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.