The skuas wheeled overhead. One cloud of them whirl-pooled down onto something along on the shore, behind some rocks. Ann hiked toward them. Suddenly she saw the birds’ target, lying in a cleft at the edge of the ice: the mostly eaten remains of a seal. Seals! The corpse lay on tundra grass, in the lee of a patch of sand dunes, sheltered by another rocky ridge running down into the ice. The white skeleton emerged from dark red flesh, ringed by white blubber, black fur. All torn open to the sky. Eyes pecked out.
She hiked on past the corpse, up another little ridge. The ridge made a kind of cape extending into the ice, and beyond it was a bay. A round bay — a crater, infilled by ice. It had happened to lie at sea level, had happened to have a breach in its rim on its seaward side, so that water and ice had poured in and filled it. Now a round bay, perfect for a harbor. One day it would be a harbor. About three kilometers across.
Ann sat down on a boulder on the cape, and looked out at the new bay. Her breath heaved in and out of her in an involuntary motion, her rib cage moving violently, as during labor contractions. Sobs, yes. She pulled aside her face mask, blew her nose using her finger, wiped her eyes, all the while still weeping furiously. This was her body. She recalled the first time she had stumbled onto the flooding of Vastitas, in a solo trip ages ago. That time she had not cried, but Michel had said that was only shock, the numbness of shock, as in any injury — withdrawal from her body and her feelings. Michel would call this response healthier, no doubt, but why? It hurt — her body, spasming in a seismic trembling. But when it was over, Michel would say, she would feel better. Drained. A tension gone — the tectonics of the limbic system — she scorned such simplistic analogies as Michel offered, the woman as planet, it was absurd. Nevertheless there she sat, sniffling, looking out at the ice bay under scudding clouds, feeling drained.
Nothing moved except for clouds overhead, and cat’s paws on a patch of open water, gust after gust, shimmering gray, mauve, gray. Water moved but the land was still.
Finally Ann stood and walked down a rib of hard old shishovite, now forming a narrow divide between two long beaches. To tell the truth, above the ice there was not that much that had changed from the primal state. Down at the waterline it was a different story. Here the daily trade winds over the open water of the summer bay had created waves large enough to break the remaining chunks of ice into what they called brash ice. Lines of this flotsam were now beached above the current ice level, like ice sculptures depicting driftwood. But in the summer this ice had helped to rip up the sand of the new beaches, tearing it into a slurry of ice and mud and sand, now frozen in place like brown cake frosting.
Ann walked slowly across this mess. Beyond it there was a little inlet, crowded with ice boulders that had grounded in the shallows and then been frozen into the sea surface. Exposure to sun and wind had rendered these boulders into baroque fantasias of clear blue ice and opaque red ice, like aggregates of sapphire and bloodstone. The south sides of the blocks had melted preferentially, the meltwater frozen in icicles, ice beards, ice sheets, ice columns.
Looking back at the shore she saw again how the sand was furrowed and torn; the damage was terrific, the gouges sometimes two meters deep — incredible force, to plow such trenches! The sand drifts must have been loess, made of loose light aeolian deposits. Now a no-man’s-land of frozen mud and dirty ice, as if bombs had devastated some sad army’s trenches.
She continued outward, stepping on opaque ice. On the surface of the bay. Like a world covered in semen. Once the ice cracked under her boot.
When she was well out on the bay she stopped and had a look around. Tight horizons indeed; she climbed a flat-topped berg, which gave her a larger view over the expanse of ice, out to the circle of the crater rim, just under the running clouds. Though cracked and jumbled and lined by pressure ridges, the ice nevertheless clearly conveyed the flatness of the water beneath it. To the north the gap to the sea was obvious. Tabular bergs stuck out from the ice like deformed castles. A white waste.
After struggling to come to grips with the scene, and failing, she clambered off the berg and hiked back to the shore, then back toward her car. As she was crossing the little ridge cape, movement down at the edge of the ice caught her eye.
A white thing moved — a person in a white walker, on all fours — no. A bear. A polar bear. Walking along the edge of the ice.
It spotted the dust devil of skuas over the dead seal. Ann crouched behind a boulder, went prone on a patch of frosty sand. Cold all along the front of her body. She looked over the boulder.
The bear’s ivory fur yellowed on its flanks and legs. It raised a heavy head, sniffed like a dog, looked around curiously. It shambled to the corpse of the seal, ignoring the column of squealing birds. It ate from the seal like a dog from a bowl. It raised its head, muzzle dark red. Ann’s heart pounded. The bear sat on its haunches and licked a paw, rubbed its face until it was clean, catlike in its fastidiousness. Then without warning it dropped to all fours and started up the slope of rock and sand, toward Ann’s hiding place behind the boulder. It trotted, moving both the legs on one side of its body in the same motion, left, right, left.
Ann rolled down the other side of the little cape and got up and ran up the trough of a shallow fracture, leading her southwest. Her rover was almost directly west of her, she reckoned, but the bear was coming from the northwest. She clambered up the short steep side of the southwest-trending canyon, ran over a strip of high ground to another little fracture canyon, trending a bit more to the west than the previous one. Up again, onto the next strip of high ground between these shallow fossae. She looked back. Already she was panting, and her rover was still at least two kilometers away, to the west and a little south. It was still out of sight, behind ragged hillocks. The bear was north and east of her; if it made directly for the rover it would be almost as close to it now as she was. Did it hunt by sight or by smell? Could it plot the course of its prey, and move to cut it off?
No doubt it could. She was sweating inside her windsuit. She hustled down into the next canyon and ran in it for a while, west southwest. Then she saw an easy ramp and ran up to the next intercanyon strip, a kind of wide high road between the shallow canyons on both sides. Looking back she found herself staring at the polar bear. It stood on all fours, behind and two canyons over, looking like a very big dog, or a cross between a dog and a person, draped in straw-white fur. It amazed her to see such a creature out there, the food chain couldn’t possibly support such a large predator, could it? They must surely be feeding it at feed stations. Hopefully so, or else it would be very hungry. Now it dropped into the canyon two over, out of sight, and Ann started to run down the strip toward her rover. Despite her running around, and the tight rugged horizon, she was confident of her sense of the car’s location.
She kept to a pace she thought she could sustain for the whole distance. It was hard not to let loose and sprint at full speed, but no, no, that would lead to a collapse eventually. Pace yourself, she thought, gasping in short pants. Get down off the high ground into a graben so you’re out of sight. Keep oriented, are you passing south of the rover? Back up to the higher ground, for just a moment to look. There behind that low flat-topped hill, which was a small crater, with a hump on the south end of the rim — she was certain — though the rover was still out of sight, and the jumbled land was easy to get confused in. A thousand times she had gotten briefly semilost, unsure of her exact location in relation to some fixed point, usually her parked rover — not a big deal usually, as her wrist’s APS could always lead her back. As it could now too, but she was sure it was over there behind that bump of a crater.