Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 108, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 661 & 662, September/October 1996

The Woman Who Loved Polar Bears by Suzanne Jones

© 1996 by Suzanne Jones

When she is not turning out fiction, Suzanne Jones writes freelance for a medical firm in Colorado. Colorado settings frequently appear in her stories, especially the University of Colorado at Boulder, where the author herself was once a student.

At first Hal had to use oxygen only at night. Sarah moved to her daughter’s old room so as not to disturb him, since he had difficulty sleeping. One night as she stayed up, too restless herself to sleep, she chanced to see part of a movie on the disastrous Nobile expedition to the Arctic. She had been fascinated by the story of the Italian airship that had crashed on its overfly of the North Pole and by the sacrifice of the great explorer Amundsen in his search for the wreck of the dirigible. Of white spaces so vast they pushed at the corners of her mind. But the image that remained with her was that of the polar bear, the solitary hunter, roaming over a landscape like nowhere else on earth, as remote from her patch in Boulder as if it were on the moon.

Now Hal trailed his oxygen tube throughout the house like a tendril of himself, slowly dragging it through every room. Sarah thought of it as a horrid kind of umbilical, this hose which supplied his laboring lungs. She found it lying everywhere like the golden track of a great snail, marking his passing by shiny lengths of itself on rug and up stair, disappearing beneath the closed door of the bathroom or the bedroom when he went down for his nap. She had an aversion to stepping on it, as if she could collapse it with her weight and cut off his very breath, though she knew very well that she could not. It was more a squeamishness which caused her to avoid it, as she would avoid earthworms on the walk after a heavy rain, rather than some concern for trampling a defenseless part of him.

Then one day, he simply stopped. Stopped moving with his painful tread. Stopped breathing. Stopped.

There was no very good reason for him to continue, though she had been warned that he might go on as he was for years. “Congestive heart failure due to complications from emphysema” is what his physician told her, his great gray eyes swimming sympathetically, like the yolks of petrified eggs on eyeballs of fishy white. He too will be dead soon, she thought.

There was no immediate sense of release. She went outside and sat on the front steps. Before her Campbell’s Cliffs, darkly wet from the last snow, lay against the slope of Flagstaff and looked much the same as they usually did at that time of year, though the snow, coming in late October, had been early. The mountain still wore its autumn reds and yellows. The cold air stung her eyes and made them water, simulating grief.

The ambulance came and went. The day girl came and tidied away and made up his bed. His pillows were as crisply white as an arctic landscape, the sheets as desolate as the sweep of arctic plain.

The doctor left her some capsules to help her sleep.

Then she was alone. Truly alone. Someone had thoughtfully collected the three green interconnected oxygen tanks which had stood side by side in the downstairs hall. There were only the circular indentations in the rug in the hall to remind her. She supposed in time they would disappear.

There was an odd, uneasy silence in the house. She didn’t miss the sound of the oxygen because it had made little sound really, no more than a gust of wind. It had never hissed except when she had, in the beginning, filled the portable tank for him when he wanted to go out of the house. But it had been months since he had wanted to do so.

From time to time throughout that first evening she imagined she heard a scuttling, a rustle in the dark, or would glimpse a movement out of the corner of her eye. Then nothing. Nothing when she put on the lights, all the lights, and went slowly through the house. The undraped windows of the dining room shone as black and hard as obsidian, mirroring her solitary image, satisfying her that she was truly alone. Except for the smell of him, which lingered, clinging to rug and walls and bed most strongly in his room, but layering the air throughout the house with the oppressive sweetness of illness. She blamed the sounds on the resurgence of a memory of some long-forgotten pet, the clicking of a dog’s nails across the kitchen tiles, then muffled in the carpet. Something like that.

She had looked down at the narrow shape of him beneath the sheets as they wheeled him across the porch and lifted the gurney down the steps. He had become a ridge of snow drifted against stainless-steel tubes. As pale and remote already as the memory of spring.

She avoided looking in mirrors for the rest of that day and night as she made the obligatory telephone calls: to her daughter in Colorado Springs, to Hal’s cousins, to the English Department, to two or three of their friends.

She did not remember much of the funeral or the colleagues who eulogized him as a scholar, an educator, generous with his knowledge and his time. Thoughtful of his students. Widely respected and admired.

