The Great White Bear

by Kieran Mulvaney

  Success was earned and prey was killed through teamwork and guile rather than brute strength; through all but the most recent of times, the risk of falling victim to those we could outsmart but not outmuscle remained all too real. When at night our children peer uncertainly over the bedclothes and complain of monsters in the corner or in the closet, it is likely a manifestation of a deep-rooted fear, an evolutionarily wise awareness that, lurking out of sight, predators larger and more powerful lie in wait.

  Over time, as our ancestors grew stronger and more confident and as their ability to defend themselves improved, their attitudes toward those predators evolved, broadening from abject fear to encompass respect and even reverence. Our fellow species became not just potential predators but rivals, superiors yet also equals, and ultimately the subjects of art, tales, and rituals in whose drawing, telling, and enactment people sought to celebrate those creatures' spirit, to eulogize their power but also to demystify it, make it somehow less frightening.

  For few animals was this truer than for bears. Their mystery and majesty, and the fear they engendered, were countered by their easily anthropomorphized features and their occasionally bipedal gait. In the centuries before primates were known to anyone north of the equator, it was common for human observers to imagine they were looking on our closest relatives, our spiritual kin.

  There is a remarkable commonality in bear myths and tales, from Europe to North America and beyond. There are stories of bears becoming humans, humans becoming bears, bears raising human children, bears being raised as human children, women marrying bears and giving birth to their hybrid offspring. In some cultures, bears' imagined oneness with humans made eating bear meat as taboo as eating one's own kin; in others, doing so granted strength, but only if done with the appropriate degree of respect.

  The Ojibway people of the Great Lakes region believed bears to be descended from people; the Cherokee held that bears had come into being when some of their ancestors chose to abandon the life of humans. As late as the eleventh century, Earl Siward of Northumbria and King Svend Estridsen of Denmark considered themselves to be descended from bears; in Siward's case, the veracity of his contention was said to be evident in the ursine appearance of his ears. A legend from the Ket people of Siberia held that bears came into being when a man disrobed to climb a tree, whereupon an unknown thief stole his clothes and the tree climber grew a bear pelt; although he looked like a bear, he could still comprehend human language. The Tlingit of British Columbia and southwest Alaska believed that not only could bears understand what people said, but their sensitive ears allowed them to hear from a great distance; accordingly, even a few carelessly uttered discourteous murmurs would be enough to prompt a bear to plot revenge.

  Hundreds of miles to the north, the bear mythology of Eskimo and Inuit is characterized by a similar caution, an injunction against the demonstration of disrespect. To many Arctic coastal cultures, a polar bear cannot be killed involuntarily; it can only allow itself to be taken in order to enable its spirit to pass on to another dimension. The soul of a polar bear was said to linger for several days on the tip of the spear or harpoon that smote its physical form, observing the post-hunt rituals and dances, a knowledge that compelled the successful hunters not to mock, gloat over, or otherwise disparage the bear that had surrendered itself.

  In his book Lords of the Arctic, Richard C. Davids writes that McGill University anthropologist George Wenzel, accompanying Inuit on a polar bear hunt in Resolute Bay in 1979, was told repeatedly not, under any circumstances, to ridicule or belittle a bear; doing so, he was assured, would bring bad luck. "Bears, the hunters kept telling him, were fully as smart as humans," reported Davids. (Indeed, Davids continues, some legends have it that, in the same way men recount successful polar bear hunts, the bears, too, regale each other with stories of stalking and killing those with two legs, whom they refer to as "the ones who stagger.")

  It would seem an easy enough piece of advice to which to adhere, the admonition not to mock a polar bear; and yet it was one that Wenzel managed to transgress. As he watched his companions skin a bear that they had killed, he commented that polar bears were foolish in the way they allowed snowmobiles to approach so close before they began to flee. Two of those skinning the bear immediately stopped work, looked at him, and cautioned him not to speak of the bear in that way again. Two days later, the village chief quietly revealed that word had reached him of what Wenzel had said. He had, he reported, expected better of his visitor; he could only hope, he continued, that because he was a white man and thus assumed to be ignorant of the ways of the north, there would be no serious repercussions.

