Read Online White Heat by Melanie Mcgrath - Free Book Online Page B

had
enough experience to know when to take particular care. The conditions required
his total concentration and he thought of nothing more until he reached the
edge of the ice, where it gave out to clear, moving water, the restlessness of
the currents beneath ensuring that it stayed ice-free all year round and, as a
result, attracted zooplankton, then char, seal, orca and beluga, all the way up
the food chain to polar bear. He wanted just to take a look at the beluga.
        Derek
hadn't hunted whale himself in a very long time. There was a good reason for
that. Some years back he'd set up camp on the beach at Jakeman Fiord. Exploring
the immediate area, he'd come upon a stretch of temporarily opened water at the
foot of a fiord. Mistaking the water for a polynya, where the water was open
all year round, a pod of young, inexperienced beluga had gathered. As the water
had begun to solidify, they had taken it in turns to swim about and edge away
the ice with their noses. As the ice crept further and further in, so their
attempts to clear it became more frantic. The splashing eventually attracted a
large male bear. Each time the beluga rose from the water to breathe, the bear
harried them with his paws. By the time the bear had managed to drag a young
beluga out onto the ice, the others, wounded and weak, were completely trapped
as all around them the water turned to bloody ice.
        Derek
had never been able to see beluga again after that without something in him
reaching out to them. It was this feeling of protectiveness that had brought
him out to the polynya today, though the likelihood of this lot sharing the
fate of those others was small, because the polynya opened out to deep-sea
waters way out from the shoreline. Not so long ago, bears would have followed
their prey out that far, part swimming, part jumping from floe to floe, but in
the past four or five years the breakup had come so early that the great white
hunters could no longer rely on their old ice routes and were wary of getting
themselves stranded out in the open ocean. In the short term this was good for
whales, bad for bears. In the long term, it was just bad.
        Derek
reached the edge of the water and waited a while but nothing stirred on the
surface and it was with a sense of relief that he realized the belugas had
moved on. Returning to Kuujuaq he was overcome with a feeling of melancholy.
Not for the first time in his life, he wished he'd had the opportunity to go to
college and study some aspect of Arctic zoology. He would have been happier as
a naturalist than he was as a policeman, he thought, as he stuck the kettle on.
        He
looked around the little apartment and thought about Stevie's invitation. Next
time he'd go.
        
        
          After
supper of canned beef stew, Derek went back to his office computer to work on
his lemming project. The conventional wisdom in the scientific community was
that the four-year lemming population cycle was somehow independent of the
chief lemming predators, the fox, the snowy owl and the stoat, but, from his
own observations in the field, Derek had begun to suspect that the predator
population actually drove the cycle. It was a whole new angle on the relationship
between predator and prey and he knew he'd have to be extremely careful to get
his facts right before approaching anyone with a view to publishing his
findings. His email popped up. He scanned the messages, saw none from Misha and
buried his feeling of disappointment by getting up and making himself a cup of
tea. He sat down and typed Arctic fox population' into Google, then, on a
sudden, sickening impulse, deleted it and tapped in Misha's name instead. He'd
done this so many times, hating himself, but unable to stop. Some people got
addicted to internet gaming or porn, but with Derek it was Googling Misha. The
only comfort to be had was the fact that the intervals between each trawl had
grown longer. It had been three or four