Kathryn Harrison - The Seal Wife

The bureau provides large-scale outlines of North America, printed on both opaque and tissue-thin folios. On the opaque maps, Bigelow enters temperature and pressure readings, delineating highs and lows with isotherms and isobars, fancy words for the lines he makes, sweeping over topography in waves and circles. On the translucent overlays, he indicates wind and precipitation, using directional arrows and a code of symbols for rain, snow, sleet, and fog. He plots his own data—readings he has taken and reported to the central office—as well as observations from all the other stations in North America, numbers he decodes from a long, daily cable message. But without a light table like the one at which he worked in Seattle, he sometimes makes mistakes, and even more of them when dogs are howling. Pen in hand, he startles at the sound, rakes its nib across ten or twenty degrees of longitude.

Half wolf, three quarters wolf, all wolf—the sound of sled dogs after dinner is like nothing Bigelow has ever heard before, one howls and then another answers and so it goes until dawn. Horses aren’t much use when snow is four feet deep, and the few automobiles shipped into Anchorage are good for nothing but sport—ice derbies and mud races—and the railroad isn’t finished, it’s barely begun. So anyone who plans on getting anywhere walks on snowshoes or travels behind a team.

When sled dogs aren’t working they’re staked, and Bigelow has grown accustomed to the sight of chains disappearing into the dens the dogs dig in the snow. But, invisible as the animals are when he walks through town, they fill the night with their wailing, like hideous hymns to the devil—once they begin, stars wink out and the bright moon sinks in the sky. Fingers in his ears, wool watch cap, earmuffs, parka hood: he can’t find a way to muffle the howling. Even Rigoletto , cranked up and blaring from the trumpet, is no good, the tenor’s lament threading eerily through the howling of the dogs. The death of civilization, the death of reason, it seems to Bigelow, tearing up one map and then another.

He binds the completed maps in volumes of 120 pages, each holding two months’ worth of recorded observations, paths of major storms extrapolated for comparison to those of years past and hence. Current theories of forecasting presuppose that atmospheric history tends, like human history, to repeat itself, an idea that some meteorological scientists consider facile. And, sometimes, sitting by the stove, feet numb and cheeks burning, Bigelow lifts his head from his task and is struck by its absurdity. He isn’t drawing mountains or rivers or canyons, all those features of the earth that have existed for aeons; and neither is he mapping countries or cities or even streets, the work of centuries. No, Bigelow records ephemera: clouds; a fall of rain or of snow; hailstones that, after their furious clatter, melt silently into the ground. Like recounting a sigh.

But there are other nights when this seems to him wonderful, poetic. He is recording a narrative that unfolds invisibly to most people, events that, even if noted, are soon forgotten. A storm such as the one that destroyed his grandmother’s home might be represented in diaries and stories, but not accurately. Its character would be distorted, altered by tellings and retellings, made into a myth rather than a set of responsibly reported observations.

As with the shard of blue-and-white china he keeps, the pattern from which he can picture his grandmother’s unbroken plate, after winds blow then still, after clouds vanish, only Bigelow will have the record.

SHE IS A WOMAN, and women want things. But what? What would she like? Hairpins and combs? At Getz’s store, Bigelow stares at the meager stock of ladies’ notions. Ipswich No. 223 cotton lisle stockings? Black? Double-soled for heavy wear? He doesn’t know.

DeBevoise dress shields. Mennen’s Violet Talcum Powder. Under Getz’s eye, he considers each item, turning cans and crinkling packets in his hands; but he leaves the store without buying anything—anything that might be taken as an intimacy, an intimacy he hasn’t been offered, rather than a gift.

Bigelow pictures the woman’s house, the stove and table and chairs and shelf. What does she need? What might she use? Unable to think of anything better, he goes back to the station to retrieve what he shot that morning, a long-legged rabbit that waited too long to jump.

He walks to her house, carrying the animal first by its ears, then by its hind feet. His stomach twists, as if he’s missed supper, but it’s not yet four. It’s because he’s nervous, very nervous. A handful of women among thousands of men, and of those few, Bigelow is pursuing one he finds not merely beautiful but necessary. Necessary. Is this the effect of loneliness, of deprivation? He’s warned himself against her closing the door in his face, against the sight of another man in the chair across from hers. Over and over he’s told himself that either of these outcomes is far more likely than her inviting him inside. But it’s done no good. And he hasn’t bothered to plan what to do if she doesn’t ask him in—it seems impossible that he could still exist on the other side of such disappointment.

“Kla-how-ya,” he practices as he walks. Klaaa. How. Yuh . His experience with pidgin hasn’t been encouraging, but what other words can he use?

He speaks the phrase when she answers his knock, how are you , and he holds out the gift, the rabbit. Without taking it, she steps aside so he can enter, so she can close the door on the cold.

“Mesika,” he tries, pushing the animal into her hands. Yours . He points at her stove.

“Com-tox?” You understand? Although, inflections for com-tox are tricky. He may have told her that it’s he who understands.

She puts the rabbit on the table. He points again at the stove, and she inclines her head a degree, nothing as much as a nod.

I’m Bigelow. I think you’re beautiful. I can put my mouth on your mouth? What’s your name? How are you called? I want to hold you. Will you take your —dress, dress, what’s the word for dress? He’s forgetting all he knew— Can I take your clothes off?

Bigelow gets out his Chinook dictionary. “Be-be,” he says, settling on something simple. Kiss .

The smallest of smiles, or has he imagined it? She looks where his finger points at the word and its translation.

He has imagined it. She’s not smiling. But she doesn’t look unhappy. She looks—what does she look? He’s about to give up, go home, when the woman moves a hand to her throat and begins with that button.

Bigelow stares as the bodice of her dress opens to show her body underneath. She folds it, then takes off her underclothes and folds them, too, unhurried. He follows her into the other room, bringing the lamp so that he can see her face, search it to confirm that this is what he hopes it is, an invitation.

She raises her eyebrows; he lifts his shirt over his head without bothering to unbutton it. Eager, not greedy. He’s rehearsed this scene more times than he can count, and he intends to be as polite as he knows how.

But he’s barely felt his way between her legs when she takes his wrist and pulls his hand away.

Okay, he thinks, all right, and he scoots down, his legs right off the bed, to insinuate his tongue in that spot.

She pops straight up. Grabs his ears like jug handles to remove his head from her crotch.

“What?” Bigelow says uselessly. “What do you want?”

The woman lies back down and he sits next to her, looking at the smooth, unreadable flesh of her stomach. “Icta? ” he translates into Chinook. What?