"A very silent, very swift swimmer"

Two nice swimming-related bits in this week's New Yorker. The first is an essay by distance swimmer Lynne Cox chronicling her swims in the icy waters of the Northwest Passage, following the path of Roald Amundsen. Unfortunately not available online, but here she swims in Baffin Bay (in a regular Lycra bathing suit!), through ice floes with a friend in a kayak leading the way:

I dragged my feet as I walked slowly into the water, so I wouldn't step on any sting-rays. A chill ran from my feet, through my body, and out along my shoulders and arms.

"This is great," I said, when I reached David. "Let's go to the right." The water felt as cold as it had in Greenland, but I could breathe much more easily.

Swimming with my head up, I followed David around a small block of sea ice and entered an area where there were larger blocks of ice on either side of me. It was like entering a snowy sculpture garden, one that might have inspired Henry Moore--the ice had been rounded and smoothed by the wind and the waves and the tide. To my right was a block of ice that looked like a reclining polar bear. On my left, another resembled a snowy egret taking flight. As I continued through the maze, though, I became a little afraid. There were ledges that extended under the water; David pointed to them with his paddle, but I still misjudged my position moving through the water and hit them. It hurt dully.

I caught up with David, and I gradually put my face in the water. I t was easier to swim that way--my hips were not dragging, and I could see well below the water's surface. It was glacial blue and as clear as springwater. The bottom was a soft, silty brown, and a pure white starfish was resting on a sandbar. I felt more confident as we moved into deeper water, and at the same time I was gauging the distance we had travelled, making sure that I had enough in my to get back. Although my outer body was numb, my core felt warm.

I continued springing through the passages, but I wasn't paying attention to my forward motion. I turned too soon at one point, and got hung up on an underwater ice shelf. David glanced back, and I shouted that I was fine and asked how long I'd been swimming.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "One more crossing of the bay?"

Once I'd finished my final loop, I had been in the water for twenty-three minutes and had covered about a mile. It was my coldest swim--four degrees colder than in Antarctica.

The other one is on a slightly lighter note, sort of (I am never going to swim as fast as this creature!). Certainly less chilly. Caroline Alexander on the aquatic Royal Bengal tiger:

Tigers, the largest of the world’s big cats, migrated to India twelve thousand years ago from south China and southeast Asia; the time of their arrival in the Sundarbans is not known. In the marshy land and brackish channels caused by encroaching tides, the huge terrestrial animals took to the water. “The Sundarbans tiger is amphibious,” Dr. Sanyal said. The tiger’s diet is not only meat based; it also includes aquatic prey, such as monitor lizards and other reptiles, frogs, and fish. The variety of the tiger’s prey—ranging, as one field manual cheerfully notes, “from fish to human beings”—is another advantage that the Sundarbans tiger has over other tiger populations.

It was only nine o’clock when the boat arrived at a neat compound of concrete-block buildings and gardens, where reserve officials and staff, some with their families, lived, surrounded by high, stout wire fencing. The day before, a tiger had sauntered along a creek outside the compound and left its pugmarks. “This was a female,” Dr. Sanyal said, pointing out that the four pads were slightly rectangular, each measuring about two and three-quarters inches. The pad marks of a male would be squarer and broader.

The prints had been made not far from a “mangrove cage walk”—a two-hundred-metre-long path through the forest under a protective wire tunnel, such as one might find in a maximum-security prison. The path ended at a thirty-foot-high watchtower, level with the tops of the tallest trees and overlooking a broad river that marks both the eastern limit of the Indian Sundarbans and the international border with Bangladesh. Historically, bandits have operated on both sides of the border, but the Bangladesh Sundarbans, which is also under protection, is considered the more lawless. The possibility of closer collaboration between the two Sundarbans is being explored, but for now the little-patrolled seventy-kilometre-long river border remains vulnerable to traffic and to poachers.

“A male tiger on this side who hears a female over there will swim over to her,” Dr. Sanyal said. Tigers can swim five miles, so the two-mile dash to Bangladesh would be a mere jaunt. “Once, I was following a tiger in a motorboat,” Dr. Sanyal said, as we continued looking across the river. “And the tiger was swimming faster.” A tiger is said to have clocked more than eighteen hundred feet at seven minutes and eighteen seconds—against the tide. Put another way, a tiger’s time for a hundred-metre freestyle would be a respectable one minute and twenty seconds. “Tiger is a very silent, very swift swimmer,” Dr. Sanyal said.

The Royal Bengal tiger is solitary and “secretive”—the last attribute regularly appears in the language of even the most sober field manuals. A group of tigers—should one be so fortunate to see one—is called a streak. A male tiger can be as large as ten and a half feet in length and weigh more than five hundred pounds. The tiger’s coat is deep amber, the lines of its characteristic black shadow-stripes abstract and sophisticated. Its claws retract, like those of a domestic cat; it “prusts,” or chuffs, rather than purrs, as well as roars. The iris of the tiger’s eye is amber-yellow. The tiger is one of the few anointed animals commonly referred to as “charismatic”; “Nature’s masterpiece of the creation,” to cite a recent book; or, as Kushal put it, “something to look up to,” both beautiful and powerful. The tiger is also a very clever animal, and a very effective predator. Stories abound of its strategic, chess-player maneuvering of prey and of its extraordinary stealth. Every story told to me by a witness or survivor of a tiger attack included words to the effect of “it came from nowhere.”