The Sensory Deception Read Online Free PDF Page A

data acquisition.”
    “That really happened?” Gloria asked. “They shot her?” Her voice quivered.
    “Yes. It really happened.” He lowered his voice in both tone and volume. “Just as you experienced at the end of that long, painful swim, she went ashore in Iceland and the police shot her.”
    Gloria trembled. “Oh my god.”
    “What you experienced in two hours, that animal had to endure for fourteen days.
Fourteen days
.”
    He let it sink in before continuing: “Without ice, polar bears die and, as you now know, polar bears don’t give up. She swam almost four hundred miles. Remember the confidence you felt when you first slid into the water? How certain you were after the first day that you’d find another iceberg? And the second day? Remember the feeling of disappointment when there was no ice?”
    Gloria’s eyes, now filled with emotion, caught his. He forgot what he was going to say. A tear dripped down her cheek, and before he realized what he was doing, he wiped it away.
    In a quiet, breathy voice, she said, “Yes, that was it. I was disappointed. Not angry, not disillusioned, just really disappointed.” She turned back to the picture and her voice trembled. “It just—the whole thing, like the world broke my heart.”
    The next picture showed Farley and Chopper walking across an ice sheet with the polar bear outfitted in the data-collection harness. The next was of the bear resting in a snowdrift withFarley leaning against her, and the one after that showed Farley comparing the size of his palm to the bear’s.
    “It all really happened?” Gloria whispered.
    “It really happens every day.”
    “But after swimming all that way, how come, when she finally made it”—she took a deep breath—“why did they shoot her?”
    “If you were a cop walking along the seashore and you saw a starving bear stalking a group of scuba divers, what would you do?”
    Gloria covered her face with her hands.
    The room was silent but for the ticking of a clock.
    Chopper stood, stepped to the center of the room, and, looking down at Gloria, asked, “Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?”
    Gloria sipped her wine. When she looked up at Chopper, his eyes widened as though impressed that she would meet his glare. He turned to Farley and gave a barely perceptible nod of approval.
    She cleared her throat and said, “I’ve never thought of myself as an environmentalist.” She paused between sentences. “I think that I appreciate how nature works. How every piece of an ecosystem plays a role. But no, I’ve never donated money to an environmental organization or volunteered.” She looked away from Chopper, toward the window and the ocean beyond it, and mumbled, “I don’t know.”
    Chopper refilled her wineglass and said, “Walking in another animal’s skin changes your perspective.”
    Gloria took a long sip, stretched her legs out on the coffee table, and asked, “When you recorded the data to make your, umm, reality show, did you hurt the bear?”
    “You mean, how did we cuddle up to one of nature’s most aggressive carnivores without being eaten?” Farley let a warm,satisfied smile consume his face. A smile that he knew would shift the tension in the room back to business. “The experiment with birds taught me that the animal needs to be awake when we fit the harness. If she’s unconscious, it’s impossible to put it on in a way that’s comfortable, and if it’s not comfortable she’ll just paw it off. The last thing we wanted was to make her uncomfortable. No, of course we didn’t hurt her. In fact, the bear really had a nice time with us. You see, Chopper designed a tranquilizer…”
    Without a pause, Chopper finished the sentence: “…to give the bear a nice, happy buzz.” He continued in a clinical tone. “Every animal likes to get high, not just people. So instead of knocking the bear out, I made her relaxed and euphoric. She never lost consciousness, and my brew left no