His colleagues and friends and the elderly cousins had filled the funeral home in which he lay in Brooks Brothers splendor prior to cremation, his nostrils pinched but free at last of that damned tube.

She did not recognize many of the people there. It had been five years since Hal had retired. His colleagues were mostly younger than he was, and one by one had disappeared from Hal’s life. Now it had been too long for her to remember them with confidence. She would recognize their names as they whispered them to her and took her hand, but she identified them tentatively, as she might music heard faintly from another room. There were, of course, couples whom she and her husband had seen up until fairly recently, who had pretended to ignore the tubing and the outer trappings of his illness, but she was not close to any of them. They were really his friends — their friends.

Her daughter Catherine, smooth-faced and assured, had come from Colorado Springs. Her husband was away on business and could not attend the funeral. Catherine insisted that she spend the night with her mother. Though Sarah agreed, she wished that her daughter would mourn by herself, if she had a mind to. She had seen the tears at the funeral and had been angered by them. If Catherine had felt like that about Hal, where had she been all these months? An intermittent presence. A disembodied voice on the telephone. Yet she knew she was being unfair. Her daughter had her own life. She supposed the younger woman was genuinely sorry her stepfather was dead, but Sarah suspected she mourned for what she had lost long ago rather than the yellowed husk Hal had become. But that was all right, wasn’t it? What should she mourn for?

“You — I don’t know — seem so remote,” Catherine had said to her. “The doctor says it’s simple depression—”

Simple depression? She almost laughed and had to turn her head away. She feigned a cough.

She awoke with a start in the night and lay listening for the familiar creak of the house in the wind. But there was nothing. She listened for the sounds her daughter might make while sleeping, but it was as if she had gone deaf. For a moment she debated getting up to see if Catherine was still there, but was suddenly afraid that if she tried, she might be unable to move her limbs. She sat up then, heart pounding. Then, fearing she might wake her daughter, she made herself lie back and calm herself and wait for sleep. She found herself thinking of an incident some years after her marriage to Hal.

They had been sitting one Sunday afternoon in the living room, she on the couch beneath the large window which looked out on Flagstaff and he in the leather chair which had the good light. She had looked up at him appraisingly from her puzzle, at his handsome, patrician profile. He was frowning at the journal in his hand and making notes in the margin to take some luckless scholar to task.

“What does ‘iconography’ mean?” she asked.

He stirred uneasily, as he always did when she asked him a question to which he should know the answer. She supposed that was part of the problem between them: The longer they were together, the more severe the erosion of her confidence in his omniscience as she found the soft places in his armor. By then she was experienced in doing so.

“It isn’t in this dictionary,” she said, tapping the paperback which rested against her thigh as snugly as a cat.

“An icon is—”

“I know what an icon is,” she said.

He paused, pretending that she had not interrupted him, tactfully ignoring her rudeness.

“Iconography is not, however, the study of icons, as one might guess, but rather the relationship of a group of symbols representing — or rather — bearing the meaning of a stylized work of art.”

She wondered if he was ashamed of the “or rather.” He had to know that she would recognize it as a clearing of the throat (which he knew she hated), a pause to allow him to think of a more exact reply.

“Such as? Could we perhaps provide an example?”

“If you like. Hamlet, for one. Ophelia and Polonius, Hamlet and Gertrude. The Oedipal interpretation. If one views the characters as symbols, they can be manipulated and interpreted virtually at will. A feminist version of the play — which blissfully I have neither seen nor read — purports to have Ophelia running off to join a lesbian guerrilla group. Dear God.”

He laid aside his journal and looked at her expectantly, seemingly surer of himself, as if he supposed that he had gained a foothold on the slippery slope of her esteem. She knew he wanted more.

“Does that make it clearer?” he asked. “Shakespeare is rife with examples. Take Othello—”

But she was unwilling to grant him more.

“Never mind. I get the drift.”

She was acutely aware of his disappointment. It was as if she had wantonly turned her back just as he had seized on the heart of the matter. She knew he longed for another chance to preen himself before her, but she bent her head ungenerously again to her puzzle. After a moment, she heard him pick up his magazine.

She made herself unclench her hands and spread her fingers on the cool sheets, imagining herself in the limitless landscape of the Arctic, with the wind curling the snow about her feet like smoke.

