I’ve started on a new manuscript, hoping to get it done
in a year or so. My working title is From
Polar Bears to Porcupines. No subtitle yet, but obviously something to do
with wildlife vets. Met with my writers
group yesterday for a first run through with one of the chapters about bears
that will likely be somewhere in the middle.
Here is the first draft of the last 580 or so words. The
events took place in the early 1980s and were part of a large study of bear ecology
and population structure in the days before the polar bear became the poster
child for global warming.
We have finished working with a sow and her two tiny
cubs south and east of Pond Inlet on Baffin Island. They have been weighed and
measured. All the samples have been collected and there is one last task to
carry out before we let her go back to a normal life. I’m working with wildlife
technician John Lee and helicopter pilot Tex Walker.
 |
| Out on the sea ice near Pond Inlet. John weighs a cub during our work on the bears |
§§§§§§§§§
Now came the last mucky task. Once more into the bag.
This time John emerged with his tube of Lady Clairol hair dye and a brush.
Before long a huge black X, each arm about sixty centimetres long, followed by
the number 5 covered the bear’s back from side to side. I had deduced, on the
first bear we had worked on, that this unconventional use of a famous product
was to prevent us from capturing this bear again this same year.
“How long will it last?” I had asked. “Quite a while,” John
had replied. “Long after we are done with our capture program this year. It’ll
be gone by next year.”
There was no need to paint the cubs, as they would be
with their mother for the rest of the season. I wonder if the folks at the
Clairol company had ever imagined
the scene we now saw.
I did the rounds with the stethoscope again and John
read off his checklist to make sure that we had not forgotten some vital
element. I took care to avoid getting the dye on myself, as John had inevitably had after dippng his brush into the black goo, and smearing it over the bear.
Now we had to hunker down and wait for the cubs to
recover. For the mother bear I had an
antidote to the carfentanil that we had used to immobilize her. Not so
for the ketamine/Rompun mixture that was keeping the cubs quiet. Of course I
could not wake the mother up until we knew that the little guys were alert, but
that did not take long. In fact they had already started to show signs of
recovery, moving their tongues and heads as we finished up collecting our
various samples. From that point their recovery was rapid and they soon
snuggled up to their mother.
Ten minutes later, and after yet another check of the
vital signs, I drew up the antidote into a syringe and injected it into the
vein on the underside of her tongue. John and I had already packed up a our bags
and closed the lids, as neither of us wanted to be fiddling with that sort of
detail when the bear awoke, as she would do within a couple of minutes, if our
experience was anything to go by.
John had already signaled Tex to start up his engines by
whirling an arm above his head. Tex needed time to get his machine warmed up
and airborne. Again, should my patient decide to turn and come for us we wanted
to be up and away before she reached us, and a bear can cover a lot of ground
very quickly if it decides to.
We walked as briskly as the snow would allow, rather
than run and risk falling, back to the chopper and climbed in. Tex upped the revs as we put on our headsets.
When the bear rose, stumbled once and moved away Tex lifted us off.
With the work on this bear finished we
climbed above the site and I looked down. I could see our tracks and the
trampled snow where the helicopter had been and realized that the evidence of
our approach and work pattern closely resembled the symbolic shape of a
Valentine’s Day heart. The chopper had been at the pointed bottom. Our own
footprints and the deeper scars left where we had crawled made the arches and
the trampled snow where we had worked on the bears was the point in the middle
where those arches meet.
I looked over to where she was walking with her
cubs. The hair dye stood out clearly and
we could avoid harassing her again. It was time to move on.
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