Arctic Circles

Harris looked out toward sea and heard the cackle and squawk of pelagic birds coasting the icy break around Sand Island. It was late spring, two weeks before the thaw. West of him, at the flaking edge of the sea ice, a polar bear whacked the lip of a floe with her forepaws, hunting ringed seal. Behind her, first-year cubs mewed from shore. In the bright cold of the morning, their faint calls drifted back to him on the air like wood smoke.

For three days a male bear had been stalking the tent and scanning the coast for cubs and seal carcasses. Harris glassed the horizon and spotted it through the scope, its cream-colored fur a smear demarcated only by black eyes and nose leather against the blue-white ice, far inland. The bear loped north of him, raised its snout to sniff the air, and ambled off, out of sight, behind the East Ridge, and behind the wall of firn that separated the bay from the rest of the island and stood as the only windbreak for base camp.

The night before, Harris had dreamed of this bear. It had clawed its way toward him across an esker and paced around the tent where he and his team slept. In his dream he’d opened the tent and stood half-naked in the diffuse light of morning. This was the moment when it should have come. The bear’s small black eyes would rush toward him at unspeakable speed. But that hadn’t happened. Instead, Harris had discharged a warning shot straight up into the frigid air, and the animal was swallowed again by darkness.

Behind him Waters and Ike trudged toward shore, pulling equipment in the sleds.

“Take this,” Waters said, handing Harris a box of leg bands.

“Where’s Sarah?” Harris said. He’d walked ahead of the others to scout and recover his breath at the beach. Ike shrugged and threw a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the tent.

Sarah had been sick almost every morning of the expedition. She told Waters and Ike it was something she caught at a conference in Alberta, and they believed her.

“You have to tell them,” Harris had said to her on the telephone before they’d departed for the island. He’d imagined her coiled beneath a comforter on her couch, her toes flexing as he spoke. He’d never been to her house but had mentally mapped her life in great detail. He envisioned himself living with her, making her eggs and smoothies, while she scheduled ultrasounds and ordered maternity clothes and swing sets.

She told him it wasn’t collegial to disclose personal problems.

“You’ve lived with these guys for months in the Arctic Circle,” Harris said. “And, you’ve already slept with Waters.”

She’d sighed. “It’s early,” she said.

Harris squatted on a mound of gravel twenty meters from shore, booted the portable computer, and listened to the shrieks of incoming Arctic terns. It was 3:00 a.m., and Harris, Ike, and Waters were up tagging the first batch of tern nesters to reach the beach after their northward migration from Tierra del Fuego. The sea rose and flopped between the ice floes in hard splashes, and a sharp wind blew from the East Ridge. It was only May, but the bay was already cracking into gristle-colored floes glazed with lilac light from the horizon.

Waters began to arrange the banding station on a tarp, and Ike looked out toward the bay through binoculars, then handed them back to Harris. “Lots,” he said.

Harris nodded.

“You hear that sow?” Waters said, twitching his head toward the female hunting downwind of them.

Ike murmured, and Harris nodded again.

“Getting hungry,” Waters said.

Harris removed his gloves and massaged his right hand. He’d broken two fingers hammering a tent stake into the ice the morning of their arrival two weeks earlier. Since then he’d been unable to tag and had instead been relegated to entering data into the battery-powered computer, a job that...