The Cage

by Audrey Shulman

  She’d yet to see a bear when she was with Maggie on the night patrols, very unusual for this time of year. Maggie said she was seeing five to seven of them after Beryl left in the hours before dawn. Maggie and Beryl continued to drive slowly about the town, scanning, watching. Beryl needed to see a bear striding calmly through the town, owning it, far from the dump and the mayonnaise jars. She wanted to see a bear in the depths of the night, judging the height of a window, the people inside sleeping.

  As Beryl developed her early pictures, she found that she hadn’t captured the arctic light at all. Those pictures undamaged by the cold looked almost like cleverly disguised zoo shots. She wanted the crystal bright light, the wide-open space, the bear’s swaying amble forward. She tried slower, then faster film, different filters, wide-angle lenses. After a while she got the sense of space, the size of the bear, but still she hadn’t captured that light within her camera, trapped it on her film. She wanted to bring that light back with her.

  Friday morning Butler told the group about a man who had been stalked and killed the previous year while driving a bulldozer along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

  “Bears,” Butler said, then paused to take a sip of his coffee. He sucked the hot liquid in through his teeth with his lips grimacing wide. Beryl guessed he had picked up that habit while drinking coffee from thin metal cups on camping trips. He probably thought it made him look tougher. “Bears have no fear of large machinery. They are used to ice shifting beneath them, to cracking sounds and loud movement. The bulldozer operator couldn’t hear anything over the motor. He was strapped into the seat. I mean, even if he’d heard the bear’s steps behind him, what could he have done? A bulldozer won’t move faster than five miles an hour. There was nowhere to hide or run. Just flat snow, rocks, gravel in all directions. Just the road he drove on leading back to base. Everything flat.” Butler pushed his plate away and stretched his arms out across the back of the booth. His shoulder cracked.

  Beryl was sitting beside him and she glanced up at his arm lying just above her shoulders. She had to lean forward a bit to avoid resting her head against the inside of his elbow.

  Butler continued. “They think the bear started eating the guy while he was still on the moving machine.” Butler looked down at Beryl beside him, searching her face for disgust. She found it difficult to look tough returning his stare when she was crouched slightly forward.

  “The road,” said Butler, “lay so straight, the bulldozer ran on for another mile before it got stuck in a wall of snow it had built earlier. They think the bear took the man’s body away a little before that. They found what was left of the body about a mile away.”

  Beryl considered this type of death. It might be sudden and you wouldn’t know what had happened, but just as likely it would be slow. The bear wouldn’t care if you were dead or alive just so long as you were immobilized. You’d be thinking your normal thoughts on a normal day, your hearing dulled by the loud machine you sat astride, only your vision remaining. You’d see an empty flat landscape, scarred straight down the center by the road. You’d fidget in your seat in hopes of speeding this day along, of getting to the end of it to your TV and some dinner.

  Abruptly a force grabs you, so powerful you don’t even feel the pain. Just a wind, a crack at the back of your head. You’re twisted about, blinking, looking up at a creature whose size and violence you’d never have believed, whose eyes are black and wet and small and when it leans forward to bite the flesh of your belly, you feel the rough thick hairs of its neck against your face.

  “The man’s body was completely mauled,” Butler added, leaning in a little closer to Beryl. He did not look at Jean-Claude or David while he told the story. He was watching for her reactions. She saw his nostrils flare a little as he breathed in the smell of her skin. “Beryl, tell me if this is too gory for you, but he had no right leg.” Butler watched Beryl for weakness, some trace of disgust or terror.

  “He had no right leg and—you know how bears like body fat—he did not have much skin left.” Butler paused to gauge her reaction to this information.

  She tired to keep her face slack. His eyes narrowed slightly in irritation. She’d begun to feel uneasy around him. She didn’t think she would feel this way if they spent less time around each other, but she spent most of the day within ten feet of him. If she’d met him in Boston she might’ve enjoyed his company for the stories he told. She might have felt attracted to him. Instead she knew she was going to be spending the next month with him in a small bus. His body weighed almost twice as much as hers. The fabric of his shirt stretched and wrinkled with the slow movements of his breath. He stood closer to her than she liked people to stand.