She had been twenty-four years old when she had gone back to school and taken her first course from Hal. Catherine was five. Sarah was newly divorced and embarrassed at being such an old undergraduate. When asked, she would say that she was “going for her doctorate,” for she had every intention of doing so. That was the price her husband had been willing to pay for an uncontested divorce. He would support her and the child until she had collected whatever degrees she could. It was more than generous, but then the divorce had not been her doing. She had left the university after her sophomore year to marry Catherine’s father in haste, and as it had turned out, unwisely.

After the divorce, she had found a woman to look after the child during the day and had returned to school eagerly. On the first day of her Milton class she had thought Hal the most attractive man she had ever seen. He was elegantly slender and impeccably dressed in a blue blazer, snowy oxford-cloth shirt with a button-down collar, tailored tan slacks, and a blue and red and white striped tie. His cordovan loafers were so highly polished she was sure he could see his reflection there as he appeared to study them for prompts, rather than the notes stacked neatly on the lectern. While gathering his thoughts, he seemed to prefer to fix on such lowly objects: an imaginary crumb on his spotless tie, a piece of lint on his sleeve. Sometimes he formulated his answer to the rare question in the glowing tip of the omnipresent cigarette, omnipresent despite the prominent NO SMOKING sign posted at the upper right-hand corner of the blackboard. Later she would find that he glanced at the sign at the start of each class before bending his sleek head to light his cigarette. She decided he did so to avoid embarrassing students who might otherwise have pointed it out to him, by making it obvious that he knew it was there. But it also had the effect of impressing on them that ordinary rules applied only to ordinary people. They did not apply to him.

He was a Milton man, the youngest tenured professor on campus and already chairman of Graduate Studies in English. Even so, he was fifteen years her senior.

She went to him during his posted office hours with a difficulty with her term paper on Comus. They went for coffee.

He was not divorced but was separated from his wife who lived in the East. Their affair was discretion itself until Hal had obtained his divorce. Most of his colleagues were stunned when they married. Though they showed her pitiless courtesy, they treated her much the way Hal himself had treated her almost from the beginning, as though she were an attractive, precocious child whose opinions were to be tolerated, not valued.

She stopped her formal schooling after she got her B.A. Though her grades were excellent, going on for an advanced degree would have been too awkward as long as Hal was chairman of Graduate Studies. Besides, she had a young girl to rear.

“What are you going to do?” her daughter asked her over breakfast. “You’re still a young woman.”

She had not been unprepared for the question but thought its timing inappropriate. Did one bury one’s husband one day and go to work for IBM the next? She decided her daughter was old enough to know better and would not profit from a rebuke.

“I suppose I’ll go back to the zoo,” she said cautiously.

“In Denver?” Her daughter frowned.

“Boulder doesn’t have one.”

“Yes, I mean, but that’s awfully far away to drive, isn’t it? Even if it is only a couple of days a week. Can’t they get along without you for a while?”

Perversely, her daughter now seemed to feel resuming her activity of choice was a desecration of her weeds.

“It’s only two mornings,” Sarah said.

“But they don’t even pay you for it,” Catherine said.

“I don’t need to get paid for it. I enjoy it. It pleases me.”

Her daughter nodded, humoring her, no doubt.

“And I intend to travel,” Sarah continued. “There is a trip I want to take to Canada before Thanksgiving. Travel is one antidote to ‘simple depression,’ don’t you think?”

“Of course it is,” her daughter said. “But it’s an odd time of year to go to Canada, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Early November is the best time to see the polar bears.”

“Early November? You mean right now?” Her daughter was shocked. She had a little bit of a frightened look. Sarah wondered if her daughter thought her mad as a hatter.

“Next week, actually,” Sarah said. “Otherwise I’ll have to wait a whole year. It’s now that the bears migrate north to Hudson Bay. Every spring they are carried south with the last of the pack ice. When it finally melts, they make their way north along the coast to wait near Churchill until freeze-up. The fresh water at the mouth of the Churchill River causes that part of Hudson Bay to freeze first. That’s why the bears are there. They’re waiting to go onto the ice.”

She realized she was flushed with excitement and talking far too much, but she wanted her daughter to understand.

“Next week?” Her daughter seemed stunned.

“All the arrangements have been made,” Sarah explained. “The tour is paid for.”

“You made these plans before Hal died.” It really wasn’t a question, but her daughter looked at her as though she expected an answer.

“I made the reservations this morning, actually.”

