Ice (12 page)

Swinging his massive head over the documents, he studied the maps, the files, the lists of numbers.

“If this helps . . . all polar bears will thank you. I thank you.” He leaned his head against her stomach, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. In a lighter voice, he added, “It is, though, quite unnatural.”

“So says the talking bear,” she said.

His fur shook as he laughed again. “I had no one to mock me for days.”

“Vacation’s over,” she said. “Cassie’s home.”

Softly, he said, “You have no idea how happy that makes me.” She felt her cheeks warm. She felt as if she could float to the ceiling. “Romantic,” she said.

He covered his muzzle with his paw, miming embarrassment.

Cassie opened another binder. She wanted to show him everything. “Look, here are all the current tagging numbers from the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the IUCN.”

“Come,” he said, nudging her with his nose. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.” Cassie grinned. Out on the ice, together. Leaving the IUCN binder, she walked alongside him, past the carvings in deep blue ice and up the staircase lit by candlelight. “You know I had a number all picked out for you: A505, Alaskan ID.”

“A505,” he repeated.

“I think you’d look nice with a tag. Just like an earring.” She tugged on his furry ear. She couldn’t get enough of touching him. It reminded her that he was real. “Not to mention the green ink on your gums. Very attractive.”

As always, he waited in the hall while she prepared for bed. Once she slid under the covers, she blew out the candle. Everything descended into darkness, and she heard the pad of bear paws and then the footsteps of a man. The mattress sank as he climbed into bed beside her.

For the first time in five nights, she slept well.

* * * * *

Cassie woke first. Her cheek lay against his bare chest, smooth and human. Her arm was draped across his stomach. She lay there for a long moment, feeling him breathe. Her husband. She reached up in the darkness and lightly touched his face. Her fingers traced his chin and lingered over his lips.

She’d never kissed him. She wondered what it would be like.

She felt him stir, and she pulled her hand away quickly. She rolled to her side of the bed. “Ready to patrol?” she asked him.

She felt the sheets shift and the mattress rise as he stood.

“We’re going together, right?” she asked.

Cassie felt a wisp of wind in her face. When he spoke, it was with his deeper, polar bear voice. “Of course, O Intrepid Leader.”

She grinned.

Cassie heard the door open. She waited until she heard it click closed before finding her flashlight and turning it on. She dressed quickly in full expedition gear—Gore-Tex pants, mukluks, all of it—and then she met Bear at the front archway to the castle. Soon, she was riding him across the ice.

The Arctic spread before them, blue-shadowed and as broad as the Sahara. Cassie leaned over Bear’s neck as the wind slapped her face. This was wonderful. This was magnificent. This was . . . far too slow. She shouted a dog sledding call into his ear: “Mush, mush, mush!”

“Very amusing,” he said, but he sped into a blur. She whooped as the deep night-winter blue stretched into a single sheet of ice and sky. Yes! She was flying! The midday moon hung low and fat on the southern horizon. She waved to it.

Bear leaped over a pressure ridge. Laughing, Cassie grabbed his fur and clamped her thighs around his middle to keep from falling off. She loved this! They should have done this months ago.

She squinted into the dark whiteness. She saw the aurora borealis curling around the fringes of her vision, green and white flashes. According to Inuit legend, the northern lights were the dancing spirits of the dead. Cassie wondered if that was where the unclaimed souls went, the ones munaqsri missed, the ones that should have gone to newborns. Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. The aurora was caused by electrically charged particles from the sun hitting the upper atmosphere, not floating souls. The souls went . . . She had no idea where missed souls went. She supposed they could go to the aurora. Bear had said once that they were lost. Maybe eventually, she’d have enough data to map paths for deaths as well as births. Wouldn’t that be something? But she shouldn’t get ahead of herself. First she had to see whether her plan would work at all.

The first route Cassie had planned took them down into Lancaster Sound to Hudson Bay and then east to Davis Strait. At the opening to the sound, Bear shouted that he felt a call. Cassie hung on as Bear leaped and crashed through pressure ridges and over creaking ice pans.

