As they approached Hudson Bay, Frans dove steeply, altering their pitch by pumping helium around in the ballonets and by tilting the flaps located behind the powerful turbines housed in two big cylinders attached to the sides of the craft. Together these actions shoved their nose down and sent them humming toward the ground.
The October nights were growing long up here, and the frozen landscape was a black whiteness to every horizon, with the icy gleam of a hundred lakes making it clear just how crushed and then flooded the Canadian shield had been by the great ice cap of the last ice age. It looked more like an archipelago than a continent. Near dawn, a glow of light on the horizon to the north marked the town they were visiting: Churchill, Manitoba. As they dropped over the town and headed for its airship field, they saw it was a desolate little knot of buildings, far enough down the western shore of Hudson Bay that it got no traffic from the busy Northwest Passage, except for an occasional cruise ship visiting in the hope of seeing whatever polar bears might remain.
Which were hardly any. This was mainly because the bears were now stuck on land every year from the breakup of the sea ice in the spring until it refroze in the fall, a disappearance that kept the bears away from the seals, which were their main source of food. That meant they were so hungry they never had triplets, nor hardly twins, and when they came through town to see if they could walk on the new sea ice yet, they also looked around to see if there was anything to eat in town. This pattern had existed for over a century, and the town’s Polar Bear Alert Program had long ago worked out a routine to deal with the October influx of bears headed for the newly frozen ice, tranquilizing ursine trespassers and blimping them in nets to a point downcoast where early ice and seals both tended to congregate. This year, rather than blimping all the trespassers out of town, the program officers had kept their holding tank full, with the idea that some of these jailed bears, the most obnoxious in the region, had self-selected to be the ones to get airlifted much farther south than usual.
After Frans attached to an airship mast at the edge of town and was pulled to the ground by a local crew, Amelia got out and greeted a clutch of locals. Actually it was very close to the total population of the town, she was told. Amelia shook everyone’s hand and thanked them for hosting her, filming all the while with a swarm of camera flies. After that she followed them across town to the holding tank.
“We’re approaching the polar bear jail in Churchill,” Amelia voice-overed unnecessarily as she filmed. Her team was not sending this out live, so she felt more relaxed than usual, but was also trying to be conscientious. “This jail and its animal control officers have saved literally thousands of polar bears from untimely death. Before the program was started, an average of twenty bears a year were shot dead to keep them from mauling people here in town. Now it’s a rare year when any bear has to be shot. When they get through a season with no bear deaths, a gigantic polar bear snowman is built to celebrate the achievement by the human citizens of the town.”
She filmed the pickup trucks that were going to convey her transpolar emigrants from the jail to the Assisted Migration. These were very hefty pickup trucks, with snow tires taller than she was. Polar bears did not hibernate, she was told, so during their trip south they would be confined to the big animal rooms at the stern end of the airship’s gondola, configured to make a single big enclosure. Apparently it had been decided that they would tolerate the voyage better if they were accommodated communally. Amelia’s producers had prepared the room in advance of departure and stocked the craft’s freezers and refrigerators with the seal steaks needed to feed them en route.
As the local program officers used a crane to hoist the drugged and netted bears into the pickup truck, then drove them over to the airship, Amelia filmed and spoke her voice-over, ad-libbing in the knowledge that later editing would change it all anyway. “Some people seem to not understand what a problem extinction is! Hard to imagine that, but it’s clearly true, because we haven’t been able to get everyone to agree that moving some polar bears back into a truly polar environment is their last chance for survival in the wild. Twenty bears are going to be transported eventually, that’s about ten percent of all the polar bears left in the wild. I’ll be taking six of them. So, if by doing that we help get them past this moment into a viable future, their genetic bottleneck from this century is going to be as skinny as a lifestraw, but it’s better than extinction, right? It’s either this or the end, so I say, load ’em up and ship ’em out!”
The bears, sedated and netted, looked disheveled and yellowy. The huge pickups backed up to the stern bay door of her airship’s gondola, where a little portable crane was wheeled up and used to lift one netted bear at a time onto a small forklift, which was dwarfed by its load but held the ground well enough to hum up the ramp into the animals’ room. During their trip the room would be kept at arctic temperatures, and everything a polar bear might want in autumn was on board. The trip south was scheduled to take two weeks, weather permitting.
Soon after the bears were on board they were ready for liftoff. Frans slung their hook and off they went, rising a bit slower than usual, being some five tons heavier.
A week later they ran into a tropical storm coming north from Trinidad and Tobago, and Amelia asked Frans to head for the west fringe of the storm’s circulation, which would give her viewers a dramatic edge-on view of what might become a hurricane, while also pushing them southward in its counterclockwise flow. The storm was now named Harold, which was Amelia’s younger brother’s name, so she started calling the storm Little Brother. As a totality it was moving north at about twenty kilometers an hour, but its western edge was whirlpooling such that its winds pushed southward at about two hundred kilometers an hour. “That gives us a net assist south of about a hundred and eighty kilometers per hour,” Amelia informed her future audience, “which is great, even if it only lasts for a few hours. Because the natives are getting a little restless, it seems to me.”
She said this with her usual moue of tolerant dismay, her raised eyebrows and bugged-out eyes giving her a Lucille Ball look, always good. The camera flies buzzing around her would add to the effect with their fish-eye lenses.