“Mother,” her daughter stifled a wail, “the funeral was yesterday! What in the world are you thinking of? What are people going to say?”

Sarah looked at her daughter’s imploring expression. She was reminded then of how different a creature Catherine was from herself. Catherine had a social context. She moved among people. The approval and disapproval of others was important to her. Sarah found it curious that she could have reared such a daughter when she herself had become so indifferent to the opinions of others.

It was as if a door were closing somewhere in her mind with a vaguely metallic sound.

“Tell them I’ve gone to the south of France for my health,” Sarah said. “For my grief.”

Her daughter swallowed. Sarah thought that Catherine seemed very far away. “I’m sorry,” Catherine said. “Everyone knows how devoted you were to Hal. Of course you must go on your trip now if that’s what you want to do. I was just surprised, that’s all. I know how fascinated you are by the bears. Had you discussed your going with Hal?”

A sly, probing question. Her daughter knew very well how Hal felt. He had labeled her involvement with the polar bears at the zoo as “obsessive behavior.”

When it became obvious that her mother was not going to respond, Catherine dropped her eyes to the surface of her coffee. “I think it will be good for you to get out of Boulder, in any event. These last few months can’t have been easy for you.”

How easily her daughter had suddenly turned gracious. What a social creature she was. Sarah wondered if Catherine would tell her friends that her mother had taken her grief to a warmer clime.

The next day her daughter went back to Colorado Springs, and Sarah went back to the zoo. She followed the same route automatically: the old Boulder turnpike to Denver and I-25 then south down Speer along Cherry Creek. She scarcely noticed that the lilacs along the edge of the Denver Country Club had taken a beating in the last snow, that some of them already had lost their leaves. She turned left on Colorado Boulevard and drove to the zoo, which was just off 23rd. She always went the same way, even though she knew it was not particularly the most efficient. It would do. Like a pony in a pound, she wore her way.

After her stint in the office, and lunch, she went to the polar bear pit, as was her custom. She felt she had been away for a month rather than less than a week.

Ula brought her head up and stared at Sarah across the reach of water which separated the pit from the fence. Sarah doubted the bear could recognize her from sight. Besides, she supposed she appeared to Ula much as Ula appeared to her, indistinguishable from any other polar bear of like size, nor was there any reason to believe that Ula could distinguish Sarah’s particular smell from the others milling along the edge of the fence, though she supposed the bear’s sensitive nose might have that capability. On the ice pack bears could scent prey thirty miles away. But here were many prey, and Sarah assumed that her own smell was inextricably mingled with the others. But she stood in her regular place and was shyly pleased when the bear raised its great head and probed the air in her direction. There was a moment when the bright black eyes seemed to single her out, to rest on her curiously, but she had too much humility to mistake that for recognition.

She remembered that there had been a time, early in her relationship with Hal, when she refused to believe that their attraction was mutual. It was too improbable that he would actually want her when he was everything she had always wanted. She loved the smell of him, of tobacco and wool and gin. Loved his voice, husky and deep and brimming with passion for Milton’s grandeur. The self-absorbed way he paced behind the lectern, as if so involved in the world he was describing that he would have continued talking and walking had they all stolen away, one by one. She loved his contemptuous indifference to their opinion. His arrogance. That these might have been difficult qualities to live with did not occur to her for some time.

And what had he seen in her, this mother of a five-year-old child? Sarah’s parents were dead by the time she met Hal, and her lineage had not been a particularly distinguished one. But Sarah had good, clear skin, thick dark-blond hair which was forever working itself free of pins and getting into her eyes, a tidy body, and large gray eyes that drooped ever so slightly at the outer corners like teardrops.

“Like the Queen of Hearts or a lady of the Italian Renaissance,” Hal told her. For the art of the Italian Renaissance was a passion of his. Every year he went to Florence. He wanted very much to show her Florence.

Later she would decide that it had less to do with how she looked or who she was than that he was in love with her being in love with him. He was flattered by the intensity of her passion and intoxicated by her humility. He was so centered on self that only someone willing to share that self-interest could penetrate his indifference. And he was charmed that she seemed as interested in his thoughts on the machinery of local politics or the most effective way to combat the aphids on his roses, as his pronouncements on the Areopagitica.

They had other things in common, of course. They played tennis together. Skied. Took long walks about the town with Catherine. Hal was appropriately, if not extravagantly, attentive to her young daughter. Certainly more attentive than Catherine’s natural father, who had by then started another family of his own.