Bear braked without warning, and Cassie flew into his neck. “Hold on,” he told her. “We’ll take it slow this first time.” Gripping his neck fur, Cassie opened her mouth to ask what he meant.

He walked into a snowbank.

Snow melted like a mirage around them. Cassie shuddered as it slid through her. A few seconds later, she felt warm wet air on her face. Half her body was within the bear’s den; the rest was immured in the hard-packed snow. She listened to the sow pant in the darkness. She’d never been so close to a birthing polar bear in the wild. She didn’t think anyone ever had. This was amazing, she thought. This was impossible.

This was the power of a munaqsri. This was why he had power: to reach the bears as they were born or died. All the magic existed to make this moment possible.

“It is time. It is coming,” Bear whispered.

“Can’t see,” she whispered back. Suddenly, she could. She saw white: fur and ice. Bear, she guessed, had altered her eyes. He’d changed her body, in the same way he did when he kept her warm on the ice.

Bear inched forward and laid his face next to the sow’s stomach. Cassie wiggled closer too. “Do you have the soul?” she whispered.

“Watch,” he said. Bear opened his mouth, and a shadow fell like a drop of water. It sank into vast mounds of fur. Cassie didn’t breathe. A tiny wet shape, the cub, slid out of its mother and squirmed.

In a soft voice, Bear said, “And that is how we make babies.”

“It’s . . . a miracle.” She had no other word for it. Bear created miracles.

The cub mewled. Blind, it wormed through its mother’s fur, and the sow licked it with a tongue that covered it in one swipe.

Silently, Bear retreated. They slid through the solid snow. Cassie felt as if she were being smothered, and she fought to stay calm. Bear would never hurt me, she told herself. She gasped in air as they emerged. Her muscles shook. “Are you all right?” Bear asked.

“Love the night vision,” she said. “Hate the walking through walls.” She took a deep breath to calm her racing heart.

Hands shaking, she took out her GPS: latitude 63° 46’ 05” N, longitude 80° 09’ 32” W. She marked it in a notebook, then tucked pencil, notebook, and GPS back into her inner layers. “We should head toward Churchill next. There are a couple mothers overdue west of Hudson Bay.”

“As you wish, O Glorious Leader.”

She snorted. “Cute.”

* * * * *

That night, Cassie lay beside Bear. “You awake?”

“Don’t kick me,” he said into his pillow.

She smiled and reached over in the darkness to touch his human shoulder. “It’s going to work,” she said. “That cub’s birth proved it.” She had a place here, not just as Bear’s wife. She had a future.

“Yes,” he said. She felt him shift. He was facing her now, she guessed.

“We’re a team now,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

She reached out again, and her fingers touched his smooth cheek. She wondered briefly what he’d look like in the light. Not that it mattered. He was her Bear. Cassie shifted closer.

He stilled, like a polar bear by a hole in the ice, but she was hyperaware of how human he was right now. She felt him waiting. He said nothing. Cassie tilted her head up, and in the darkness, she kissed him. Not moving his body, as if afraid she’d flee, he kissed her back, soft and sweet.

THIRTEEN

Latitude 83° 35’ 43” N

Longitude 123° 29’ 10” E

Altitude 4 ft.

AS LIGHT RETURNED to the southern Arctic, Cassie and Bear spent more and more time out on the ice. Every day under the blue-purple-pink sky, they patrolled the snowbanks of Alaska, Canada, Siberia, Greenland, and Norway. Every evening under the eyes of Bear’s ice carvings, Cassie refined her maps and plotted their route for the next day. And every night in the dark, she kissed her husband until she fell asleep, curled in his arms. She’d never been happier.

One afternoon, when they were north of the Laptev Sea, Bear said, “I feel a call.” Fumbling for her notes, Cassie opened her mouth to ask which direction.

“Hold tight,” he said. “There’s little time.”