  Butler continued. “They don’t know how long he lived after the bear attacked him. But the doctors said that no one of his wounds was fatal. He could have lived through all of it, died slowly after the bear left, of cold and loss of blood, lying on the snow.” Butler held out his heavy hand warped into claws, moved the thick paw forward slowly to touch her face, to run the nails along her cheek. He wanted to scare her, to force her to show fear. The rest of the team watched her reaction.

  She moved back from his reach, not out of fear of the bear, but out of revulsion at Butler’s warm moist flesh. He smiled.

  She thought that being mauled by a bear was a better way to die than most. It was better than listening to the uneven rasp of your respirator.

  CHAPTER 14

  Saturday morning, someone knocked on the door of her room. When she opened the door she was surprised to see Jean-Claude. He held out a bag of wiring and batteries. “I think I can make a heater for your camera,” he said. Standing face to face with him, she realized he was only two or three inches taller. She wondered if he’d been fed properly when he was a child; perhaps the expeditions he’d been on at fourteen had stunted his growth. Or maybe he had simply needed to be short, to eat less, to move fast in order to survive. His white eyebrows gave his serious face an almost comical look of shock.

  He helped her rig a small battery-operated heater on the bottom of her camera. He worked methodically, explaining the steps. He spoke clearly, succinctly. He checked each connection three times. She wondered what his parents were like, his childhood. She wanted him to talk about his trips, about the Arctic, the cold and death, what he thought of walking across the snow away from a pile of clothes filled with something once alive. She watched his movements carefully. His hands were large and calloused. His right hand seemed bigger than his left. After a few minutes of staring she realized that his left hand had only three fingers; even the knuckle of the fourth finger had been removed. His fingers moved precisely, gracefully. She wondered if his mind was also moving the finger that was no longer there.

  Next, as Jean-Claude watched, she constructed a heater for David. She watched her own hands and tried to move them as precisely as Jean-Claude had moved his. She imagined that her whole life depended on the success of this machine. No backup wiring or batteries. No shelter or extra food. Not even time. She rechecked the links again. Turned it on. The warmth rose, slow and comforting.

  She smiled up at Jean-Claude and realized she only played with a terror he had lived.

  “Hey,” Beryl asked, “can you also look at my parka and clothes for the cage? I got everything the magazine recommended but I’m still worried about sitting outside in the wind. Do you mind?” In Maggie’s car, even with all her gear on and the heater going full blast, Beryl’s feet and fingers went numb, while her back sweated against the seat.

  She opened the closet, pulled out everything and laid it across the bed. She’d brought two suits of polypropylene underwear, three flannel shirts, several Icelandic sweaters, Thinsulate pants, Gore-Tex overpants, the green and gleaming parka that zipped up to a small hole for breathing and vision, two pairs of gloves, three hats, six battery-powered wool socks, boots large enough for moon landings, goggles and a face mask. Each piece of clothing was emblazoned with the insignia of the Natu
ral Photography company. She disliked wearing the electric socks the most, for they always smelled lightly of burning wool. She hadn’t turned them on after the first day; the smell made her too nervous. She imagined her feet catching fire. The clothing took up an impressive amount of space, much more of the bed than she did when she lay down.

  Beside her, Jean-Claude started shaking. At first she thought he trembled from some sort of flashback to an expedition, to the cold and the want. She thought briefly about backing slowly out of the room. Then she looked at his face and saw that he was laughing. He held the back of his hand against his mouth and his face had changed so completely he almost looked like the boy of twenty he was.