The unhappiness in the early part of her marriage to Hal was all her own, as she felt more and more keenly the disparity in their respective stations. It required more than filling in the appalling gaps in her literary education. She knew she was foolishly sensitive to the condescension shown her by the other wives of the department, few of whom had any more education than she, but they had the advantage of their years, their wisdom, and the psychic battle scars suffered in their husbands’ tortured struggles to attain the recognition which Hal had already achieved and she so effortlessly shared. She could not experience the camaraderie of their shared disappointments in failed appointments and rejected publications. They were of another generation, and though she recognized that their slights and lack of cordiality arose from envy, that recognition was of little consolation. She was “Hal’s wife.” And the years which separated her from them were a gulf which she could not seem to bridge.

She learned that she could not share this hunger for acceptance with her husband. It puzzled him, then irritated him. So she devoted herself to her family. To housework and gardening and dinner parties. She filled up her days the way a nautilus built its shell, layer by layer and chamber by chamber, never mistaking an instinct to survive for delight in the complexity of design.

Time was on her side, but as she had accumulated sufficient years to simulate wisdom, the other wives had gone — to other schools, to retirement, to the grave. And in their place were women not so much younger than she but whom she found very different. They were bright and ambitious for themselves as well as their husbands. If they were intimidated by Hal’s wife, they showed it only in that they approached her with considerable reserve. So ultimately she was deserving of their respect only and not their friendship. It was at about this time that her daughter married.

Sarah and Hal began to travel more, to Mexico and Hawaii and of course to Italy, and the disappointments she had experienced early in their marriage she felt were behind her. If there was less passion, she and Hal were easier with each other now, expecting little and demanding less. The passage of time had weakened his compulsive assertion of his superiority as it had armed her with a dispassionate indifference. It should have been the best of times, but little by little Hal’s health failed.

In late January, shortly after she had seen the Nobile film, a long article on Ula’s rejection of the cubs appeared in the newspaper. She had read it avidly, and went into Denver the following week to see the cubs, taking the route that would later become as much hers as the steps to her own house or the back walk among Hal’s roses.

Only two months old, the cubs looked like the teddy bears of her childhood as they sprawled on the floor of the nursery with their legs splayed on either side, bodies flat on the carpet. They couldn’t walk yet and propelled themselves across the floor on their stomachs with a rowing motion. Their nose and eyes were black buttons. They nursed greedily in the quilted laps of the women who tended them and shrieked and hissed in disappointment when they had sucked the bottles dry. A volunteer stood with the crowd which had assembled outside the glass of the nursery and demanded they lower their voices because “the noise was causing the cubs stress.” And of course to keep moving so that everyone could see.

Sarah disliked the woman controlling the crowd, disliked her assertive, confident manner. She wondered how such a disagreeable personality had come by her position. In moments Sarah had been rushed past the great glass window of the nursery and found herself again in the bright sunshine. Having already endured Hal’s derision at her interest in the cubs, and disappointed that she had seen so little for her six dollars, she decided she would visit the mother of the cubs, although she was on the other side of the zoo. Still, it was a nice day, warm for January, and Hal would not expect her for hours. She walked past enclosures of kangaroo, ostrich, eland, zebra, and warthog, past the main entrance with its business office to an exhibit entitled “Northern Shores,” where she saw Ula for the first time.

The polar bear pit curved beneath an overhanging high concrete bank cleverly sculpted and studded with stones and simulated streaks of clay to look like the bank of a river. Despite the cleverness, even Cherry Creek, the concrete-walled trench which Sarah followed through the heart of Denver, looked less artificial.

Along the foot of the bank was a narrow beach bordered by a stream which traversed the length of the pit, swiftly running down the slope from right to left. Between it and the low fence was the pool, the surface of which was some four feet below the low box hedge and the three horizontal pipes set in cement posts which made up the barrier between prey and predator. The bear was sitting on the base of its spine alone at one end of the pit, sprawled like an old woman with its stubby hind legs spread indecently apart in front of it. The soles of its feet were as black as its nose and eyes.

The bear was sleek, sleeker than Sarah would have imagined. Its coat looked as smooth as that of the seals it was designed to hunt and feast on. It swung its head toward the spectators. The bear tested the air, probing it with an up and down motion of its head, thrusting its muzzle in the direction of the sparse crowd.

