The Cage by Audrey Shulman

over here to this poster tolook at this woman baking in the tropical sun on the beach. I’m going to channel my thoughts toward warmth and sun-tans and when you two have finished this discussion, you can call me over.” David walked to the poster and began to search his pockets for change for the candy machine.
    Beryl noticed Butler watching the poster woman’s wet breasts as though they were going to do something interesting. “What happened to the snowmobile group?” she asked. He turned his head back to look at her.
    â€œThe snowmobiles died the second day. They were two hundred miles from Churchill. Without the machines, they couldn’t pull all the food and shelter they needed. Jean-Claude got three of the five of them out alive.”
    A small man stepped in the door, closed it behind him. David walked back from the candy machine. The man paced toward the three of them with his hand held out. He walked in a painful and methodical way, something wrong with his right hip, a slight stiffness. Beryl knew just from looking that he’d left several bad situations by walking exactly that way for many many miles. He’d outlived even the sled dogs.
    She would never have guessed he was only twenty years old. The harshness of the short but constant summer sun had bleached his eyebrows a pure white. His face moved stiffly as the faces of older people who have lived by the sea their entire lives. His skin blushed a slow pink except for three white spots on his cheeks the size of quarters. The pinker the rest of his features became, the more dead white the spotsseemed. She realized they were caused by frostbite. She did not know if the blush came from the heat of the room or from having to greet them.
    He took her hand. She felt a dry roughened palm like the raspy skin on the paw of a dog. She knew her own hand must feel soft and weak in comparison. His eyes rested on her, blue and level. She knew he was wondering how she would react if things went bad, if she would survive. He let go of her hand and shook hands with the others. Beryl wondered what he saw. Jean-Claude nodded, picked up some of their luggage and led the way toward the door. Beryl watched the men follow him. David tried to zip the front of his thin jacket while carrying two bags. The bags bumped him in the chest. He settled his face farther into the jacket’s neck.
    Butler yawned and stretched his long arms until his back cracked. Then he grabbed three bags and sauntered out the door into the open.
    Beryl touched the palm of the hand that had shaken Jean-Claude’s. Her hand felt soft, with the smooth fingers of a monkey. She could smell the clear air outside now and she felt something loosen inside her. She picked up her own bags and stepped toward the door.
    Beryl guessed the temperature outside the terminal was in the low thirties, Fahrenheit. The wind blew about them like the wind she knew. It smelled of the sea, of salt. The air was like what she’d been used to breathing. The cold felt manageable. In the dark, in the car she could sense nothing of Churchill except that the road was very rough and therewere no lights of houses visible until they were a hundred yards from the hotel. The hotel had a worn red carpet and a stuffed moose in the hall.
    That night as she slept she confused the sheets of the bed with the white arms of a gigantic bear who waltzed her gently across the rolling flat plains of the tundra.

CHAPTER 9
    In the morning, she went outside and stood in the parking lot of the hotel. All her life she’d lived where the landscape rose taller than she, cutting off her vision. She’d lived among houses and vacationed in the mountains. She’d driven along roads lined with trees. Here, the land rolled out flat. There were no trees. No buildings outside of town, no fences or power lines, no hedges or long waving grass to distract from the utterly flat line of the land pulling the eye out to the horizon.