step out of the frame). But the big money, he said, was in bears.
On the bridge of the Louis, somewhere in Peel Sound, we were all still watching the bear beside the hole. Its patience was so great that it resembled somnolence. I swear to both God and the monsters thereof, that as we watched, a seal popped up to catch a breath, and as it did the until now statuesque bear sprang forth, catlike, extending its fatal paw. With one terrible and yet somewhat leisurely swipe it snared the seal by the neck, punctured the jugular with one terrible bite, and then, limp carcass hanging from its jaws, trailing blood, lumbered off, making an exit that Nansen describes well, assuming “an easy shambling gait, without deigning to pay any further attention to such a trifle as a ship.” Then it disappeared behind a pressure ridge to enjoy its meal in private.
CARMACK’S DREAM
Eddy Carmack, sixty-seven, does not resemble the Arctic explorers whose black-and-white portraits I’ve seen in history books—those pipesmoking Victorians and Edwardians wearing layers of wool and layers of beard. Beardless, since boarding the Louis, Carmack has worn, as if it were a kind of uniform, a navy-blue fleece cardigan vest decorated with the logo of the Canada’s Three Oceans Project. He has short brown hair, little round glasses, a thin, scholarly face, almost no visible jawbone to speak of (a trait he and I share, one that makes his neck and mine resemble that of an iguana), and a nervous habit of smiling for no apparent reason. Talking to him, I’m often left wondering why he’s smiling and what he’s thinking. When he smiles, the smile lines in his cheeks crinkle almost to his ears.
When I visited him at his office in British Columbia, back in January, after disembarking from the Ottawa, I asked him the same questions I’d asked John Toole, Amy Bower, and just about every other oceanographer I’d met: If flotsam can tell us where stuff really goes, as Carmack believed, then where, upon entering Bering Strait, had the ducks really gone? And why in the summer of 2003, despite Ebbesmeyer’s predictions, hadn’t the beachcombers of New England found them?
“You had one finding,” Carmack said.
“One sighting,” I said. “I interviewed them, the people in Maine who reported the sighting. Put it this way, I don’t think their testimony would have held up in court.” (How long ago and far away that drizzly morning in Maine seemed! Had a duck made an appearance in Kennebunkport or hadn’t it? Science or no science? Proof or no proof? Was this a children’s fable after all?)
In his office, Carmack had smiled, inscrutably, knitting his fingers, but said nothing. The window above his desk looked out onto fir trees. Affixed to the glass was the translucent likeness of a cardinal, and on one of his bookshelves was a framed photo of his own feet, in brown sandals, propped up on the prow of a red kayak afloat on some tropical lagoon.
To fill the silence, I’d continued: “So from what I understand, this question turns out to be a fairly difficult one to answer. Given that the spill happened in 1992, you now have fifteen years of climate to be thinking about, and from what I’ve read the climate of the Arctic has changed a lot since 1992.”
From behind his little spectacles, Carmack’s eyes seemed to twinkle a little. It was then that he’d told me about the Drift Bottle Project, fetching a beer bottle from a bookshelf, saying, “So here is the Canadian version of the rubber duckie.” Then he shared with me one of his preliminary findings: “The Arctic is moving faster.”
Down the hall, on a colleague’s computer, he pulled up satellite footage of the polar ice cap. The footage began in September 2007, the same month that I’d voyaged to the Labrador Sea. Watching this grainy, pixelated, black-and-white, yin-yang, stop-motion montage of ice swirling and expanding and contracting inside the Arctic Basin, I was reminded, weirdly, of watching a fetus on a sonogram screen. “This shows you what an ice catastrophe last year was,” Carmack said. “I mean it broke all records. Smashed them. It was hell up there.”
Now, months later, one evening, before the bar opened for business, in the Louis’s main lounge, in heavy ice, the bubblers screaming, somewhere in Franklin Strait, Carmack delivered a lecture in which he expounded and expanded on the preliminary findings he’d shared with me seven months before. His was among