  She looked back at the pile of clothing and began to smile. When she walked to Maggie’s car with all of the clothing on, she breathed as slowly and stiffly as an astronaut.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to her. His face grinned young and happy. At that moment she could almost imagine him holding books under his arm and talking about grades. He said, “You could drown in all that. The Inuit clothing is better. Warmer. Come to my room. I have an extra suit.”

  Jean-Claude’s suit had two separate layers. On the inside was a shirt and pair of pants of caribou skin. The outside was made of wolf hide, with wolverine trim about the face.

  “Put the caribou layer against the skin,” Jean-Claude explained. “No clothing underneath. Fur faces out.” He ran his fingers over the nap of the caribou. “Wear the outside layer with the fur facing in. Don’t need anything else but socks, boots and gloves. With the body warm, the face can take intense cold. Has to. Masks simply freeze with the moisture from breathing.

  “Ice is a problem. Out there.” Jean-Claude’s eyes shifted to look out the window. Beryl watched them move slowly back to her. “You sweat and exhale moisture. It freezes to your clothing. This suit is made of fur, doesn’t retain ice. If you fall in water or sweat really hard, take it off and shake it. The ice shatters off. It’s dry again. Not like wool, where the moisture invades the cloth.”

  She went into the bathroom to try the suit on. His shelves were bare except for a toothbrush and toothpaste. She coughed to cover the noise of opening the medicine cabinet. Only a hairbrush. Beneath the sink was a first-aid kit big enough to be a doctor’s bag.

  She stripped and pulled the suit on. The caribou skin ran down over her chest and arms, supple, soft and light. She pulled on the pants and tied the thongs at the waist. She smelled smoke and leather, the sweat of sled dogs and Jean-Claude, a working smell like bitter wood. The short thick fur of the caribou stood out from her body. She could feel the stitches on the inside along her belly and shoulders, but they were so small and tight she couldn’t see them even when she brushed back the hair. She pulled the outer layer on. The thick fur rustled over her face. As the hood settled into place, she breathed in a musk as thick and sweet as skunk: wolverine or wolf. The smell dissipated almost immediately. She didn’t know if she’d gotten used to it already or if it faded quickly in the fresh air.

  She stood in the white tiled bathroom, light and flexible. With each movement she made, the fur of the two layers shivered and brushed up against each other. The fur made no sound; rather, it created a distinct feeling like when the hair on her neck stood up, that feeling all across her body, the interlocking and giving of bristles. It seemed she had always waited for this feeling, the soft skin of a caribou brushing up between her legs. She felt strong and big. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She was surprised at her new mass, the smells she encompassed. She wondered if this was how the bears felt.

  She went into the bedroom to show Jean-Claude how the suit fit. He pulled the hood forward over her head as far as it would go. She could feel the wolf fur against her cheeks. He pulled at the bottom of the parka to make sure it went down far enough, then swept the front of it up and back to look at the way she’d knotted the thongs of the pants.

  “No,” he said, “never double-knot these.” Her stomach was exposed. His hand held the material of the parka up against her ribs. If he pulled on the thongs to see how tight they were, he would see her pubic hair. “You have to untie the pants to shit and pee. If you take off your gloves for the knot, you could lose your fingers.” He let go of the material, stepped back a bit. “It’s like the moon out there. Have to think ahead.” He tapped the side of her head. “Think all the time. Can’t touch metal. Must protect your eyes. How deep is the snow? Your lips frozen? Hands still work? Should you run to warm up now or will you need that energy later?”

  The smells and Beryl’s own heat came up to her through the neck of the suit. The sensations melded together into the feeling of a single body. Always before when she had stood, clothed or unclothed, in front of a man’s gaze she had felt deficient, too small. Now she stood in the smells and skins of many bodies and felt herself to be larger than she’d ever been.

  He told her that if she’d worn the clothing Natural Photography recommended into the cage, she wouldn’t have been able to move enough in its bulky mass to clap her hands to stay warm. Every year they sent people up here like that, and it was fine so long as they stayed inside heated cars or houses. But when they tried to go out on the snow for a while, things happened.