She found herself nodding forward as though she too were testing the air. And for one dizzying moment the bear stopped its motion and stared directly at her across the pool. It wasn’t for long, scarcely time for her heart to turn over, but she felt a piercing thrill, part pleasure and part fear. It was a look which belonged in a cold, wild place.

Suddenly the bear rolled forward and moved with surprising speed along the narrow beach the length of the pit and up the slope through an opening in the concrete wall. She heard a thundering, metallic sound.

“Feeding time,” a tall young man told his small son, who was frowning in disappointment.

And that was it. The bear did not reappear. Sarah descended steps which curved down to a glass viewing area beneath the surface of the pool, which looked quite deep, fifteen or twenty feet at least. It was devoid of life. Feeding time, she reminded herself. She now understood why the surface of the water could be so close to the low fence. There was nothing on which the bears could brace themselves to spring upward. Through the clear water she could see a small white towel lying on the bottom of the pool. She waited for several minutes alone at the glass, but no animal of any sort appeared, and she was getting cold. She walked back into the sun and found her way to the business office with a vague idea of complaining about the disagreeable volunteer in the nursery. Instead she picked up a leaflet which told her that for only forty dollars she could become a member of the zoo and a volunteer herself. She could work in the business office, which she now did, two mornings a week.

After her lunch, usually a sandwich she had brought with her, she would stop to see the cubs, then go to the polar-bear pit. There were bears other than Ula: Otto, a male almost half again as large as Ula and father of the cubs, and another female who was a little larger than Ula, but they did not much interest Sarah, even when they dived in the pool and swam on their backs, playing with blocks of ice like otters. It was Ula with her seal-like skin and eyes that seemed to penetrate Sarah’s skull and burn images of a far-off place into her brain, Ula, who had the memory of her species, of icy waters and white storms, though disappointingly Ula had not been born in the frozen North but in the Louisville, Kentucky zoo. Ula, who paced along that narrow beach, rolling with a rippling, pigeon-toed gait, who caused Sarah to imagine the dark blue skies and limitless sweep of the icecap. Ula was usually solitary, aloof from the others and their often boisterous play.

Sarah went to the bear pit even on snowy days that winter and spring, even on days when driving from Boulder was difficult. Even once when the weather was so bad that Hal had asked her not to. The car knew the way.

One day was very like another with Hal now as his condition worsened. She supposed he did the same things when she was gone that he did when she was there: read, go through his papers, and organize his notes on the long paper on Samson Agonistes, which they both doubted he would ever finish now. Sometimes he watched the news at noon.

In the beginning he had asked her about her day at the zoo, what she had done, what animals she had seen, but he quickly recognized that her job was clerical and menial and that her only interest was in the polar bears. It was Hal who had pointed out to her the small article in the paper that fall, the few lines which indicated that the Denver Zoo would be sending Ula to San Diego. Rejected cubs often did not survive, but Ula’s cubs were now almost a year old and evidently deemed out of danger so that the zoo administrators decided they had a surfeit of polar bears. They had agreed to transfer Ula in November.

She remembered being surprised by the intensity of her anger at the article and at Hal, who, after all, had only brought it to her attention. However, he was not long in observing that while he could take no responsibility for the arbitrary action of the zoo, its perfidy ought to make her consider how she was wasting her time. She had no more input into decision making at the zoo than any other typist. Why should she drive to Denver two days a week in all kinds of weather? There had already been an early snow. Let her find work to do in Boulder, if that’s all she wanted.

How confident he was in his assessment of her situation. How satisfied in his judgment.

She went to her room and got out the brochure on Churchill again. She sat on the edge of her bed and read it carefully, smoothing the pages grown soft and furry with handling. Touching them was like sliding open a door in her mind. Through it she could see the polar ice stretching away to the very top of the world.

That night, after Hal had retired, she went noiselessly down the stair, carefully avoiding the motionless tubing, to the oxygen tanks in the hall. She turned the black knob on the top of the master cylinder from 8 to 7, all the way down to 1. It took her almost an hour to do so, gradually reducing the flow so as not to disturb him. Then she went to bed.

The next morning she got up early and gradually turned the setting back to 8. Hal seemed little different, although he complained of tiredness. She had been tempted to leave the setting on 1, since she knew he would not go near the tanks. He despised his dependency on them. But she thought that imprudent and unnecessary.