Flattening herself, she held on to his broad neck as he sprang into superspeed. Ahead, she saw blue blackness—ocean water. He lunged forward into the black waves. Under the waves, water soaked into her parka. It seeped through her face mask and around her hood. But instead of cold, the water was as soft as air. She grinned. She loved Bear’s magic.

On Bear’s back, she burst out of the water. He paddled toward shore. Head and shoulders in air, Cassie clung to his wet fur. On the other side, he scrambled onto the ice and ran.

She heard the thrum of a helicopter.

Up ahead, in the distance, on ice stirred by the wind from a helicopter, a lone bear ran toward a ridge of ice. The bear’s flank was streaked in red.

“Hold on!” Bear called. “We can’t be seen!”

She wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, and Bear impossibly increased speed. Around them, the world streaked into a blur of white and blue.

It slowed for only a fraction of a second. She saw a flash of red on creamy white as Bear sank his teeth into the throat of the wounded bear. Bear yanked, and Cassie saw a streak of silver—and then Bear was running again.

Behind them, the bear crumpled, and the helicopter landed, kicking snow into the air. She saw it all in a fraction of an instant before they rocketed away.

“Bear, the poacher!” Cassie yelled. “Stop him!”

Bear vanished in between ice blocks. He didn’t slow until they were miles north. When he did stop, he swallowed the streak of silver—the dead bear’s soul—whole.

Cassie shouted, “That bear didn’t have to die! We could have scared the poacher off, and you could have healed him, magicked his cells.” It was a waste. That beautiful polar bear . . . How could Bear have done that? Let that bear, one of his bears, die!

“Yes,” he said.

She choked down words she’d been going to say. Yes, he could have saved the bear. “You’re the Angel of Death for polar bears.”

“It is necessary. If I do not claim the soul, a munaqsri from another species will. If no munaqsri does, the soul will be lost. Without souls to give the newborns, the species will become extinct.” He had prevented her from having hypothermia; he could have healed that bear. He could heal all the bears, all the time. But then where would the souls for the newborns come from? Those bears would be stillborn. She shook her head. All the implications . . .

“You knew my responsibilities.”

But it was the first time she had witnessed this part of it.

“Cassie?” he said, concern in his voice. “Does this change things?” He had such enormous power. Did that change things? She took a breath. It was his job. He existed to transport these souls, not to choose who lived and who died. That’s what she had bought into—

the continuation of the species, not the saving of individuals. Really, was it so much different from what a researcher did, studying without interfering?

Leaning forward, she laid her cheek on his neck. “It doesn’t change things,” she said. “You’re my tuvaaqan, my soul mate.” She’d never had a chance to use that Inupiaq word before. She tasted it on her tongue as she said it. “We’re a team. Right?”

He nuzzled her hand with his cold nose. “We are a team, tuvaaqan,” he affirmed. “I love that I can share this with you. I have never shared this with anyone. Thank you.” She threw her arms around his wide, furry neck. “You know, there’s something else we’ve never shared, husband,” she said very softly, and her heart beat faster. “We never had a proper wedding night.”

* * * * *

In the dark bedroom, Cassie unzipped her parka and pulled off her gaiters and mukluks. She heard Bear slough his bear fur in the familiar rush of wind. He was a man now, she knew. She grinned in the darkness. She had expected to be nervous, but she wasn’t. This was Bear.

She slid off her Gore-Tex pants and pulled off three layers of socks.

She stripped off her wool sweater.

She removed her flannel shirt.

“How many layers do you wear?” Bear asked in his human voice.

“Some of us don’t have blubber,” she said, and took off her wool pants, her long johns, and her silkweights.

“Do you want to call me when you are done?”

“Cute,” she said. She located him by listening to his breathing. She managed not to stub her toes on the wardrobe or the washbasin. Standing in front of him, she reached her fingers up to touch the bones of his cheek. She laid her hand on the side of his face and felt his eyelashes brush her skin. He blinked, and it felt like the brush of butterfly wings. Now she felt a twinge of nerves. For the first time, she was grateful for Bear’s insistence on darkness. She could be bold in the dark. She could be beautiful in the dark.