During the first two or three years of leading these tours, Sam hadn’t carved out space in the schedule for free time. He’d been too afraid of losing tourists. But now he compliments himself on his faith in them while he strolls up and down the jagged shore, watching towering blue icebergs shed giant blocks of packed snow into the sea.
Of course he curses himself later, when it’s one-thirty and only nine of his twelve tourists have returned. Perry, the mechanic and barge driver, is idling in the harbor, pacing from bow to stern, threatening to leave them all stranded if they don’t climb on board right then and there. Sam is frantic, sweating beneath his parka and tripping over rocks in his desperate attempt to appear calm. If he loses someone out here, his permit will be revoked and the whole group will be shipped home. He buys himself another five minutes by instructing everyone to get on the boat as slowly and deliberately as possible, and as the ninth is climbing aboard, three shadow-figures pop up over the slate-gray ridge in the distance, waving their arms and calling over the wind for everyone to wait. The pressure in Sam’s chest stretches and pops.
He pushes the late arrivals onto the barge before they can offer their apologies, and then, once they’re motoring across the strait, the engine roars too loudly for anyone to make conversation. It’s only when they’re disembarking at Mawson that he hears the reason for their delay.
“We saw a polar bear,” the novelist announces, clearly delighting in the slack jaws and the rapt gazes of her fellow group members. A few of them gasp. “A real live polar bear.”
There’s an outlier on every tour. A chatterbox, an introvert, a doomsday prepper. Sam has learned to expect them, and as a rule he doesn’t engage with them. But this time he can’t stop himself from snorting. Twelve faux-fur-lined faces swivel in his direction.
“Not possible,” he reminds everyone. “Polar bears have been extinct for thirty years.”
The moment the words leave his mouth, he sees her again: Elsa, floating in the distance over the white expanse before him, inverted on her back with all four limbs outstretched. He shakes his head and blinks, his eyes aching in the cold.
“So they say,” the novelist retorts.
Sam exhales, his breath puffing through his chapped lips like dragon smoke. “I saw her,” he tells everyone. “Elsa. At the zoo in Minneapolis, right before she died.” He remembers the silhouettes of his parents in the cave, framed in that unearthly blue light. “Then I saw her again a few months later,” he continues, “after she’d been stuffed and preserved and put in a plexiglas case. The Last Polar Bear. That’s what the sign said, what all the articles and all the books said. Trust me; I read every single one of them. She was it.”
The novelist shoots a glance at the two college students who had been with her. They take a few awkward steps forward, the snow squeaking beneath their boots.
“Jocelyn’s right,” the woman says. “We saw her, too.”
“Her?”
She shrugs. “Just a guess.”
“And do you also study fiction?” Sam asks.
“Physics,” the young man replies. He points at his companion. “Mathematics.”
Sam spins around and stalks toward the Blue Shed. He doesn’t know why he’s suddenly so angry. He needs to focus on the flash of heat in his chest, the kindling of anger in his limbs. He feels the urge to kick something, hit something, and he strides faster and faster in order to stamp it out. By the time he crosses the lounge and the dining room and reaches his cramped sleeping quarters, he is out of breath and sweating again. It’s just a story, he tells himself as he lies on his thin twin mattress, clenching and unclenching his fists in the dark because the electricity has cut out again. He listens to his heart pounding in his ears. They made the whole thing up, of course. But what does it matter, even? Why does he care?
“It’s called Fata Morgana,” Perry tells Sam over a late-night beer at the Red Shed. The tourists have retreated to their bunks, and Sam has regained his composure. “It’s a type of mirage.”
Sam tilts his head. “Like in the desert?” he asks. It makes sense. The Antarctic, too, is wide and still and bright. Rays of light could bend through thermal currents as they’re sliding from sun to ice.
Perry raises one shoulder and lowers it. “Sure. Except it’s not water you see. It’s other things. Boats. Mountains. Islands.”
Sam swallows his beer. In the darkest days of the winter, the scientists at Mawson occupy themselves by setting up home-brewing stations. “What about bears?”
“Haven’t heard of that before.” Perry tilts his head. “But anything’s possible, I guess.” After he refills their glasses, he tells Sam the story of the early Arctic explorers who were convinced they’d discovered a new island. Sam pictures it: the frozen landmass shimmering in the distance, the fur-clad men willing to lose fingers and toes to frostbite in order to find it, name it. But when they tried to get closer, it vanished.
“So did four of the explorers,” Perry adds. “Trekked out with kayaks and dogsleds and never came back.”