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Alejandro Saravia 235 The Bears of Port Churchill He had been watching the swift work of a small hamster for a while as it devoured seeds and grains from a small plastic feeder and stored them in its cheeks, which in this species of rodent serve as enormous pouches to transport food from one place to another. In a few minutes, its small body had acquired the size and poise of a tiny, muscular gladiator walking up and down inside its cage, all puffed up and powerful , letting itself be seen and admired. When he received notice from the employment office regarding his relocation to a remote village in northern Canada, above the sixtieth parallel and reachable only by plane, he had assumed he would be able to travel with everything he owned. However, the brief letter specified he was to make only a one-way trip and that he could bring no more than two large suitcases. As for the rest of his belongings, the letter simply said, “Get rid of everything you cannot bring with you.” He spent two nights packing and unpacking his bags, putting in and taking out objects that seemed important to him as time went by in the hours before his departure. After a long struggle and great sacrifices, he decided it would be impossible to take all his books with him, or at least all the ones he thought were necessary. What? He had to leave behind Ambrose G. Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary? And H. Caulfield’s Manual of Chess? It would be impossible to take off for those white, frigid plains without that great text, El camino del Araya by José María Arguedas, and this one, or better that one, and this one here, and that one too. . . . He couldn’t help regretting having to part with so many good books. He knew that in Port Churchill, a remote town in northern Manitoba, close to the polar ice, there were only two main activities during the winter: watching enormous polar bears go down the street in their migration, during which they might get tangled up mating and frolicking and even end up crushing entire houses while they were at it, or . . . reading. Or both things at the same time. He imagined Cloudburst 236 one of those long winter nights, a single night that lasts six months, and he pictured himself lying in bed after a day’s work as a language teacher, with no books left to read, listening to the wind moaning, whistling and howling as it carefully buffed the frozen shells of the roofs outside. He imagined that instead of counting sheep to fight insomnia, he would have to count flying white bears, carried on the arctic wind, beasts that bleated rather than growled and ate seals that were as black and glistening as India ink. Sitting with a cup of tea, his mind wandered as he watched the meticulous eating habits of that small hamster that had ended up in his possession in the most curious, unlikely way when one day someone decided to stick it inside a sock and leave it dangling from a nail on the door to his apartment in the east end of Montreal. In the midst of his bookish diversions, he was suddenly struckbyanideaasabsurdasitwaswonderful.Heremembered a hot summer afternoon when he went to visit the First Nations people on their land at Kahnawake, on the other side of the Jacques Cartier Bridge, during their annual powwow celebration. There he met a Mohawk as old and wrinkled as an antique map, who offered to sell him a necklace made of dry, shiny seeds. From its centre hung a small vial, a few drops of which, the old man assured him, would transform him into whatever he most wanted to be: a cloud, rain, a wolf or a salmon. Of course he didn’t believe for a second the promises of the old trader in potions and necklaces. As someone who had diligently walked the halls of a few universities, an atheist with roots in Cartesian logic and a Marxist bent, the only reason that convinced him to buy the necklace was the mysterious radiance he saw in the man’s pupils. They had the faded, distant glow of a candle that casts a silent, ancient light. He had never seen anything like it before, and he came to the conclusion that the man’s gaze didn’t belong to either this century or...

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