She repeated that activity for more than a week without any noticeable change in his behavior, though he might have become quieter, more introspective. She felt only a certain curiosity about his condition. She was not impatient.

Then one morning before she left for Denver, he complained of weakness and had her make a doctor’s appointment for him for the following day. When she came home from the zoo that afternoon, she found him dead in his leather chair.

The travel agent had been very pleased to be able to find her a room in Churchill at that time of year. It was the peak time to see the bears, and with all the tourists flying in, accommodations were scarce. And he had managed to get her space on one of the buses for three of the six days of the tour.

She had been disappointed in Manitoba. She had expected more snow, but it lay thinly, streaking a desolate plain dotted by many ice-covered ponds. Churchill itself was a small collection of low buildings set on the edge of the gray gravel shore of Hudson Bay under a misting sky. She was told that some of the trees — all of which were less than four feet high — were hundreds of years old. Everything in that bleak country seemed to hug the earth.

The pilot of the early flight from Winnipeg had pointed out some bears on the approach to the Churchill airport, but she had an aisle seat and by the time she leaned across her seatmate, the plane was touching down.

Churchill was cold and damp, and she was tired, but there was a tour scheduled after lunch. The tour bus looked very much like a school bus, but it was heavily reinforced with steel and rolled on huge tires so soft they would do less damage to the fragile environment than a person walking. Or so they said, but the buses following one another had carved a great muddy track across the tundra as they slowly bumped over hummocks and through shallow pools, crushing the ice beneath them.

She was extremely uncomfortable on the bus. Her fellow passengers dropped the windows excitedly whenever they wished to take a picture unhindered by the glass, and they wished to take pictures every time they spotted a bear. Which was often. She was cold and hated being jostled as they jockeyed for position. The motor drives which advanced the film whined incessantly as the shutters clicked and clicked and clicked. They meant to have their trophies. Sarah had brought no camera.

The bears were part of a dull landscape studded with numerous large pale rocks and low, spindly shrubs. Sarah had a sudden sad longing for color. The lilacs along Speer were purple and white in the late spring. Hal’s roses had bloomed crimson and pink and yellow until the snow. Flagstaff still had its autumnal reds. Here it was as though wind and cold had leeched the land to bone. In all directions the plain stretched away perfectly flat.

Hudson Bay was a long thin line of dark water on the eastern horizon against a leaden sky. When the bus rolled to its edge, Sarah could see the ice forming a crumbling necklace along the shore.

Despite the repeated encouragements from the guide, Sarah did not leave the bus. She remained behind as her fellow tourists trooped uneasily across the tundra to take pictures of dun-colored lichen and stunted willows at the edges of frozen ponds.

Eventually they returned to town, and she was able to sit on the edge of her bed in the rather ordinary motel and rest and wait for dark, which was not long in coming. She delayed to let people going home from work clear the streets. Around six o’clock she left the motel and hurried along Kelsey, the main street of Churchill and the only one she had seen which was paved. The wind was stronger now, and the few people left on the street were hurrying too, hurrying toward light and warmth. She soon passed the cautionary row of signs bearing the image of the bear which marked the limit of the town. Then she was alone.

It was not so dark that she could not follow the tracks of the buses out of town and across the tundra, angling toward the bay. The only sound she could hear now over the wind was the icy mud crackling beneath her feet. From time to time she stopped and raised her head to the biting wind and tasted the air.

She didn’t see the bears until she was almost among them. In the darkness she had mistaken them for stones. As she drew nearer, she could see that there were four of them, probably all males. They lifted their heads, swinging their muzzles toward her. Behind them she could just make out the white-capped bay with its growing fringe of ice. Soon freeze-up would begin, and the bears would leave the land behind them. Soon they would be hunting the ringed seals, each bear making its solitary way over the great stretches of pack ice that rotated imperceptibly beneath it, drifting clockwise past Ellesmere Island, Point Barrow, New Siberian Islands, Franz Josef Land, Svalbard, Greenland. All countries were the same in the great polar night. The seals would come up to their breathe holes in the ice, and hunting would be good. Now the bears were coming to the end of their long summer fasts, and they would be very hungry.

She quickened her stride toward them, toward the sea and toward the dark, where they were waiting to take her to the top of the world.