But suddenly, I wasn’t alone, and I was no longer me. My polar bear roared to life from deep inside me. Even at six years old I was aware this was too early. He wasn’t ready, and this wasn’t supposed to happen. It might hurt him, and my body wasn’tbig enough to tolerate a shift, but he cared about me more than himself and roared to life.
The shift was agony because I was drowning and transforming for the first time. I opened my mouth to scream, and it filled with water. Was I still Asher or a beast? I was smaller and also bigger. I had paws with claws that didn’t lose their grip on the ice. And I was no longer sinking into the darkness.
My polar bear, like me, was a cub. He should have been sleeping inside me, but instead, he’d emerged to save my life.
My stepfather had vanished when we reached the surface, and my beast dragged himself onto the ice. He had used all his energy in shifting and climbing out of the water, and he lay in the ice, unable to move.
But we both caught a scent at the same time. It was a wolf, and it was headed toward us. Maybe I should have been afraid, but a man who was supposed to look after and care for me tried to drown me, so a wolf approaching didn’t frighten me, even though I was vulnerable if the wolf was hunting. Neither my beast nor I had enough energy to be scared.
The wolf was huge, twice my beast’s size, and he sniffed my bear’s wet fur. He shifted, and I stared up at a man about Father’s age with scars on his shoulders.
“Gods, what happened to you? You’re little more than a baby.” He was naked and shivering, and I worried he’d die and leave me here to the same fate.
“Don’t shift back.”
I couldn’t, and he picked me up, saying there was a hunting cabin nearby where he had clothes, furs, and could make a fire.He must have picked me up because my next memory was being covered in furs on the floor of that cabin and him making soup. I was in human form, but every part of me ached, and I drifted in and out of consciousness.
When I’d regained some strength, he carried me on his back to his pack, more than an hour away from where he found me. Pack members told me I was safe and asked what had happened. I told them using my six-year-old words, and a man, not the one who rescued me, but the Alpha, said I had a home with them.
The ice cracking beneath me brought me back to the present. My bear didn’t want to share any memories he had of that day.
Aaron, who’d rescued me, had died a few years ago, but the wolf pack was my family. They were home.
I often wondered if Father had grieved for me and what Kipp told him about the so-called accident. But that was the past, and I had survived despite what my stepfather wanted.
The ice groaned as I caught a salmon and headed home.
2
WESTON
“I don’t understand why no one cares.” I grabbed my polar bear stuffie, Bear-Bear, the one I’d begged my grandfather for the time I went to the zoo and saw a real one for the first time.
That was the beginning of a lifetime of what people called my “special interest,” or my “obsession,” or in some cases, “my unhealthy attachment” to polar bears. But it was none of those things. It was empathy and care. Seeing those bears in that small enclosure, swimming in water with fake icebergs, being gawked at and fed at regular intervals so people could gape at them through huge windows that showed them both above and below the surface… it had broken my young heart.
I’d needed that bear to remind me they deserved love too. Of course, at the time, I hadn’t figured that out. I thought I was saving Bear-Bear from the zoo and that would somehow save them all. It didn’t, no matter what four-year-old me believed. All these years later, they were still there. And when one of them passed, they quickly replaced it with another. They couldn’t not have their star attractions.
It was fair to say that that single trip was the most influential outing of my life. Watching them in captivity that day had never left me. I still pictured Luan, the youngest bear at the time, trying to hide behind the fake iceberg when I closed my eyes after a long day of work.
Back in elementary school, I read all the kids’ books about bears, fiction and nonfiction. When we had to pick an animal for a project or do a diorama of a habitat, there were polar bears there. Anytime a kid talked about Santa living with the penguins and polar bears, I had to set them straight. Polar bears and penguins did not live together anywhere but in zoos. I was a pain in the butt, I’m sure, but I couldn’t help myself.
When it came time for college, I majored in zoology. And once again, every time we were given a choice, I geared my work toward polar bears. While I understood all the reasons why zoos were important and how studying animals in captivity could help them in the long run, something about it still felt very unsettling and wrong.
As I went from my master’s to my doctorate, I tried to find ways to do it better. We had computers that could help with analysis. Drones to help with observation. We had tag-and-release programs that were better than some of the alternatives but still came with its own set of problems. There were so many things we could do, but one thing was for sure, we couldn’t ignore them completely. Not with the way the weather had been so erratic and the way humans had been behaving. If nothing else, we needed to protect them, to keep them from becoming the next to join the extinction list.
That was one of the reasons why I was so focused on Bramble Woods. It was a small town, nowhere near where polar bears should be living, but there had been polar bear sightings therefor generations. At first, I thought it was like the Abominable Snowman, where there were sightings but no actual proof. Only, the more I dug, the more I’d found the pictures, some of them from long before AI was a possibility, long before there was computer manipulation software, back before cameras had flex film.
The documented sightings went from one a decade to a handful a generation to now, when there were multiple each year. By all the data I’d been able to collect, there were more polar bears there now than ever before, and they shouldn’t have been there at all. It wasn’t their natural habitat. Or was it, and we’d been wrong about polar bears this entire time? One thing I knew was that I’d never feel at ease until I at least tried to figure this puzzle out.
And that was why I wrote my first grant proposal three years ago. I wanted to study the reasons they were there in the most ethical and non-invasive way I could. It was only a matter of time before they would hunt a dog or hurt some livestock and the humans resorted to hunting them down, or a video clip went viral on social media and some do-gooder group decided to “save” them by relocating them to places they’d never lived before, or they became a tourist attraction and a human got hurt, which would bring us right back to them being hunted.
I opened up my work email, still holding Bear-Bear. Talk about being a mature, responsible adult. I couldn’t help it. I’d been opening up disappointing emails since I started writing grant proposals, and there was only one left still pending, one that was to be announced today. Everything was riding on this email.
Just as I thought, there was a notification from the final grant waiting for me. They loved my proposal, but it was something they wouldn’t be investing in at this time. It read like every otherrejection I’d received. At least they sent one; many I found out only after reading a press release stating who did get the grant.
Tears started to flow. I hated it. I hated that I couldn’t do anything, that this was something that would require more money than I’d earn in my lifetime, that I was out of options.
My phone rang. It was Stevenson. He’d been my best friend since undergrad, and my roommate all of those years. His grad school had taken him to California, unlike mine. We were still good friends who talked often, but we didn’t see each other nearly as much as I wanted to. He had a way of knowing that I needed to talk, just like now.