  The imperative of respect, of not speaking ill of a polar bear either directly or behind its back, that informs the behavior of those on a hunt also permeates the tales told in a warm dwelling when the hunt is over. Like those recounted by cultures about ursids far to the south, Arctic stories of polar bears bestow human qualities on their protagonists and assume that humans and bears move effortlessly (if not always comfortably) between each other's worlds. It is an assumption that is a testament to the proximity of the tales' tellers to the natural world about which they speak, a proximity that is as true now for coastal peoples of the Arctic as it was several centuries ago for Europeans who recounted myths of the wild animals that lurked in the shadows of the forests.

  Consider, by way of example, the following:

  A polar bear fell in love with a married woman, and they began an affair. He warned her not to speak of their relationship to her husband, for fear that the man would surely seek to kill him. His concern was misplaced; the husband was a particularly poor hunter of bears, so much so, in fact, that, taking pity on her spouse's lack of success, the woman revealed her lover's whereabouts. The words, though whispered, traveled through the air to the ears of the bear, which left his dwelling before the husband arrived to seek vengeance for the betrayal. Reaching the woman's snow house, he raised himself on his hind legs, poised to smash through the roof with his front feet. But, at the last moment, he paused, dropped his legs to the side, and, sadly, wandered off into the distance.

  Barry Lopez, who recites the tale in Arctic Dreams, notes the subtleties therein that speak to an intimacy and familiarity with polar bears and the Arctic, and a recognition of the danger posed by both. While to a European the notion of a mournful bear setting off on a long trek alone may seem, as he puts it, poignant, to an Inuk the ending is evocative on an entirely different level, summoning as it does the danger of being distracted in an environment where constant attention is a requirement and anything less poses perils.

  The manner in which the bear in the tale raised up to smash through the roof of the woman's house is of course suggestive of the method polar bears employ to break into seal lairs, a small detail casually mentioned that would surely have escaped inclusion had the author or storyteller been anyone unfamiliar with the daily workings of Ursus maritimus. Such familiarity is a testament not to the supposed "oneness with Nature" too easily and frequently ascribed to anyone living in a nonindustrial culture, but, more prosaically, to that most valued commodity of any field researcher: the time and opportunity to make multiple, repeated observations.

  Polar bears are in many respects like whales, not solely in that they are officially classified as marine mammals, or that they have been totems for environmental causes, but because they are both, at heart, wanderers. Whales and polar bears alike traverse great distances, through environments to which virtually all would-be human scrutinizers are singularly ill adapted.

  It is a trial particularly vexing for anyone wishing to study cetaceans; for most who wish to observe polar bears, the challenge is not substantially less. But for those for whom, like the polar bear, the ice is a place of familiarity and plenty, there are fewer difficulties. Even then, however, the more frequent encounter is not with the bears themselves but with the signs of their recent presence, of their hunting or their passage, signs that, with the benef
it of experience and observation, the astute can interpret with a greater degree of detail than the unaware.

  "If you track a bear, you can tell whether it's a male or female by the size and dent of the [paw] imprint," says Bob Konana, an Inuk from Gjoa Haven in Nunavut, in a volume entitled Inuit Qaujimaningit Nanurnut: Inuit Knowledge of Polar Bears. "The female ... has smaller feet and paws that are broader than the male's ... and lighter in weight, while the male bear is much larger and weighs heavier than the females, their imprint tends to be deeper and wider."

  It is also, says Konana, possible to tell from tracks whether the bear that has left them is healthy or unwell.

  "The heel will dig more into the snow if it is skinny," he says. "If it is fat you can't see the heel bone."

  Experience has taught Konana the most likely places for such tracks to lead.

