The Ecstasy of Ice

The Ecstasy of Ice

Nanuk shuffled away as the chopper’s blades receded. When she was a safe distance away, she slowed to a walk, swaying her powerful head and keeping her nose to the ground. She smelled things before she saw them. She could smell a seal on the ice from twenty miles away. She had the keenest nose of any creature on earth but she was far from the fastest; running any farther than a few hundred yards overheated her. Four inches of blubber and a dense double coat made the icy Beaufort Sea her bathtub, but her core temperature was difficult to regulate on land. She was more a creature of the water than the land. Evolution had its shortcomings.

    A moan rumbled in her chest. Another cub lost. Chutka was gone. They’d taken him. It was not unusual to lose one of the two cubs she gave birth to every three years or so. Predation, starvation, drowning; all took their toll. But usually, one survived. She would have sacrificed her life to defend him an hour ago, but Nanuk was a creature who existed in the moment, a creature of imminent survival and self-determination. She felt a vague sense of loss and anger, but it would soon dissipate. She would move on and never think of him again. There would be more springs and more cubs.

    She shifted her attention to finding a place to rest. The residual tranquilizer drug in her system, and the stress of the encounter exhausted her. One ear throbbed where they’d tagged her. The collar around her neck, though not heavy, was a foreign sensation. She swiped at it with her paw, pushed her neck into the ground like a snowplow, then wiggled on her back belly up, but it would not budge. Giving up, she found a spot near a grassy mound that looked comfortable and settled down to nap. She laid her wide paws beside her muzzle and fell instantly asleep. No need to worry about lying in the open; she was well aware she was the apex predator of her domain.

    The light was waning to a deep, watercolor pink when she woke at midnight. At this time of year, she never saw complete darkness; the sky simply faded to soft shades of grey, pink and yellow during the Arctic night.

    Nanuk grunted and shifted her gaze upward. Colors began to dance and curve into shape-shifting arcs that reflected off her shiny, black eyes. To her, the spectacle seemed like a living thing. As she gazed on it, a belonging with Earth washed through her. To Nanuk, the scent of her cub’s fur was the heart of Earth. The warmth of a snow cave while a blizzard raged was the mercy of Earth. The wind roaring over the vast tundra was the voice of Earth. The sweet, fresh blubber of a seal was the gracious gift of Earth.

    All creatures contained the same life force, Nanuk instinctively understood. The life force of a ringed seal, her main source of food, was equal to hers, equal in its desire to survive and raise its young. The life force of an Arctic poppy to reach toward the sun and absorb the brief light, to mysteriously synthesize food from air and water, was equal to that of a polar bear. The life force of an Arctic wooly caterpillar, which froze solid every winter until it transformed into a moth fourteen years later, contained the magic and endurance of Inua. The tiniest speck of life was equal to the largest.

     Nanuk closed her eyes over the colors dancing on their surface and slept for the remainder of the night. The sky colors danced on her white fur in shifting shades of pink and green. Hours later, she woke to another late summer morning.

    Summer was a conundrum for her. She needed sea ice to hunt seals, and the sea ice had retreated in July— over two months ago. In winter, she’d wait for hours at the seals’ breathing holes, then crush their skulls easily in her jaws, or steal pups from the seal’s birth lairs that lay hidden in the snowdrifts. But in summer, she spent most of her days lazing, waiting for her perfect white world to return.

    That morning, Anuk lifted her nose and slowly rose from her napping place. Looking around for her cub, she was reminded he was gone. She stretched her thick limbs, found a scent of hare tracks, and half-heartedly followed it. She would never, ever be able to catch a snowshoe hare unless it jumped directly into her mouth. She ambled on, chewing on lichens and withered berries as she went, not having any particular direction or goal. She welcomed the familiar, crisp wind ruffling the surface of her coat, the fleeting scent of hares, of frozen grasses, and lifting light.

    Over the next two summer months, Nanuk ate little and slept hard. Occasionally, she came across some crabs or kelp along the craggy shoreline which she snacked on with little enthusiasm, but still, she enjoyed the sensation in her mouth of chewing and grinding and swallowing. Twice, she found some snow goose eggs in a poorly hidden nest. But it was the blubber of the ringed seals she craved.

    As winter approached, ice crystals multiplied in wild frenzy. Beads of water froze into miniature globes of ice on slender rock willow leaves, formed on the tips of snowy owl feathers, and clung to the whiskers of walruses. It fell in soft flakes on rust-colored lichens clinging to pebbles of granite that had lain on the tundra for ten million years. The snowshoe hares’ brown summer coats transformed to white, and tundra mice cached one last cheek full of seeds in their underground burrows. Weeks earlier, the snow geese had erupted in thundering millions from their arctic nesting grounds, seeking warmer climes as far south as Mexico. But unlike those animals seeking to hide out the long winter, Nanuk roused from her summer lethargy and paced along the shoreline, watching as the sea ice grew thicker and thicker, anticipating the coming feast.

    Six months later, in early spring, Nanuk sat beside a seal’s breathing hole on the outer edge of the land fast ice. For three hours she had stared and sniffed at the undisturbed hole. She was losing focus and getting drowsy when an intense scent smacked her nasal organs and her eyes snapped open in alarm. Not the wished-for whiff of a seal’s exhaled breath, but a musky, testosterone smell. A mature male bear, a boar, had snuck up on her downwind and stood snorting and prancing on his forelegs just fifty feet away. Too close. She eyed him cautiously. Getting to her feet, she kept her head down, wondering what he wanted. She had no food for him to steal, and no cubs for him to cannibalize. Yet he was coming closer and he loomed twice her size. She didn’t know he had tracked her for thirty miles and fought off two other males to earn this moment with her.

    As he approached, she noticed his feathered foreleg hair, an ornamental feature only males possessed. How handsome it was, waving in the wind, how attractive and noble he suddenly seemed to her. Hormones fired up inside her brain, coursed through her endocrine system, and engorged her sex organs. She tolerated his approach without protest. He came close and gaped his mouth at hers to impress her. She noticed his broken canine tooth, a sign of a warrior male. She gaped at him in return. She liked his potent smell, his hot, meaty breath. He made a thrumming sound that soothed her. He sniffed her; she was receptive. He flicked his purple tongue in and out as he circled her body, then nudged her, and they ambled off together. Nanuk had found her next mate, or more accurately, he had found her.

    They spent the next ten days together, rolling in the snow, sliding down snow-packed hillsides, acting like cubs again. It wasn’t until the third day that Anuk was reassured by her partner, and her body released an egg for fertilization. A female bear could not ovulate spontaneously, since, in the vast Arctic, there would be no guarantee a suitable male would be nearby to fertilize it. Evolution had its advantages.

    Over the next few days, they copulated freely between bouts of rough play. But on the tenth day, Nanuk became impatient with his over-eager attentions and his brooding possessiveness. She longed for her former solitude. She rebuffed him once, twice, and eventually he turned away. She watched him lift his quivering nose to the wind and lumber off.

    She grunted and pawed the ground. She knew he would forget her almost immediately, focused only on mating with as many females that would let him before the season ended. But soon, she would be a mother once again.