting her hair, her face; forming distinct droplets on the leather jacket that John wore.

“I think you do care very much,” she said.

“Who asked you to be an amateur psychiatrist?” he muttered. “Especially such a bloody bad one.”

“I don’t think I’m wrong,” Catherine said. “You think it is Franklin, or some goddamned thing about a dead man and a dead crew and dead ships. Or now, this wildlife photographer. This bear. When that is not it at all. You don’t want to get to Peel Sound, Beechey Island. You want to get to
him
. That is what it is.”

He had still not looked up at her.

But when he finally began to reply, it was low, almost guttural.

“And you know all the answers,” he said. “And just because I want to take up a bloody perfectly good offer, a fucking good opportunity. I don’t want to go to Canada for six weeks. It can’t be that simple, can it? It’s not that I just want to get away from this claustrophobic bloody place.” He pointed a finger at her accusingly. “You’re going to Arctic Bay, aren’t you?” he said.