  "If you are following a pressure ridge and you see only old tracks," he says, "keep following it because newer tracks will always cross it at some point."

  Pressure ridges—those areas where floes grind together, buckling under and rising over each other, creating miniature mountain ranges—are prime polar bear habitat. In their lee form snowdrifts; in the snowdrifts, ringed seals carve out lairs, and it is the smell of pups in the lairs that attracts the bears. But, says Konana, pressure ridges are not the only likely spots for polar bears; equally desirable are what the people of Gjoa Haven refer to in English as icebergs. They are not, however, icebergs as we understand them—chunks of freshwater ice that have calved from glaciers. In their native Inuktitut, Konana and his relatives dub them piqalujat—large, elevated expanses of old, hardened, thickened sea ice—and they say that the movement of these hardened floes, grinding through the fresher seasonal ice, keeps leads open and creates more openings for polar bears to hunt seals.

  The reason why polar bears seek out pressure ridges or areas of broken ice is, of course, to feed. Frequent observation of these areas, noted and passed down orally over the course of centuries, has enabled Inuit and Eskimo to refine their own seal-hunting techniques—although some of the techniques that Natives insist they have seen bears employ in pursuit of their prey have not been widely reported in scientific journals. The notion that bears push blocks of ice ahead of them while stalking, or that they use such blocks—or even boulders—as tools to break through particularly recalcitrant breathing holes or even to pound unsuspecting walruses, engenders skepticism among Western researchers, even if oft repeated by Inuit and Eskimo observers. Konana asserts that he has seen bears use their intelligence in other ways.

  "I have seen a polar bear [prepare] the seal hole," he says. "He cleared all the snow ... around it, and made it really thin right to the ice cone over the hole. It was really thin, so that he could easily grab the seal when it came out."

  And yet even inventive polar bears can meet with unexpected tragedy. The polar bear's head and neck are narrower than those of a brown bear in part to facilitate reaching into a seal hole and pulling a victim out onto the ice; a brown bear, were it to attempt the same trick, would almost certainly find its head stuck, but several of the residents of Gjoa Haven insist that polar bears are not immune to such setbacks themselves.

  "Before there were so many snow machines, someone with a dogteam discovered a polar bear stuck in a seal hole," adds Konana. "It drowned. It was bloated with the gases of decay. It was stinky and ... so full of gas the water was way down the ... hole [from the pressure]. The bear attacked the seal and got stuck." In a February 2009 edition of the science journal Nature, writer Richard Monastersky detailed a growing interest on the part of scientists in incorporating the traditional knowledge of polar peoples into their understanding of Arctic ecosystems and the change those ecosystems are undergoing. He quoted, by way of example, Elizabeth Peacock, polar bear biologist for the Canadian territory of Nunavut, as saying she often relies on Inuit friends for their insights into polar bear behavior.

  "Recently, she was puzzled when a male bear with a satellite transmitter stopped moving for six weeks, acting like a female in her den rather than hunting seals as would normally be the case," Monastersky wrote. "An Inuit hunter solved the mystery by telling her that male bears sometimes rest if they are already fat and want to preserve their energy for the best seal season later in the winter. That's not an insight you'll find in the scientific literature."

  For coastal peoples of the Arctic, modern accouterments have made life more convenient and secure than it once was. But the environment in which that life is lived remains hostile and inhospitable, and like the bears with which they share that environment, Inuit and Eskimo peoples must still adapt to its unique challenges. Even now, even in an age when flights may bring supplies of soda and microwave dinners, the beating heart that powers the culture of coastal villages in Arctic Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russia is subsistence, the consumption of the marine mammals that inhabit the sea ice and the water just beyond. In search of those marine mammals they, like their ursine compatriots, are wanderers, accustomed to traveling great distances for long periods. They, too, noting the ways in which polar bears wait for long spells by seal holes, adopt a means of hunting that is the personification of patience: lengthy periods of quiet anticipation punctuated with sudden bursts of frenetic activity. And while it is a life that is far from easy, in an environment that is far from forgiving, it is at least a milieu with which, after countless generations of habitation, coastal peoples of the Arctic are familiar.