  When Jean-Claude stood up from checking the length of the suit’s legs, she found herself blushing. He said he was concerned that the suit might be too tight. He pushed back the hood, reached into the back of the neck to make sure there was enough room for the extra heat to escape. His arm stretched up and over her shoulder, his body leaning forward against the outer fur. She felt the smooth imprint of each of his three fingers against the bare skin between her shoulder blades. The wolf skin rustled.

  Back in the bathroom she pulled the suit off and put her own clothes on with regret. Her clothing seemed scentless, plain and light without the fur. Zippers were inordinately mechanical, buttons foreign. Holding the suit in her arms, she returned to the other room. There was a chair in the corner, but she sat down beside Jean-Claude on the bed. He looked at her, then away. His eyes roved slowly over the blank white walls. She wondered what he looked for. She shifted slightly closer to him on the bed. She wanted to touch his skin, to find out if it was warmer than average. Perhaps he was a small furnace like Maggie.

  Jean-Claude said, “When the British explored the Arctic, they wore the normal navy uniform. Weren’t allowed anything else. They thought nothing could be as good as two layers of British woolens.”

  Beryl was glad he was finally talking. She wanted him to continue. “Didn’t they cheat?” she asked. “Once they got here, didn’t they ignore the rule?”

  “Difficult to smuggle other clothes on board. Certainly couldn’t wear them in public. The officers punished that.” Jean-Claude looked at the wall as though he read the words there. She wondered if he cared who he was talking with. She wondered if he had any friends, any siblings. “Each year a boat was trapped in the ice. The ice floes would grind together over the months. The boat’s hull would crack. The men froze or starved slowly. Winter’s nine months long here. Most of it’s a single night. With no sun, they could be awake at noon or three in the morning. It didn’t matter, still dark. They could stay awake for two hours or twenty. Didn’t matter. Time passes slowly that way.”

  Beryl watched his hands. They lay in his lap, too big and heavy for the rest of his body. They had thickened knuckles and deep calluses. She wondered if they hurt.

  He turned to look at her for a moment. “In situations like that,” he said, his words clear and careful, “you’ve got to understand what you live for, exactly. You’ve got to be able to hold on to it. If you don’t have it, or if you forget, you die.”

  He watched her. She wasn’t sure how to respond to what he’d said. It seemed he was waiting for something. “It must be a horrible death,” she offered.

  He turned away. She couldn’t tell if he was satisfied or not. “There was this one Dutch captain. The ship ran into an iceberg. It’s easy to d
o. Some of the floes are the size of city blocks, switching directions with the wind. The captain ran forward, his hands held out like this.” Jean-Claude put his hands up in front of him, his shoulders pushing behind. “Ran up to the floe, placed his hands against the ice. He was sucked down between the ship and floe. His men watched it. He’d been a good captain.” Jean-Claude let his hands fall back into his lap.

  “Part of his ship survived. It fell over on the ice with seven men inside. They had no food. They had no wood but the piece of the ship around them. They slowly burnt it in pieces. They floated about on the ice. They bled one another in turn, drank the blood from a shoe. After a month a man went out onto the ice to kill himself. He saw another ship passing. They were rescued.”

  Jean-Claude turned toward her. His face was blank. He held his hands palm up in a gesture she didn’t understand.

  She reached out and ran her fingertips across his palm. The skin was thick and hard, split open in places. Warm. She pulled her hand back and smiled at him, embarrassed.

  Jean-Claude looked at her, confused, suddenly very young.

  CHAPTER 15

  On their last night in town they all stayed around after dinner talking until late. They drank and looked hungrily about at strangers passing by the table. None of the four attempted to talk to any other people. So far as Beryl knew, only she and Jean-Claude actually knew anyone in town. Jean-Claude seemed to know every person who walked by smelling of dogs and gasoline. Each one looked around at the Natural Photography group and then gave Jean-Claude a silent nod. He nodded back.