  In its seasonal rhythms and familiar natural cues, it is, if not exactly comfortable, at least comforting.

  It is home.

  For the Europeans who began to venture into what, to them, was a strange and terrifying world, it was something entirely different, about as far removed from the comforting embrace of home as it was possible to be. As Hugh Brody notes in Living Arctic, "Arctic and Subarctic societies must depend upon, and not simply exist in defiance of, the cold." Conversely, he continues, "Europeans, with their agricultural heritage, react with fascinated horror to the idea of a far northern cold." Or, as Jeannette Mirsky observed in her 1934 classic of northern exploration, To the Arctic!, "Only the very strongest of motives could induce men to undertake Arctic voyages during the period just following the discovery of the New World. Men were as fearful of the dangers of the Arctic as they were of the terrors of hell."

  Those motives were, initially, territorial and financial, the two inextricably intertwined and manifested primarily in the search for a passage through the Arctic to the Orient, where it was assumed riches could surely be gained from the trade of teas, spices, gold, and silk.

  However, far from providing an easily navigable passageway, the Arctic instead proved a formidable adversary, encounters with which provided more than ample justification for the apprehension it engendered in those who ventured into its depths.

  A 1498 expedition led by John Cabot to the waters of Newfoundland simply disappeared, its fate never recorded or revealed. In 1553, two of the three ships of a much-heralded journey in search of the Northeast Passage failed to return; frozen into the ice off Russia's Kola Peninsula, the hulls inadequately protected against, and the crew improperly prepared for, the rigors of an Arctic winter, ships and sailors alike were found by fishermen the following summer. Every one of the complement had perished from, most likely, a combination of cold, starvation, and carbon monoxide poisoning as a result of burning coal in the wood stoves and sealing chimneys and portholes against the cold outside.

  Forty-three years after that voyage, the Dutchmen Willem Barents and Jacob van Heemskerck led two vessels on a similar path to that taken in 1553; Barents had been beaten back by ice in the same region two years earlier but, notwithstanding the abbreviated ending of that endeavor, nonetheless remained confident of his ability to find and navigate the pathway to Cathay that he, and multiple others, assumed awaited discovery.

  Sailing north from Norway, they became the first Europeans to spy Spitsbergen; but on this occasion, as duri
ng the previous attempt, sea ice proved an impediment to progress, sufficient to persuade one of the ships to turn south and head home. The remaining vessel—Heemskerck commanding, Barents the navigator, and Gerrit de Veer as mate—set forth anew, attempting to round Novaya Zemlya and head east, but the advancing pack ice of the Kara Sea encroached upon them, surrounding them and forcing them to retreat to a shallow bay they called Ice Haven. The name proved optimistic; even here, ice squeezed the hull of their vessel until the crew realized they had no option but to abandon ship and swiftly secure shelter on the shore. Using driftwood logs and planks from the crippled ship, they constructed a hut that they called the Safe House; there, all but one survived the winter, despite a near-death experience when they, like their seaborne predecessors almost five decades earlier, made the mistake of heating the cabin with sea coal and plugging up the chimney to trap the heat.

  It was a frequently unsettling experience. The sailors were trapped miles from home, in an environment they did not know and in which they had not anticipated tarrying. They faced daily a conflict between the desire to keep their dwelling warm and the need to keep it aerated. And they knew, too, that there were risks beyond the cold attendant in opening the door, in the form of the foxes and, especially, the polar bears that lurked expectantly outside, patrolling the darkness in the near distance as the crewmen huddled together nervously inside.

  On occasion, a particularly adventurous bear sought to break into their haven. De Veer described the evening of April 6, 1597, when a "beare came bouldly toward the house" and pushed forcefully against the door: