Three
TORNARSSUK
Ursus maritimus
HPI HE SEASCAPE WAS almost without color beneath a low gray
I sky. Scattered ice floes damped any motion of large waves,
^ and fogs and thin snow showers came and went in the
still air. The surface of the water was the lacquered black of
Japanese wooden boxes.
Three of us stood in the small open boat, about a hundred
miles off the northwest coast of Alaska, at the southern edge of
the polar pack in the Chukchi Sea. I and two marine scientists
were hunting ringed seals that cold September day. In the seal
stomachs we found what fish they had been eating; from bottom
76
Torndrssuk 77
trawls we learned what the fish they were eating had eaten; and
from plankton samplings we learned what the creatures the fish ate
were eating.*
We had been working at this study of marine food chains
for several weeks, moving west in our boat across the north coast
of Alaska, from the west end of the Jones Islands to Point Barrow.
At Barrow we boarded a 300-foot oceanographic research vessel,
the Oceanographer, and headed out into the Chukchi Sea. Each
morning for the next two weeks our boat was lowered from the
deck of this mother vessel and we worked in the sea ice until
evening.
We had been hunting seals intensively for three days without
success. Twice we had seen a seal, each time for only a split second.
We moved slowly, steadily, through the ice floes, without con-
versation, occasionally raising a pair of field glasses to study a
small, dark dot on the water--a piece of ice? A bird? A seal break-
ing the surface of the water to breathe? It is not so difficult to
learn to distinguish among these things, to match a "search image"
in the mind after a few days of tutoring with the shading, shape,
and movement that mean seal. Waiting in silence, intently atten-
tive, was harder to learn.
We were three good sets of eyes, hunting hard. Nothing. A
fog would clear. A snow squall drift through. In the most promis-
ing areas of the ice we shut off the engines and drifted with the
currents. The ice, despite its occasional vertical relief, only com-
pounded a sense of emptiness in the landscape, a feeling of direc-
tionlessness. The floes were like random, silent pieces of the earth.
Our compass, turning serenely in its liquid dome, promised, if
called upon to do so, to render points on a horizon obliterated in
slanting snow and fog.
* This project was part of a Bureau of Land Management/Outer
Continental Shelf study of Alaskan coastal marine life, results of which
were to lead offshore oil development in the least harmful direction.
7 ARCTIC DREAMS
We drifted and sipped hot liquids, and stared into the quilt-
work of gray-white ice and ink-black water. If one of us tensed, the
others felt it and were alert. Always we were hunting. This par-
ticular habitat, the number of cod in the water, the time of the year
--everything said ringed seals should be here. But for us they
weren't.
Late summer in the sea ice. Eventually the cold, damp air finds
its way through insulated boots and wool clothing to your bones.
The conscious mind, the mind that knows how long you have been
out here, importunes for some measure of comfort. We made a
slow, wide turn in the boat, a turn that meant the end of the day.
Though we still watched intently, thoughts of the ship were now
upon us. Before this, we had camped on the beach in tents; now
a hot shower, an evening meal in light clothing at a table, and a
way to dry clothes awaited us. In the back of your mind at the
end of the day you are very glad for these things.
My friend Bob saw the bear first: an ivory-white head gliding
in glassy black water 300 feet ahead, at the apex of a V-wake. We
slowed the boat and drew up cautiously to within 30 feet. A male.
The great seal hunter himself. About three years old, said Bob.
The bear turned in the water and regarded us with irritation,
and then, wary, he veered toward a floe. In a single motion of
graceful power he rose from the water to the ice, his back feet
catching the ice edge at the end of the movement. Then he stepped
forward and shook. Seawater whirled off in flat sheets and a halo of
spray. His head lowered, he glared at us with small, dark eyes.
Then he crossed the floe and, going down on his forelegs, sliding
headfirst, he entered the water on the other side without a splash
and swam off.
We found our way to him again through the ice. We were
magnetically drawn, in a fundamental but perhaps callow way.
Our presence was interference. We approached as slowly as before,
and he turned to glower, treading water, opening his mouth--the
gray tongue, the pale violet mouth, the white teeth--to hiss. He
paddled away abruptly to a large floe and again catapulted from
Torndrssnk 79
the water, shook his fur out, and started across the ice to open
water on the far side.
We let him go. We watched him, that undeterred walk of
authority. "The farmer," the whalers had called him, for his
"very agricultural appearance as he stalks leisurely over the fur-
rowed fields of ice." John Muir, on a visit to these same waters in
1899, said bears move "as if the country had belonged to them
always."
The polar bear is a creature of arctic edges: he hunts the ice
margins, the surface of the water, and the continental shore. The
ice bear, he is called. His world forms beneath him in the days of
shortening light, and then falls away in the spring. He dives to the
ocean floor for mussels and kelp, and soundlessly breaks the water's
glassy surface on his return, to study a sleeping seal. Twenty miles
from shore he treads water amid schooling fish. The sea bear. In
winter, while the grizzly hibernates, the polar bear is out on the
sea ice, hunting. In summer his tracks turn up a hundred miles
inland, where he has feasted on crowberries and blueberries.
Until a few years ago this resourceful hunter was in a genus
by himself: Thalarctos. Now he is back where he started, with the
grizzly and black bear in the genus Ursus, where his genes, if not
his behavior, say he belongs.
What was so impressive about the bear we saw that day in
the Chukchi was how robust he seemed. At three years of age a
bear in this part of the Arctic is likely spending its first summer
alone. To feed itself, it has had to learn to hunt, and open pack ice
is among the toughest of environments for bears to hunt in. This
was September, when most bears are thin, waiting for the forma-
tion of sea ice, their hunting platform. In our three days of diligent
searching, in this gray and almost featureless landscape of ice
remnants so far off the coast, we had seen but two seals. We were
transfixed by the young bear. We watched him move off across
the ice, into a confusing plane of grays and whites. We were
shivering a little and opened a thermos of coffee. A snow shower
moved quickly through, and when it cleared we could barely make
8o ARCTIC DREAMS
him out in the black water with field glasses from the rocking boat.
A young and successful hunter, at home in his home.
He had found the seals.
THE polar bear is only lately known to science, and not yet well.
What has been learned, especially about the size and movements of
its different geographic populations, has been difficult and expen-
sive to determine, and it has come on the heels of fears that the
bear was threatened with extinction.
The Russians were the first to raise an alarm. They banned
polar bear hunting in 1956; in 1961 Savva Uspenskii speculated
that the world population of polar bears was only about 5000.
American biologists thought it was more like 17,000 to 19,000--
but no one had any reliable information; nor did the technology
to find out exist. At the time, Americans in Alaska and Norwegians
in Svalbard were exerting a tremendous hunting pressure on polar
bears, as were hunters in Canada.* In Alaska in the mid-sixties a
combination of hunting by native people and airborne sportsmen
was accounting for a kill of about 300 bears a year. Canadian
hunters were taking more than 400 a year. Greenlanders were kill-
ing about 200 a year, and more than 400 polar bears were being
killed every year in Svalbard by commercial trappers and Euro-
pean sport hunters. The reported kill (smaller than the actual kill),
then, was about 1300 bears a year, nearly 25 percent of the popu-
lation if Uspenskii was right.
Uspenskii, fortunately, was wrong; but indications of the
bear's vulnerability, and the fact that there was no scientific ground
on which to base any decisions, precipitated an international meet-
ing in Fairbanks in 1965, sponsored by the United States. This
meeting produced an international agreement for polar bear man-
^ ^
Torndrssuk 81
* Svalbard is the Norwegian name for an arctic archipelago whose
largest island is Spitsbergen, a name sometimes used in English to refer
to the entire archipelago.
agement under the auspices of the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). By 1968
an IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group had been established, to
share information and coordinate management programs for an
animal that drifts between countries and occupies the high seas in
its wanderings.*
What emerged from the research initiated by this group of
polar bear biologists was both new information, some of it startling,
and the end for some old theories. It had been previously thought,
for example, that polar bears followed the roughly clockwise
movement of ice around the Pole, bearing their young in Canada,
say, with those bears then growing up in the Russian Arctic and
breeding in Svalbard and in northern Greenland the next year.
This notion was early laid to rest. Polar bears do wander, some-
times very far over the sea ice; but populations in the Arctic are
fairly discrete. Polar bears show a high degree of fidelity to winter
seal-hunting areas, summer retreats, and ancestral denning areas
such as those along the Owl River in Manitoba, in Bogen Valley on
Kongsoya Island in Svalbard, or in the Drem-Head Mountains on
Wrangel Island.
Within these major populations--one of them seems to wander
back and forth between Svalbard, Franz Josef Land, and the east
coast of Greenland; another to stay around the north and north-
west coasts of Alaska; a third in the Canadian Arctic--there are
smaller, somewhat less discrete populations. For example, the bears
of southern Hudson Bay and of James Bay appear to be a self-
contained group. (They also have a unique summer diet, denning
habits different from those of other bears, and different popula-
tion dynamics--they raise more cubs, who strike off on their own
at an earlier age than the young of other bear populations.) Polar
* The IUCN Polar Bear Agreement, signed by Russia, Norway, Den-
mark, Canada, and the United States in 1973, became effective on May
26, 1976. It is the only treaty of general agreement between the five
polar nations.
82 ARCTIC DREAMS
r
Locations of a radio-collared polar bear off the north coast of Alaska
between October 2$, 1981 and December 4, 1984. Adapted from S. C.
Amstrup, 198$, unpublished data, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
Anchorage, Alaska.
bears are rather retiring and unaggressive, especially in comparison
with grizzly bears. Robert Brown, an English traveler writing in
1868 and reacting to the popular stories of his day, said he would
far rather meet a polar bear than a grizzly. "I cannot help think-
ing," he wrote, ". . . the impressions which we have imbibed
regarding the polar bear's ferocity are due more to old notions of
what it ought to be rather than what it is. . . ."
Polar bears vary in size, and their weights can change dra-
matically during the year. (Very large polar bears may stand 12
feet on their hind legs and weigh 2000 pounds. The number of
12- and 13-foot bears weighing 2200 or 2400 pounds that have been
reported, however, says more about unadjusted scales, stretched
hides, and wishful exaggeration than about polar bears.) Bears eat
prodigiously in the spring, lightly in late summer, and lightly or
not at all (in the case of denning females) during the winter. An
adult male might weigh between 550 and 1700 pounds and measure
Tornarssuk 8 3
75 to 100 inches from tip of nose to tip of tail. Females weigh
between 350 and 750 pounds and measure from 70 to 75 inches in
length.
In addition to being smaller and lighter, females have narrower
skulls and lower foreheads. Young adult males are longer in the
leg and are generally rangier-looking than young adult females.
Some longtime observers say females have longer hair on their
backs, while males have longer hair in the feathering at the back
of the forelegs. The hair of older animals is often shorter, with
more dark skin showing through on the snout. Eskimos make a
fine distinction between male and female tracks, not merely on
the basis of size--a male's paw may be 13 inches long and 9 wide--
but because of faint marks left by longer hairs around a male's foot
and because of the female's slightly more pigeon-toed track.
A polar bear walks in a way all its own. Coming toward you,
the front legs appear to swing out to the side and the huge paws to
fold toward the body like paddles, until they flick forward and
are set down. The back feet appear actually to kick the front feet
forward, they come so close to meeting. From the rear the walk
appears bandy-legged, a trait most evident in mature males. The
front legs seem long because the chest is shallow, the cleft be-
tween the legs extending into the neck. The rear legs, in fact, are
longer. Viewed head-on, its hips stick out past its shoulders. From
the side, from above, or from the front the bear is wedge-shaped,
a form that emphasizes the sinuous movements of its long neck.
A bear walks at about 2.5 miles per hour. When it trots, it
paces, moving both legs on one side of its body forward in the
same motion. Over short distances--charging a resting seal--it
moves in a quick bound at nearly 25 miles per hour. Over any
distance, females and cubs tend to outdistance males.
Bears move with a supple agility, seeming to flow over
steep, complex obstacles like sea-ice pressure ridges. They also
have tremendous strength and dexterity. The same bear that pries
tiny thalia from a kelp strand with a single claw can knock a
84 ARCTIC DREAMS Fbelukha whale senseless with a blow from its foreleg. Deft and
quick enough to snatch a lemming from the grass, it can also flip
a 400-pound bearded seal into the air.
The ivory and pearl shading we see in a polar bear's fur is
caused by the refraction of sunlight (the same phenomenon that
makes clouds appear white) in its guard hairs. The hair itself is
optically transparent, or colorless. The brightest whites show up
at the spring molt, the purest of these being those of young cubs.
With exposure to sunlight, the hairs take on a subtle coloring;
soft yellowish tones appear on the hips, along the flanks, and down
the legs--a pale lemon wash, apricot yellows, cream buffs, straw
whites. The tones deepen each year as the animal ages. In the low
sunlight of a fall afternoon an older male's fur might suggest the
yellow golds of ripe wheat.
A polar bear's fur is like that of no other mammal. An early
mystery about it was that it seemed a relatively poor insulator
compared with wolf or caribou hair; too, unlike beaver fur, which
traps a layer of air between skin and water, polar bear fur loses
90 percent of its insulative value in water. Polar bears, it turned
out, depend instead on a layer of blubber to keep them warm in
the water (which conducts heat away from the body at about
twenty times the rate of still air). On land, the bear is protected by
a thick underlayer of dense wool and a relatively open layer of
guard hairs about six inches long. These guard hairs are so hard
and shiny they appear synthetic. They are also hollow, which
means that a polar bear's fur stays erect and doesn't mat when it
is wet. Also, because of the open spacing and smoothness of its
guard hairs, a bear can easily shake free of water before it freezes.
(He also rolls in snow, an excellent blotter, to daub off moisture--
as do people who accidently fall through the ice.)
A second function of the bear's hollow hair, a key to under-
standing how it might stay warm on land, was discovered by
accident. White bears show up poorly when photographed from
the air against white snow and ice. In the late 1960s, an American
scientist, reasoning that a mammal should give off more heat than
Torndrssuk 85
sea ice, tried infrared photography, but polar bears proved too
well insulated to appear on the film. The only bit of black the film
recorded was in the polar bear's tracks, which were warm for
several minutes after an animal passed. (Polar bears get rid of
excess body heat through their claws and footpads.) He next tried
ultraviolet-sensitive film. Bears absorbed light in those wave-
lengths and finally appeared black on the white ice, and this led
to the second discovery: polar bear guard hairs work like light
pipes. They funnel short-wavelength energy from the sun to the
bear's black skin, where it plays an as yet incompletely understood
role in the bear's complex system of heat regulation.*
POLAR bears apparently moved into the Arctic only very recently,
sometime in the middle or late Pleistocene. A population of brown
bears, the prevailing theory goes, became isolated in Siberia and
quickly evolved into polar bears. (The rate of evolution here is
apparently astonishing. Polar bears now even show consistent
variation in size within their own populations, being typically very
slightly larger as one moves westward from the east coast of
Greenland, reaching their largest size in the Bering/Chukchi Sea
region.) The genetic distance between polar bears and brown
bears, however, is not so great that they can't produce fertile
young together (offspring capable themselves of reproducing).
* As commonly experienced in zoos, a polar bear's color, as well as its
bulk, can be misleading--and the bear's hollow guard hairs can play a
strange part in the overall distortion. Blue-green algae living in fresh-
water pools in zoo enclosures can migrate through a polar bear's
. damaged guard hairs and bloom in the hollow spaces within. Bears
afflicted in this way, as they have been recently in zoos in San Diego
and elsewhere, appear green to visitors. The disinfectants and cleaners
used by zoos and circuses and the chemicals used to tan polar bear furs
for rugs take much of the delicate shading out of the fur. The bears'
true appearance is further compromised when they are kept in climates
where they produce neither a substantial layer of blubber nor heavy
winter coats. With so much of their dark skin showing through, they
seem barbered and gaunt.
86 ARCTIC DREAMS
And their blood chemistries are still quite similar. But they are
markedly different animals.
Brown bears, including the grizzly bear, are terrestrial crea-
tures. They live largely on vegetable matter and have clear
enough spatial images of their territories to defend them. The
polar bear lives almost exclusively on meat. Its "territory" is some-
thing it carries with it over the ice. The difference in diets is
evident in an examination of the teeth. The polar bear's are those
of an ambusher and a flesh eater--long canines, smaller, shearing
molars, vestigial premolars, and incisors that angle forward, en-
abling the bear to use them like a pair of delicate clippers. The
brown bear's canines are shorter, and its molars and premolars are
broader and flatter, adapted to the grinding of vegetation.
The difference evolution has made is also evident in the
overall shape of their bodies. Where the brown bear is broad-
shouldered and dish-faced, the polar bear is narrow-shouldered
and Roman-nosed. His neck is longer, his head smaller. He stands
taller than the brown bear but is less robust in the chest and
generally of lighter build. The polar bear's feet are larger and
thickly furred between the pads. The toes are partially webbed,
the blackish-brown claws sharper and smaller than the brown
bear's. It lacks the brown bear's shoulder hump and more expres-
sive face, with its prehensile lips, well suited to stripping bushes of
their berries.
The remarkable thing, again, is that they have become so
different in such a short time. We call them both "bears," but
when you see a polar bear surface quietly in a lead, focus its small
brown eyes on a sleeping bearded seal, draw breath soundlessly,
and submerge without a ripple, you wonder at the insouciance
with which we name things.*
* A "lead" (pron. leed) is a passage through sea ice navigable by a
surface vessel such as a kayak. Smaller fractures are called cracks.
Torndrssuk 87
WHEN the five polar bear nations embarked on the IUCN's pro-
gram of cooperative research, each nation, by mutual agreement,
went in a slightly different direction. The Americans and Nor-
wegians pioneered techniques of marking bears and then later
relocating them, establishing the broad boundaries of discrete
populations. The Americans also began developing a technology
for electronic tracking. The Canadians looked at general hunting
behavior and at the bear's relationship with the animal it is most
dependent on for food, the ringed seal. The Norwegians, with
Canadian help, also began investigating the bear's physiology. The
latter work, conducted at a laboratory at Churchill, Manitoba, was
carried out by Nils 0ritsland with live-trapped bears from the
southern Hudson Bay population.
0ritsland quickly uncovered a number of fascinating things.
Because bears climb in and out of the water regularly, they have
special heating and cooling problems. Eventually, 0ritsland dis-
covered that the bear's basal metabolism was adequate to keep it
warm in all seasons under a variety of conditions. He also deter-
mined that their winter pelage provided adequate protection in
temperatures as low as --4O°F with a 15-mile-per-hour wind.
(Laboratory results are always somewhat problematic because they
oversimplify. In the field bears tend to lie down in the leeward
protection of drifts and pressure ridges or to dig temporary dens
in -- i5°F to --2O°F weather with 15-mile-per-hour winds.)
The bears' only "problem," 0ritsland found out, was getting
rid of the heat produced by working muscles. They do so, 0rits-
land learned, by increasing blood flow to their footpads and claws,
to their snouts and legs (the least insulated parts of their bodies),
and, most remarkably, to two unique sheets of thin muscle that lie
across the bear's back behind its shoulder blades, between the skin
and a layer of blubber. Blood shunted to all these areas either
radiates heat off into space or comes into contact with previously
cooled blood, which it warms in countercurrent or heat-exchange
systems. When the core temperatures of bears in 0ritsland's
88 ARCTIC DREAMS Tornarssuk 89
experiments began to climb above IOI.6°F, their heartbeat in-
creased from a resting pulse of about 45 per minute to as high as
148 per minute, and they switched from a pattern of regular
breathing to rapid, shallow breathing (panting) to bring cool air
to the lungs.
Bears do not overheat when they are swimming, so they will
also jump in the water to cool off. And eat snow.
It is its layer of blubber that causes a polar bear to overheat
so easily. The blubber is heaviest on the outside of the back legs
and over the buttocks and lower back, where it may be as much
as 4.3 inches thick. Lesser amounts are on the upper body, front
legs, and neck. Polar bears depend on their blubber for warmth,
especially in the water, and for nourishment. During the five
months a female is hibernating, giving birth, and nursing her cubs,
she lives entirely on her fat reserves. Bears waiting out storms in
temporary dens and bears ashore waiting for sea ice to form in the
fall do the same. This regimen is such that in southern Hudson
Bay denning females may come ashore weighing 750 pounds in
early August and emerge from their dens in April weighing only
350 pounds. Similarly, males coming ashore in late summer may
lose 30 percent or more of their body weight in the three months
that pass before ice forms and they are able to hunt on the sea ice
again.
During the summer, especially on the tundra of the Hudson
Bay coast, bears dig summer sleeping pits to get out of direct
sunlight, sometimes digging down to the layer of permafrost to
cool off. When trying to sleep in warm weather, they often roll
on their backs in order to expose their bellies and feet. In cold
weather they hug their back legs to their stomachs with their
forelegs, curling tight to bury their heads in their chests, where
they breathe warm air with their backs against the wind.
0ritsland's experimental findings have a certain attractiveness
because they simplify and provide numbers. To watch polar bears
in the wild, however, is to marvel at the intricacy of their physi-
ology and behavior. The animals alternately seek shelter or expo-
sure, sleep and travel, hunt down certain foods, and mate and
hibernate. The interplay here among rest, exertion, and nutrition
H that carries them comfortably through life is something that can-
not be broken down into pieces. Like the skater's long, graceful
arc, it is a statement about life, the full exercise of which is
beautiful.
THE bears that are successful, that respond with insight to new
circumstances, that do the right thing at the right time, season
after season, may live to be thirty. Beyond learning how to secure
food, the most intriguing aspects of their behavior are the steps
female bears take to ensure that there will be more bears.
Before she dens, usually in late October or early November,
a female bear must put on a heavy layer of fat to sustain herself
(and her cubs) until she emerges to hunt again in the spring. If
the weather doesn't turn stormy and food is abundant, a female
might den late. If little food is available, she may decide not to
. den at all that year. In the face of early storms that keep her from
feeding, she may make a temporary den, wait out the weather,
and then decide what to do. Polar bears conceive during the
female's three-week estrus in April and May, but the fertilized
eggs do not implant in the uterine wall until much later--some
speculate at the moment the female commits herself to a long
denning period, which only females carrying fertilized eggs do.
Bears are as particular about the type of snow they select for
a maternity den as Eskimos are in constructing an iglu, and the
two structures have many features in common. The female usually
chooses a site where snowdrifts develop in early autumn, often
close to the top of the leeward side of a ridge. Midwinter storms
are not likely to expose a den built there, nor is the den likely to
, be buried in an avalanche. The variety of structures denning
females build is great, but they share a certain architecture: an
entrance tunnel 5 to 10 feet long and 24 to 28 inches wide and
high; a small room at the end of the upward-sloping tunnel, just big
enough for the bear to turn around in; and a ventilation hole.
9°
ARCTIC DREAMS
By designing for the flow of air and controlling the thickness
of snow, an excellent insulator, a female can keep fresh air moving
through her den all winter and maintain the temperature at about
32°F, no matter how cold it gets outside. She does this by radiating
a small amount of heat, about as much as a 200-watt bulb, and by
trapping that heat in the den chamber with a sloping entrance
tunnel and an air dike, or sill, where the tunnel enters the den.
She also adjusts the thickness of the roof. (Eskimos put the same
techniques to use.)
The female is not actually hibernating during the winter. Her
heartbeat and rate of respiration are greatly reduced, but her
temperature falls only very slightly. She can awaken and become
alert in moments. If her den gets too warm, ice will form on the
walls, cooling the chamber and inhibiting the exchange of carbon
dioxide and oxygen through the snow walls. The bear may then
scrape off the ice and adjust the ventilation, or dig a new chamber
adjacent to the old one. J0rn Thomassen, who has watched den-
ning bears in Svalbard for several years, speculates that some
females are more successful than others at designing and maintain-
ing these structures, and that older bears, learning from their own
mistakes, subsequently build dens where the exchange of gases,
the conservation of heat, and, later, the expansion of the den to
allow the cubs to exercise before they emerge, are accomplished
with more economy.
Dens are very clean. By metabolizing fat instead of protein,
the female produces very little body waste. Except for a mouthful
of snow now and again, she also draws all the water she needs from
her fat reserves.
Cubs, usually two but sometimes one or three, and very
rarely four, are born sometime in December or early January.
They are blind, deaf, poorly insulated, and unable to walk or smell.
In their first weeks they are dependent on three things for sur-
vival: the protection of the den, the warm crevices of their mother's
body, and her rich milk. (Polar bear milk has the consistency of
cream. Those who have tasted it say it tastes like cod liver oil and
Tornarssuk 91
smells of seals or fish. It is richer than whale milk and higher in
protein than seal milk.) Again, it is only with the protection of a
well-made den that a female can conserve and direct her metab-
olism to produce the heat and milk that her cubs need.
The cubs are so small at birth, barely a pound, that the female
can hide one in the rolled toes of her front paw. At about twenty-
four days they can hear, and a week later they are able to see. It
is several more weeks before they can walk and smell. By late
March or early April the cubs weigh about 25 pounds, and the
female, depending on the weather and the cubs' condition, breaks
out of her den. For the first days she might just sit drowsily in the
sun at the den entrance. Or roll in the snow to revive her coat. Or
nose about in a desultory way, looking for grasses and lichens
to nibble.
A well-placed den entrance will be protected from the wind
and directed in some measure to the south and west to take ad-
vantage of the sun's afternoon warmth. Cubs venture forth onto
this sheltered sun porch a few days after their mother and for the
next few weeks do not travel far at all. Their mother often nurses
them here in a sitting position in the sunshine, with her back
against a snowbank. The cubs lie on her belly. While they nurse
she may put her head back and stare at the sky, or roll her head
slowly from side to side, or rock her cubs gently in the cradle of
her forelegs.
These first few weeks are a critical time for all three animals.
The female balances her desire to leave in order to hunt to feed
herself against an investment in the cubs' learning, exercise, and
preparation for travel. For most bears the sea is no more than a
day away. For others, like those denning on the southern coast of
Hudson Bay, the journey is much longer and requires making
temporary dens along the way.
Rasmus Hansson and J0rn Thomassen, who have watched
more bears emerge from their dens than probably anyone else,
studied bears for several years at a traditional denning area called
Bogen Valley, in Svalbard. Most of the bears there den in a long
92 ARCTIC DREAMS Torndrssuk 93
line just below the ridge of Retzius Mountain. (In spite of this
density it is very rare to see two families outside their dens at the
same time. How the females manage periods of exercise so as not
to interfere with each other is not known.)
Since portions of the southwest face of Retzius Mountain
slope at an angle of 700
, the first problem cubs face there is getting
down to the floor of Bogen Valley. They learn to imitate their
mothers, who slide down rump first, looking over their shoulders
and braking with their claws; or on their sides, leading with all
four feet; or headfirst on their bellies. Mothers at the bottom catch
cubs veering out of control.
In those first few days outside together, say Hansson and
Thomassen, the females tend to rest while the cubs exercise vigor-
ously. The cubs pick up blocks of ice or snow, which they then
throw and chase or wrestle with violently, biting and chewing like
cats. Cubs also stand up to swat at each other and roll over thrash-
ing and neck-biting in the snow. In analyzing the cubs' behavior,
the two Norwegian scientists concluded that the cubs were de-
veloping in three areas: strength and coordination; social habits and
communication skills, which would permit the female and her
cubs to live and hunt together efficiently during the next two years;
and fighting techniques. In the future the latter would serve males
in their battles with each other during the breeding season, and
females in the defense of their own cubs. (Male bears, according
to some researchers, will try to kill any cub they encounter, espe-
cially if the female offers a weak defense.)
When cubs reach some threshold level of strength and coordi-
nation, when they are able to walk well and are responsive to
their mother's instructions to "stay" and "come," the bears depart
from the den. The time of all three having to live solely on the
stored fat of the female is nearly over.
THE Polar Eskimos of northwest Greenland call the polar bear
pisugtooq, the great wanderer. On the basis of mark-and-recapture
studies and radio-tracking information, scientists have determined
that individual bears wander largely within a local area; but some,
indeed, are long-distance travelers. A polar bear tagged in Svalbard,
for example, showed up a year later near Nanortalik, Greenland,
2000 miles to the southwest. Another bear, a female, traveled a
straight-line distance of 205 miles in two days. Polar bears have
also been found far afield in unlikely places, at the crest of Mount
Newton in Svalbard, for example, 6600 feet above sea level, or
30 miles inland on the Greenland ice cap. An American crew on
the ice island Alpha saw a female and her cub at 84°N in Decem-
ber 1957. (She had become entangled in runway lighting, which
she tore out moments before a plane attempted a landing.) A
Russian ice-island crew spotted a female and her cubs a little more
than a hundred miles from the Pole in the summer of 1937.
Because we think of polar bears as northern animals, and of
"the North" as an area that doesn't extend very far south, it is
somewhat surprising to discover that bears den at only 53°N, on
Akimiski Island at the southern end of Hudson Bay. Or that bears
still turn up occasionally on the east coast of Newfoundland as far
south as Saint John's. Some stories of their wandering have an
esoteric perseverance and loneliness about them. In 1938, for
example, an aging female was shot far inland in the province of
Quebec, near Peribonka on Lac Saint-Jean. She had apparently
ascended the Saguenay River from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence
and was headed for James Bay, some 360 miles farther north.
Once, looking up from the sea ice at the coastal cliffs of
Devon Island, Ray Schweinsburg, a Canadian polar bear biologist,
said to me, "I used to think the land would stop them. But I think
they can cross nearly any terrain. The only thing that stops them
is a place where there is no food."
The bear is a great wanderer not solely because it travels far,
but because it travels with curiosity, and tirelessly. The Eskimo
hunters in Greenland mean that it covers the ground successfully
and intelligently when they pronounce the word pisugtooq.
Eskimos, long-time, keen observers of the polar bear, have
advanced other thoughts about polar bears that science has treated
94 ARCTIC DREAMS Torndrssuk 95
with skepticism, and in some quarters with cynical disdain. Eskimos
widely assert, for example, that most polar bears are left-pawed,
that if one must leap in desperation from a charging bear it should
always be to the bear's right.* Eskimos have also asserted that polar
bears push blocks of ice ahead of them as shields when they are
stalking seals; that a wounded bear will staunch the flow of its
blood with snow; that they will hurl ice and rocks at walrus to
wound and distract them, hoping to snatch an unprotected calf;
and that females use anal plugs when they den.
Refuting any of these things is a complicated business. It
becomes not only a denial of the integrity of the person telling
the story, but a denial of the resourcefulness of the polar bear.
Too, because of poor translations, you might end up refuting
something that was never meant. The best field biologists, with a
fundamental grasp of the animal's behavior, take the attitude that
these things could happen, though they themselves have not seen
them. The anthropologist Richard Nelson has offered succinct
advice on this issue. "Eskimos," he writes, "are highly reliable
observers of animal behavior, and many of their least believable
statements have been proved to me by personal observation." Some
scientists strongly resisted the notion that bears might use tools
until a Canadian biologist found evidence in 1972, on the north
coast of Devon Island, that a female with two cubs had smashed in
the roof of a ringed-seal lair with a 45-pound piece of ice. Scientists
have also found that bears intentionally stalk small prey like
lemmings, which Eskimos have long claimed they do. And that a
polar bear will hunt sea ducks by coming up underneath a flock
of them in the water like a killer whale.
One of the most persistent of bear legends--that they cover
their dark noses with a paw or a piece of snow when they are
stalking a seal--may have originated with Eskimos, but the thought
* On the basis of this, Greenland Eskimos object to the depiction of a
polar bear extending its right paw on the official seal of the Royal
Greenland Trading Company as inaccurate.
has the flavor of invention about it. At a distance of 1000 yards,
the argument goes, you can barely distinguish a polar bear on the
sea ice, but you can clearly see its black nose. How could a seal
not notice it? It's possible that it does--and that that is exactly what
the bear intends. To a seal, a polar bear approaching in a straight
line over flat ice, its lowered forequarters sliding along ahead of its
hindquarters, would show very little body movement--the push-
ing motion of the rear legs does not break the outline of the hips.
If the seal focuses on the dark nose, the bear's shape falls into
vague relief against the surrounding ice. And at that distance the
nose looks like another seal resting on the ice. Because of an optical
phenomenon, the size of the bear's nose does not begin to fill more
of the seal's image of that part of the sea ice until the bear is almost
on top of the seal. And at that point the bear rises and bounds
toward it.
It is possible the bear goes down on its forequarters only to
keep the horizon from showing up between its legs; but it is also
possible it wants its dark nose down there on the ice where it looks
like a seal. Without direct evidence, without setting up an experi-
ment, one can only speculate.
The desire to verify conjecture, to witness spontaneous, un-
structured events in the wild, is of course very sharp among field
biologists. Nothing--no laboratory result or field-camp specula-
tion--can replace the rich, complex texture, the credibility, of
something that takes place "out there." And scientists working in
the field know that what they see in the field always has the
potential to contradict what they have read or been told.* One-
time events, like seeing a polar bear stalk and kill a seal in open
* In a recent laboratory experiment, polar bears were declared "ineffi-
cient walkers" because they overheated on a treadmill. An experienced
polar bear biologist smiled when I asked him about this. "The bear can't
walk properly on a treadmill. . . . Walking into the wind, making that
great pendulum swing of his legs, opening and closing his body to the
cool air, you don't see that on a treadmill. Out on the sea ice you see
he can walk a long way without overheating."
9 6 ARCTIC DREAMS Torndrssuk 97
water (some biologists doubted this ever occurred, until one of
them, Donald Furnell, and an Eskimo companion, David Oolooyuk,
saw a bear do so in 1978), may be of no statistical importance. It
may not be possible, in other words, to generalize about all bears
from these incidents. But such events emphasize the resourceful-
ness of the individual bear and the range of capability in the
species; or they may reveal an unusual technique widespread only
in a certain population. These events underscore something critical
in the biology of large predators: the range of capability in the
species. No matter how long you watch, you will not see all it
can do.
Once, in a helicopter flying along Barrow Strait, Ray
Schweinsburg and I saw a lone bear headed south across the ice.
"I'd like to follow him," Schweinsburg shouted over the engine
noise. "I'd like to go down there and just follow him." And he
rolled his eyes and smiled at the impossibility of it.
I looked out the window, at the hundreds of square miles of
ice that lay ahead of the bear. Even if it were possible to follow,
I thought, how well could we put together what we saw? What
would we miss out there? I remembered again the desert writing
of Wilfred Thesiger, wandering in the Empty Quarter with his
Bedouin companions. The Arctic reminds one of the desert not
only because of the lack of moisture and the barren topography,
but because it puts a like strain on human life. It favors tough and
practical people, people aware of the vaguest flutter of life in an
environment that seems featureless and interminable to the un-
trained eye. People with a predator's alertness for minutiae, for
revealing detail. The loss of "a native eye" among civilized cultures
has been commented on by people as diverse as Vladimir Arseniev,
writing about the Manchurian native Dersu Uzala, and Laurens
van der Post, writing about Kalahari Desert people.
It not only takes a long time of watching the animal before
you can say what it is doing; it takes a long time to learn how to
watch. This point is raised, deferentially but repeatedly, in en-
counters with Eskimos. They are uneasy, they manage to say, about
the irrevocability of decisions made by people who are not sensually
perceptive, not discriminating in these northern landscapes, not
enthusiastic about long-term observations. When I hear these points
made, my instinct is to nod yes; but it always causes me to reflect
on something else--how dependent we are on Western field biol-
ogists to tell us fully and accurately what the animals did while
they were there. How we hope they regain some approximation
of "the native eye" in their studies.
The bear I was watching disappeared, cut off by the door
frame of the helicopter.
To follow a bear, or simply follow in its tracks, is to "reeeally
learn something," as the Eskimos say, smiling. Not only about
where a bear went, but how it dealt with what happened along the
way. A set of tracks might show where a bear had leaped into the
air and come down headed in another direction--and you would
look around for evidence of what surprised it. The trail of a cub
alongside its mother disappears where it has crawled up onto its
mother's back for a ride on a cold day. Bear tracks on the sea ice
might follow the line of a pressure ridge (where seal lairs are
likely to be) at a distance of 100 feet or so on the downwind side.
Fresh tracks turning into a fiord might make no sense until you saw
a bird rookery, beneath which the bear had scavenged dead birds.
A male's tracks might cross a female's and turn to follow. Another
set of tracks might turn suddenly and continue in an unerring line,
and an aglu, a seal's breathing hole, would be there at the end, with
signs of the bear's patient waiting. Tracks below a high bluff would
show where a bear had hunted on a July morning, out of the sun.
The wide walk of a fat bear in June, you would see, differs
from the walk of a thin bear in October. Bear tracks would show
a consistent avoidance of deep snow; in spring they would not
cross melt pools, where needle ice can puncture a bear's foot. On a
sheet of sea ice so thin it would not support a human step, you
would see traces where a bear had crossed with skating steps like a
water strider, sprawled nearly on its chest.
These signs reveal that the polar bear lives in an olfactory
98 ARCTIC DREAMS
and a visual landscape, and that it is attentive, especially in summer,
to a thermal landscape. It looks for cool places.
From following hundreds of such tracks, polar bear biologists
have developed certain impressions. Males keep largely to the
coasts in summer, while females with cubs and subadults are more
apt to travel overland from place to place. Bears make use of
mountain passes, ravines, and other features of the land in such a
way as to suggest that these are traditional routes across isthmuses
as well as occasional one-time shortcuts around an area of bad ice
or open water. (To take a shortcut, a creature must have a map
in its head of where it is--memory is no help. How bears create
and use such maps is one of the most intriguing of all the questions
about them.)
Beyond using celestial clues and a knowledge of prevailing
winds and currents, which reliably guide Eskimos across the
angular topography of shifting sea ice, no one knows how bears
find their way. But they consistently travel directly to aggregations
of seals; they return to core denning and breeding areas every year;
and they find their way unerringly to the coast from hundreds of
miles offshore. This would be astonishing enough if they only did
it on land, where there are perennial landmarks, but they also do it
at sea, where a frozen landscape is created anew each year, where
it can change from one day to the next with the sudden rise of a new
pressure ridge or the opening of a lead, with a shift of pack ice in
the currents. In some areas of stable ice, bears may travel for weeks
without seeing a break in the continuity of the sharp blue line of
the horizon, with only "the infinite expanse of the frozen plain, the
infinite dome of the cold blue sky, and the cold, white sun"
before them.
Gathering ground to themselves. Navigating. Wandering with
purpose.
THE large black nose pulls cool air continuously across the nasal
membranes, straining it for scent. The female bear climbs on top
of an old piece of multiyear ice and rises on her hind legs to scan
Torndrssuk 99
the ice fields beyond. She shields her eyes against the brilliant
JVlarch light with her paw. She goes on. Partway across a refrozen
lead the bear pauses motionless, one paw off the ground. Her head
tilts and the small ears pivot independently. She puts the paw
down. She sniffs the air at several levels, then the head is still, the
attention fixed. She has found netsik. And netsik, somewhere
beneath the snow and ice of Viscount Melville Sound, knows,
perhaps, that nanuq has come.
The relationship between the hunted animal and the hunter
has only recently come to be studied with the same intensity that
biologists have brought to the study of the isolated life histories of
the individual species. A Canadian polar bear biologist, Ian Stirling,
has added greatly to a Western understanding of the polar bear by
combining his study of bears hunting seals with a study of ringed
seals and ice dynamics. In the spring of 1974, Stirling, with the
help of ringed-seal biologist Tom Smith, was able to explain a
peculiar sudden decline of the polar bear population in Amundsen
Gulf. In the winter of 1973-74, he said, little snow fell in the area
--too little to permit seals to excavate their snow lairs on the ice
except in a few isolated places. Also, the ice itself remained stable
and unbroken in areas where there were usually leads in winter.
Perhaps the solid ice also affected concentrations of the seals'
food. At any rate, a number of seals moved out (one of Smith's
tagged seals moved all the way to Cape Dezhnev, Siberia), very
few seals made birth lairs, and many bears either starved or moved
on. Because, in essence, it didn't snow enough that year.
The ringed seal that the polar bear habitually hunts is a small
marine mammal completely at home in the sea ice. Its short snout
and large eyes suggest a cat's face, though its sleek head is earless.
Its short-necked, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, tapered body is
like that of its relatives, the harp, ribbon, and spotted seals. Like
them, too, the ringed seal is awkward out of water because its
hind flippers don't pivot forward like a walrus's or a sea lion's to
help it walk.
Ringed seals are the most abundant large mammal in the Arctic
IOO ARCTIC DREAMS Torndrssuk I O I
--the Russians estimate a minimal population of 2.5 million--but
they are relatively unsocial, rarely gathering in dense numbers.
The young are born in snow-covered lairs on top of the ice in early
April. Eight to ten weeks later they are on their own. Adults breed
in late April and early May, at about six years of age. They feed,
interestingly, at two levels of arctic marine food chains, consuming
both fish in the cod family and the zooplankton those fish feed on.
Differences in age at weaning--if the ice breaks up early a pup is
not nursed as long--partially account for the variety of si7.e in
ringed seals. An adult may range from 40 to 60 inches in length
and weigh from 80 to 250 pounds. During breeding, nursing, and
molting, ringed seals feed lightly and may lose as much as 30 per-
cent of their body weight. They are also territorial at this time,
sometimes so aggressively defensive around their breathing holes
that young seals who have crawled out on the ice through the
wrong hole are kept at bay by another seal in the water until they
are frozen out.
Among many questions about the ringed seal are how it finds
food beneath the ice in the darkness of winter and how it "re-
members" the location of its breathing holes, particularly after a
deep dive in ocean currents.
A ringed seal is most vulnerable to the polar bear when it
surfaces to breathe. When it is hauled out on the ice it is unusually
vigilant, looking up for six or eight seconds every twenty to thirty
seconds, and napping so close to its breathing hole that it can
usually escape. Seals in birth lairs and males and nonbreeding
females in haul-out lairs under the snow present another set of
circumstances, to be considered in a moment.*
From the polar bear's perspective, the seal is a swift, alert
animal that can be taken advantage of only at that moment of
vulnerability--when it breaks the surface of the water to draw
* Marine mammals that have crawled up onto the sea ice or come ashore
are said to be "hauled out." A snow cave dug out by a seal above its
aglu as a concealed place of rest is called a haul-out lair.
breath, or when it is hauled out. Bears stalk seals over the ice or
approach by swimming quietly toward them. The patience and
judgment evident in these stalks can rivet a human observer's
attention.
The bear we left hunting on Viscount Melville Sound had
heard a seal surfacing in its snow cave, a muffled tinkle of water at
its aglu as it pulled itself out. The bear's footfalls are nearly sound-
less as it approaches--the hair between its footpads muffles the
crunch and squeak of snow. The bear pinpoints in her mind the spot
where the seal now rests. When she is 20 feet away--she pauses
ten seconds at one step, fifteen seconds with another step, ears
twitching to detect the seal's movement--she lunges, comes slam-
ming through the snow roof with all four feet centered precisely
over the aglu. The seal is cut off, finished.
Sometimes all it takes to break in the roof of a seal's lair is a
single calculated blow of the 40-pound paw. But these are stout
structures, and the bear may be forced to dig. Perhaps once in five
times, overall, it is successful. It understands precisely, however,
where in the chamber the aglu is, and its explosive entries into seal
lairs of all kinds are almost invariably centered at that spot.
Probably no other predator employs as many hunting strat-
egies with one animal as the polar bear does with the ringed seal.
It may take a half hour to patiently approach a seal resting on
the edge of an ice floe, surfacing quietly to reconnoiter, then
submerging again. A bear may drift toward a seal like an innoc-
uous piece of ice; when it reaches the floe edge it explodes from
the water and smacks the seal dead all in one motion. When it
stalks seals over the ice, it flattens itself on its forequarters and
slides along slowly on chest and forelegs, taking advantage of
every piece of cover. It will scrape away the sea ice at a breathing
hole until there is just a thin layer left, and then cover the ice with
its body to cut off sunlight, so it looks to the seal below as if the
thick crust of ice and snow is still present. It will build a snow
Wall to hide behind while it waits at an aglu. And it will rise up
suddenly in a resting seal's own aglu.
i
102 ARCTIC DREAMS Tornarssuk 103
Stirling, who has watched them hunting for more than 2000
hours in the field, emphasizes several points about bears. First, the
bear is only occasionally successful. The overall hunting success in
any particular situation, considering the variety of ice cover, the
number of seals present, the time of year, the age and sex of the
bear, and the age of the seal, might range from 2 to 25 percent.
The highest rate of success for a technique that is persistently
applied, in Stirling's view, is the patient wait at an aglu for a seal
to show up. (The bear can tell from small details of ice accumula-
tion and sometimes by catching a whiff of seal odor whether the
aglu has been used recently enough to make waiting worthwhile.)
Older bears, especially, have exceptional patience. They will
wait for three or four hours at an aglu, lying downwind of the hole
on their chests, out of the seal's line of sight. To stretch its muscles
a bear will sometimes rise to sit or stand up quietly, ready to drop
again soundlessly if it hears a seal.
Just before it surfaces, the seal exhales, and the sight or sound
of the bubbles alerts the bear. The seal rises headfirst up a cone-
shaped tunnel to its breathing hole, which, on smooth ice, appears
as a low mound. A small amount of water forced up ahead of the
seal splashes out on the ice and freezes. (The seal keeps the tunnel
open and the aglu from freezing over completely by scouring with
its claws.) The bear must time its strike perfectly and move with
exceptional speed. It usually strikes with one or both paws and
follows so quickly with its snout that if the smashing blow of its
paws doesn't kill the seal, the impact of its snout will. "Every-
thing cooperates," writes Frans Van de Velde, "--paws, claws,
snout, and teeth--to give a blow that is so rapid that the seal has
hardly a chance of getting away."
When it charges a basking seal, the bear does not seem so
much to run as to pounce. Thor Larsen, a biologist who has
observed polar bears in Svalbard for more than fifteen years, when
I asked him about their hunting behavior, said, "Cats. They are
like big cats." Fast? "It is absolutely unbelievable how fast they
are--oh, do they come fast." Shrewd? "Yes. They are making
judgments at every point about what to do. And they are patient."
Larsen, Stirling, Dennis Andriashek, Schweinsburg, and other
polar bear biologists with long field experience often comment on
the bear's seeming ability to analyze an unfamiliar situation and
attempt a practical solution; on its ability to learn quickly when
confronted with something new; and the novel approaches bears
take to commonplace situations. "They are smart," says Larsen,
"and precisely because they are, they sustain all the legends about
them doing these extraordinary things, like using tools and moving
blinds along ahead of them."
Bears prey on an impressive range of animals, each of which
requires something different of the bear. They hunt spotted and
ribbon seals in the western Arctic and harp seals in the eastern
Arctic. The large bearded seal and hooded seals off the coast of
Greenland are much stronger quarry. In leads and at savssats, bears
prey on belukha and narwhals.* Bears prey heavily on bearded seal
pups and kill an occasional muskox, walrus, dozing hare, or goose
caught flightless during its molt. They eat bird eggs, seaweed,
varieties of tundra berries. And carrion. (A bear can live for months
on a bowhead whale carcass or beach-cast walrus.) The bear also
leaves carrion in its wake; and here lies an interesting aspect of its
ecology. An adult bear in good health will usually eat only a
ringed seal's blubber, leaving the rest behind for a retinue that
never seems far off--the arctic fox, glaucous and Thayer's gulls,
the shier ivory gull, and the ubiquitous raven. (In winter arctic
foxes live far out on the sea ice, entirely dependent on scavenging
polar bear kills for their survival.)
* Savssats occur most often in fiords, where a band of sea ice too wide
for marine mammals to swim under on a single breath cuts them off
from the open sea. As the fiord continues to freeze over, the animals,
often hundreds of narwhals and belukha, are restricted to a smaller and
smaller opening in the ice for breathing. If the ice doesn't break up or
recede, the trap is fatal.
104 ARCTIC DREAMS
When a female with cubs makes a kill, on the other hand,
the family normally consumes the whole seal carcass. But they
also scavenge carcasses left behind by the adult males. While it is
not clear how, it is evident that sharing these kills is critically
important to a healthy polar bear population.
Polar bears are neither gregarious nor social, in the sense that,
say, wolves or cheetahs are social. Their repertoire of body lan-
guage and vocalizations seems limited, used largely to communicate
a desire to avoid each other. When they are seen, they are usually
seen alone--a single male or female, or a female with her cubs.
They gather together in special circumstances, however, and some
of these assemblies are memorable.
In 1874 two American observers saw between 250 and 300
polar bears together on Saint Matthew Island in Bering Sea,
placidly "grazing and rooting about like hogs in a common." (A
ship's captain who saw polar bears ranging together in a lush
coastal valley in eastern Greenland likened them to sheep pastured
in an English meadow.) At Cape Churchill, Manitoba, in Septem-
ber and October great numbers of bears are milling about waiting,
like the Saint Matthew bears, for the formation of sea ice, so they
can quit the coast and a life of sleeping and browsing in these
summer retreats.
Food draws bears together in at least two ways. When a
single bear finds a good seal-hunting ground, ten or fifteen other
bears are likely to show up at the same place within half a day or
so. Somehow they know. Savssats and beached carrion also draw
bears. In 1980, scientists counted fifty-six of them at a bowhead
whale carcass on the Svalbard coast. Larsen says scientists don't
have an explanation for how bears get wind of these things. Odor
likely plays a role, but bears come in from all directions and some
from very far away. "They just get to a place where something
is happening," says Larsen, "and they get there quickly."
Bears seem to pay each other very little mind under these
circumstances. They feed, interact very little with each other, and
go on their way. It is a different situation entirely when a female
Tornarssuk 105
with cubs encounters a lone male. She runs away immediately.
Or when two males meet each other on the track of a female in
estrus. The ensuing fights can be violent and protracted. (Fight-
ing among males is so common that it is a rare male past the age
of six that doesn't carry facial scars from these encounters.) On
the other hand, a little-understood pairing apparently occasionally
occurs with young male bears who become hunting and traveling
companions.
The enduring social unit is a female and her cubs. They are
usually together for two years, during which time the female
teaches the cubs to hunt. Their social interaction is constant and
intense. Older bears infrequently make sounds--they hiss loudly,
growl, and champ their teeth when they are irritated; and when
they are very agitated they make a soft chuffing sound. Cubs, on
the other hand, have an impressive vocal repertoire. When they
are around human observers they hiss, squall, and whimper, make
a wet, popping sound by smacking their lips, and emit throaty
rumblings. Scientists guess that their mothers communicate with
them vocally--perhaps using only a few simple sounds. One could
be a version of the adult's chuff, a quiet, repetitive call "easily
located in space but not traveling far," used to warn her cubs
away from danger--an approaching male, rotten ice, a rabid fox.
Somehow the female must control her cubs until they can
feed themselves, if for no other reason than that they can so
easily disrupt her own hunting, on which they all depend. (One
scientist suggested to me that females solve this problem by walking
the cubs until they are so tired they curl up together to sleep.
While they rest, she hunts.)
Young bears apparently understand the basic skills of stalking
and still-hunting, but require practice. Perhaps their mothers also
provide some instruction by creating opportunities for them; and
perhaps they learn a good deal by watching and imitating. Their
initial attempts to catch seals are frantic and impatient. A young
bear may give up its watch at an aglu after only ten minutes. Or
charge wildly across an ice floe and dive headfirst into a lead in
io6 ARCTIC DREAMS Torndrssuk 107
pursuit of a seal. As with other predators, an acute sense of need
plays a crucial role in the determination to succeed. For cubs-of-
the-year (coys) and yearlings, mother will provide.
Polar bears have relatively few young, but they put a great
deal of time and energy into raising and protecting them, which
ensures that most of them will survive. When they are between
twenty-four and twenty-eight months old, usually, the family
breaks up and the cubs are on their own. The female often mates
again. The cubs may stay together for a while, but then they, too,
separate. At this point, the survival of Ursus marithnus hinges on
learning to live alone. And among all age classes of bears, it is those
in this transitional stage that suffer the greatest mortality.
Charles Jonkel, a biologist, summarizes the situation that
faces a young bear in its first summer alone. First, it lacks experi-
ence, an indispensable attribute for a successful hunter. Second,
it is somewhat limited in its ability to secure food because of its
small size (a large bearded or hooded seal could get away); and
it might not have strength enough to break through a seal lair
before the seal escapes. Third, it has a pressing need for food, not
only for its continued growth, but to build up a layer of blubber
on which to draw during lean periods. Fourth, it has to learn to
find its way, to comprehend and then remember the relationships
between currents, prevailing winds, the position of certain land
masses, the trend of coastlines. Last, it must face competition from
and conflict with older bears, who may take its seals away.
A female's unique competence lies in figuring out something
new and difficult--den construction--in the middle of her life;
and in teaching her cubs to survive. What makes the males im-
pressive is their year-round success as hunters (for they are more
often abroad in the winter than the female) and their assertive
curiosity. Males investigate almost anything they spot on the sea
ice. In evolutionary terms this might only be simple resourceful-
ness. Curious bears may in the end eat more often. The darker
side of this is that, today, with the spread of oil camps and the
I abandonment of military installations, curious bears are sometimes
I killed by the things they test.
THERE is a famous object of Dorset art--the Dorset culture flour-
ished in the Arctic between about 500 B.C. and A.D. IOOO--which
archaeologists refer to as a "floating" or "flying" bear. The best-
known example was found at a site called Alernerk, near the
present village of Igloolik on Melville Peninsula in the eastern
Canadian Arctic. It is carved from ivory, about six inches long,
and dates from about A.D. 500. The bear's head and body are stream-
lined, the forelegs sweeping back along the sides and the rear legs
trailing. The bear appears to be gliding or flying. There is some-
thing human in the shape of the rear legs, and it is incised with a
stylized skeleton, a backbone and ribs, with the cervical vertebrae
and limb joints clearly marked. The underside--the chest and
abdomen--is longitudinally concave, suggesting the lack of a body;
and there is a tiny compartment with a sliding wood cover in the
neck, which apparently once held red ocher.
The Dorset culture, particularly toward its close, may have
been dominated by influential shamans who made these carvings.
Dorset shamans in self-induced trances "flew away," departing
their human bodies for a spirit realm at the bottom of the sea or
on the moon. Here they consulted, appeased, and cajoled on their
own behalf or on behalf of their patients. They were frequently
accompanied on these journeys by powerful helping spirits, and
among these the polar bear was without peer. The bear helped the
angakoq, or shaman, get outside his body so he could fly. (The
skeleton carved on the bears is thought to emphasize this dis-
embodied form of travel.)
One of the most interesting things about these carvings is how
realistic they actually are. At first I thought they were stylized
like modern Eskimo soapstone carvings. After I saw polar bears
on the ice, I realized it was instead my conceptions that were
stylized. Polar bears strike poses in real life that are but slightly
io8 ARCTIC DREAMS Torndrssuk 109
exaggerated in Dorset and modern carvings--a reminder of the
native eye, the kernels of realism that lie within seemingly exag-
gerated native ideas.
I once asked Ray Schweinsburg about polar bears that went
down into the sea, that swam down to the bottom of the ocean
with their angakoq companions. "Once," replied Schweinsburg,
"I saw a set of bear tracks that led up to the edge of a large hole in
the ice, where they disappeared. There were no tracks coming out,
and there was nowhere else the bear could have surfaced in that
floe ice. You can easily understand the view that there are bears
walking around on the bottom of the ocean."
And if you have ever seen a polar bear swimming 30 feet
below the surface in clear water, watched it stroke and glide, turn
and roll down there like a sea otter, you would not wonder that
bears could fly.
The artistic and philosophical evocation of the polar bear by
Eskimo and pre-Eskimo cultures leads one to believe that their
insight derives from a special affinity with the bear. To an extent,
the Eskimo and the polar bear are alike, the lines of their successful
adaptation to the Arctic being parallel. The prey of both, though
not the principal prey of some Eskimo groups, is the ringed seal.
Their hunting methods--waiting patiently at the aglu, various
kinds of stalking--are strikingly similar. (Polar bears arrived in
the Arctic ahead of the Eskimo, and it is likely Eskimos learned,
or at least refined, some of their techniques by watching bears
hunt.) Some groups of Eskimos move off the land and onto the
sea ice in winter, like bears. And after about two weeks at a place
where seal hunting is good, the area seems to be hunted out for
both sorts of hunter, and they move on. Both make their living at
the edge of the sea ice and along the shore. And both live with the
threat of starvation if the seals disappear.
Man and bear are affected as well by the vicissitudes of a harsh
climate, which seems to give each of them a discernable aura of
successful endurance. Anthropologists and biologists turn to the
same words to describe each: "tough," "practical," "tenacious,"
I·'inventive," "a one-time learner." And they note a difference be-
tween the two. Bears seem occasionally to lose their temper when
they are hunting. "I have seen [a polar bear] watch a seal for half a
ïay," wrote a traveler, and failing to catch it by any stratagem,
"it roared hideously, tossing snow in the air, and trotted off." Other
observers have seen bears smash off projections of ice or smack the
water repeatedly in frustration after just missing a seal. Eskimos
rarely lose their temper, and almost never when they are hunting.
The usual response to failure in these circumstances is laughter.
The Eskimos' affinity for the polar bear is easy to understand
from the parallels in their ecology and the similarity of their dwell-
ings, mentioned earlier; and from knowing the esteem with which
Eskimos regard a successful hunter. And from seeing a polar bear
stripped of its skin, how disquietingly human its appearance is. But
there is something far deeper in their involvement, for each is prey
to the other.
The bear fears both the killer whale and the walrus when it is
in the water, for it has no lethal leverage there. On land, it is wary
of the walrus and of men, too, but it will stalk both. A hungry bear
will test the resistance of either. The image of a strong, determined,
cunning animal stalking them must have entered the minds of all
people who felt their vulnerability out on the sea ice. Over that
uneven topography the bear could draw near without ever being
noticed. The fear of being hunted is vestigial in us, a dim memory
from the open savannas of southern Africa. For a man waiting
alone at an aglu for a seal on a winter afternoon, looking around in
the half-light, alert at a subconscious and primitive level for the
triggering sound of the bear's footfall, the fear must have been
palpable.
Bears approached men as though they were a kind of resting
seal. Some of these encounters must have ended with a pounce, a
single blow, a man dead. But some of them were finished with a seal
harpoon or a knife, a bear dead of a fatal miscalculation. Of the
latter, some were encounters deliberately courted, by men on the
verge of manhood. These were not simply terrifying moments but
I IO ARCTIC DREAMS Tornarssuk 11
moments of awe and apotheosis. These were moments that kept
alive within the culture the overarching presence of a being held
in fearful esteem. Tornarssuk, the Polar Eskimo called him, "the
one who gives power."
To encounter the bear, to meet it with your whole life, was to
grapple with something personal. The confrontation occurred on a
serene, deadly, and elevated plain. If you were successful you
found something irreducible within yourself, like a seed. To walk
away was to be alive, utterly. To be assured of your own life, the
life of your kind, in a harsh land where life took insight and patience
and humor. It was to touch the bear. It was a gift from the bear.
Knud Rasmussen, an arctic traveler, once asked an Eskimo man
about happiness, about exhilaration, and he answered, "To come
across fresh bear tracks and be ahead of all the other sledges."
To men who grappled, instead, with abstractions of geography,
with dreams of a mother lode of wealth in the New World, the
bear was something else. In 1597, during that winter they saw the
sun rise early, Barents and his men were frightened often by polar
bears. Bears had killed two of the group the previous year, and now
they seemed to prowl continuously around Barents' winter quarters.
His men watched, unnerved, as the bears dragged huge slabs of
meat (from a beached whale) past them in the dusky light. On April
15, 1597, when no bears had been seen for weeks, one of the men
volunteered to crawl into a den---"but not to farre," wrote Gerrit
de Veer, "for it was fearfull to behold" with hoar-frosted hairs
dangling from its ceiling and its ice-covered, claw-scraped walls.
De Veer's chronicle--and a later one by Jacob van der Brugge,
about a 1634 expedition to Svalbard that also suffered predation by
bears--projected an image of the polar bear as a ghostly marauder.
The image persisted throughout the period of arctic exploration,
and was one the polar bear lent itself to. Bears loomed together
suddenly in numbers on a foggy beach, like white wolves. They
tore open graves and strewed the bodies about, which men found
more ominous than if the bears had eaten the corpses. They entered
camps boldly on their large, silent feet and, accustomed as they
were to the crack and explosion of sea ice, were not startled by
gunfire. Explorers who arrived at their caches to find them torn
apart by bears--sacks of flour dragged off in one direction, sleep-
ing bags in another, equipment crates smashed to kindling, food
tins surgically opened with the rake of a single claw--felt violated.
Those who ate bear meat indiscriminately thought they had been
tricked by their victims--poisoned--when they suffered the nau-
seous lethargy, the crushing headaches and loss of skin and hair that
came from eating the bear's liver. Or when they developed trich-
inosis from eating the bear's flesh.*
Thousands of miles from familiar surroundings, genuinely
frightened, and perhaps strained by the grim conditions of ship-
board life, Europeans took to killing any polar bear they saw. They
shot them out of pettiness and a sense of rectitude. In time, killing
polar bears became the sort of amusement people expected on an
arctic journey. Travelers regularly shot them from the ship's deck,
for target practice. One idle summer afternoon in 1896, a whaling
captain in Amundsen Gulf with nothing else to do shot thirty-five,
for sport. The curious and unaggressive bear, so easily attracted to
a ship, an object cruising so oddly in the ice, time and again stepped
into its own death. In 1875 the crew of a whaler was playing
football on a shelf of landfast ice in thick fog next to the ship. In
the middle of the game a polar bear appeared and began chasing the
ball in and out among the men. The whalers fled. Such stories only
confirmed some in their sense of being offended, of being trifled
with in this difficult place. They shot the animals with colonial
indifference.
The most disturbing and deplorable aspect of nineteenth-
century encounters with polar bears was a perverse manipulation of
the bond between a female and her cubs, a common amusement of
* Vitamin A is found in toxic concentrations in polar bear liver. Eating
it causes hypervitaminosis-A. And about 60 percent of the present polar
bear population carries species of Trichinella.
I 12 ARCTIC DREAMS
sailors aboard whaling and sealing ships. William Scoresby tells
of an incident involving walrus hunters who had set fire to a pile of
blubber to attract bears. A female and two cubs drew near. The
female settled her cubs at a short distance and then started trying
to hook pieces of blubber out of the fire. The men watched from
the safety of the deck as she fought with the flames. They threw
her small bits of blubber, which she took to the cubs. As she
approached them with the last piece, the men shot the two cubs
dead. For the next half hour she "laid her paws first upon one, and
then the other, and endeavored to raise them up." She walked off
and called to them, she licked their wounds. She went off again and
"stood for some time moaning" before returning to paw them "with
signs of inexpressible fondness." Bored, or perhaps mortified, the
men shot the female and left her on the ice with her cubs.
Sometimes a cub was taken alive, for a zoo or as a present for
someone. In November 1876, a Sir Allen Young shot a female and
one of her cubs from the deck of a steamship. The other cub he
lassoed as a gift for the Prince of Wales.* The cub fought wildly
until it was secured with chains to ringbolts in the deck. The female
was butchered and the cub wrapped in her skin in the hope of
appeasing him. Three or four days later the cub succeeded in tear-
ing free of the ringbolts. He was then placed in a small cage, where
he remained for the duration of the voyage. The cub roared for
hours on end and pulled at the length of chain still around his neck.
He was tormented by the ship's dog, which stole his food and bit
his paws. The origin of the meat he was fed can be imagined. By
the time the ship reached England, the cub lay prostrate in his cage,
convulsing and panting. He died a week later. "Had he lived,"
* European royalty received live polar bears as gifts from explorers and
adventurers from the tenth century onward. They, in turn, historically
found them "an extremely valued and efficient instrument of diplom-
acy" in North Africa and the Middle East, where they were sent, along
with gyrfalcons, in royal retinues.
Tornarssuk 113
wrote Frank Buckland, reflecting the attitudes of the age, "he
would, no doubt, have been an honour to his country and his race."
These stories, of course, are from another era; but the craven
taunting, the witless insensitivity, and the phony sense of adventure
that propelled them are not from another age. They still afflict us.
For these men, the bear had no intrinsic worth, no spiritual power
of intercession, no ability to elevate human life. The circumstances
of its death emphasized the breach with man. During these same
years, by contrast, the killing of polar bears by Eskimos occurred
in an atmosphere of respect, with implicit spiritual obligations. The
dead bear, for example, was propitiated with gifts. Such an act of
propitiation is sometimes dismissed as "superstition." "Technique of
awareness" would come much closer to the mark, words that re-
mind you of what you are dealing with.
Europeans were ill at ease in the Arctic. The polar bear was
for them a symbol of the implacable indifference of an inhospitable
landscape. Whatever remorse they suffered over their harsh treat-
ment of the polar bear eventually became admiration, but for a bear
that was really a curious image of themselves. De Veer's marauding
ghost bear, which became an impediment to Western progress and
then an amusement, a nuisance, finally became a vaguely noble
creature, wandering in a desolate landscape, saddled with melan-
choly thoughts. A romantic, estranged, self-absorbed creature.
In the stories Eskimos tell, down to the present, the polar bear
is most often cast as a helper or companion of one sort or another,
like Tornarssuk. But he is known as Kokogiaq, too, the ten-legged
or many-legged bear. One time, one winter, it seemed people who
went off hunting in a certain direction never came back. What
happened to them was that there was a ten-legged bear down there.
When people looked over there, Kokogiaq moved his legs around
a little. It looked like people walking around on the ice. So other
people went down there to see them. That's how Kokogiaq got
people. Finally a man got the bear to come after him. He got him
to chase him into a place in the ice where Kokogiaq couldn't turn
ARCTIC DREAMS
around. Then that man ran around and killed him from behind ivith
his spear. When people go hunting down there now, they always
come back.
The stories go like that.
Often in a story about Kokogiaq or Torndrssuk there is some
hint not only of the bear's biology (how that wedge-shaped body
could get caught in ice where a man could slip through) but of its
personality. The bear's melancholy wandering, for example, is
underscored in a Polar Eskimo story about a bear who falls in love
with a young married woman. He cautions her never to tell her
husband of their meetings because her husband will surely try to
kill him. But she takes pity on her husband's failures in hunting
bears and tells him where her lover lives. Far away, the bear hears
her whispering to her husband in the night, and he leaves his home
before the husband arrives. He goes straight to the woman's snow
house. He raises his paws to smash it in--and then he lowers his
paws to his side. Feeling betrayed, overcome with grief, he sets off
on a long and solitary journey.
To the European mind the story is poignant. For the Eskimo
it is charged with danger. For the bear to go off preoccupied with
such a subject means it will not be paying attention to where it is
going, that it may fall through bad ice or miss signs that will lead it
to an aglu and sustenance.
A bear's long, solitary journeys across the frozen ocean, science tells
us, are not precisely what the imagination once conjectured. And
now, too often, wherever they go someone is in the way. Between
1978 and 1981, eighty-four polar bears were killed in the Canadian
Arctic as threats to human life. The threat is real. In 1973, a bear
killed a tractor operator near Kendall Island in the Beaufort Sea. In
1975, also in the Beaufort, a bear killed a construction worker on the
deck of a barge. In August 1975, a polar bear severely mauled a man
in a scientific camp on Somerset Island. And at Churchill, Manitoba,
bears mauled people in 1966 and 1967, and killed a boy in 1968 and
a man in 1983.
Torndrssuk 115
The former deaths are associated with industrial development
in the Arctic; the attacks at Churchill derive from a more peculiar
set of circumstances. For many years, polar bears at the southern
end of Hudson Bay have come ashore in late July and early August
with southward-drifting ice. Females commonly den for the winter
in country between the Nelson and Churchill rivers, while adult
males and subadults of both sexes drift northward up the coast to
the vicinity of Cape Churchill, 25 miles east of the village, where
coastal ice is likely to form earliest. They remain in this vicinity,
"temporarily removed from their specialized predatory niche," as
one scientist put it, throughout September and October.
This unusual staging was not discovered until the 1960s, when
bears began turning up at the village of Churchill. Scientists
theorize that when a Hudson's Bay Company post at the mouth of
the Nelson River closed, an American Strategic Air Command base
closed, and military maneuvers ceased at Fort Churchill, all in 1957,
the hunting pressure on polar bears was relieved and the population
began to increase. By the mid-sixties, polar bears were turning up
in large numbers at garbage fires in Churchill, frightening people.
The people, in turn, began tormenting the bears by shooting them
with small-caliber weapons and chasing them with cars.
In recent years, though the bear population has continued to
grow, a program of warning, local education, deterrence, and
management has reduced the numbers of bears killed, and there
have been few attacks. Residents of Churchill now regard the bears,
somewhat fondly, as a tourist attraction. Others who have visited
the area find the sight of bears ominous and peculiar--some with
huge dark numerals painted on their sides, some rooting in the
smoke and flames of the smoldering dump, where a bear once died
from trying to eat an automobile battery.
The parade of amateur and professional photographers, film-
makers, and television personnel, baiting bears with jars of mayon-
naise and importuning Churchill people to assist them in staging
various scenes, is unending. More than anything, Churchill represents
a moment in time when an animal in a comparatively accelerated
n 6 ARCTIC DREAMS
state of evolutionary development has encountered another creature
evolving at a very much higher rate of change. Churchill, for the
moment, is the answer to the question of what industrial develop-
ment in the Arctic means--along with the thirty or so bears shot
each year in northern Canada as "nuisances" and threats. The bears
at Churchill, it should be observed, depart the day the ice will
support their weight.
Recent research into the size and dynamics of polar bear
populations has resulted in a hunting moratorium in Svalbard and a
partial ban on hunting in the United States.* Native hunting in
Greenland continues, apparently without serious effect on the
population. Native hunting in Canada is under a quota system,
which has worked well in the past, although quotas are subject
to political manipulation and, as one scientist pointed out to me,
often regarded not so much as limits but as numbers to strive for.
In 1965, polar bear biologists, meeting at the University of
Alaska to pool what they knew, feared that bears might need pro-
tection from excessive hunting. The greatest danger to them now,
stressed every scientist I spoke with, is not hunting but industrial
development and what it brings with it, including summary de-
mands for data on polar bear biology and ecology, t Uppermost in
scientists' minds are three areas of concern. First is environmental
poisoning. Bears feed at the top of a marine food chain that con-
centrates PCBs, heavy metals, and chlorinated hydrocarbons like
* According to the terms of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which
supersedes the stricter provisions of the IUCN Polar Bear Agreement,
there are no seasonal limits and no limits on the number of bears that
can be killed by native hunters. Nor are clubs, females with cubs, or
denning females protected.
t In the face of such demands some polar bears have been wounded or
killed in poorly designed research projects or poorly thought-through
experiments. For a description of experiments that killed two bears see
N. A. 0ritsland et aL, Effect of Crude Oil on Polar Bears, Environ-
mental Studies No. 24 (Ottawa: Northern Affairs Program, Northern
Environmental Protection Branch, 1981).
Torndrssuk 117
dieldrin, all of which have been found in polar bears. The waste
from drilling and mining operations has also proved lethal to bears.
A second concern is the disruption of female bears at their denning
sites, the result of intensive overflights and other transportation
corridor development and of repeated seismic surveys.* A third
area of concern is what effect industrial development will have on
the distribution of seals, and therefore bears.
The most pressing problem is finding a way to keep curious
bears away from industrial sites. Deterrent systems that do not
seriously injure bears--electric fences, rubber batons fired from riot
guns--have met with some success, but polar bears are not easily
stopped or fooled.
In the light of all these potential problems, IUCN polar bear
biologists have asked for "no-activity zones" or what a Russian
scientist has called "zones of peace," where bears will simply not
be bothered by various human projects.
FAR from all these disturbing concerns, one May afternoon, I
accompanied two polar bear biologists searching for breeding fe-
males on the sea ice of Lancaster Sound. I knew and trusted and
liked these two men. I also sympathized with their ambivalent feel-
ings about their work. One of them had once come upon a female
nursing her cubs. Unaware of his presence, she had settled back
against a bank of snow with them and was staring calmly out across
the empty sea ice. "I saw that, and I said to myself, why in God's
name am I bothering these animals?" They were ambivalent, too,
about the drugs they were using to immobilize the bears. What they
were using---Ketamine (ketamine hydrochloride) and Rhompun
(xylazine hydrochloride)--was an improvement over earlier drugs
like Sernylan (phencyclidine hydrochloride, the street drug called
"angel dust"), which appeared to induce psychotic reactions and
* Seismic surveys employ explosion and vibration to map the earth's
crust in search of mineral and petroleum deposits. When improvements
are made in seismic technology, the same areas are often surveyed again.
n8 ARCTIC DREAMS
cause breathing difficulties. But immobilizing drugs are still prob-
lematic. One bear biologist told me, "Every time I chase an animal to
put a dart in it, I am in conflict. How can I justify getting the
information like this?"
That afternoon on Lancaster Sound, in the completion of the
somewhat somber duties of tagging and recording data and fitting
the animals with radio collars to permit satellite tracking, we saw
many bears. We landed once to inspect the remains of a walrus
that had been killed, perhaps, or possibly only scavenged, by a bear.
We saw two-year-old cubs with their mothers striding apprehen-
sively away from the sound of our helicopter, and we saw males
and females together, mating pairs, turning beneath us to stare. And
females with five-month-old cubs, scrambling over pressure ridges
with a boost from their mother's nose.
One of the females we darted went down near a jumble of
shattered ice. Wr
hile the others made measurements, I looked at her
feet. I had once been told that polar bear claws show an annual
shading, faint rings, which could be used reliably to age a bear, as
is the case with ringed seals. But there were none that I could
detect. I looked at details of her fur and felt the thickness of her
ears, as though examining a museum specimen. Uncomfortable
with all this, I walked over to the pressure ridge and sat on a slab
of broken sea ice. It was a beautiful day, the skies clear behind a
thin layer of very high cirrus, which made the sky a paler blue.
About five below zero. No wind.
As I sat there my companions rolled the unconscious bear over
on her back and I saw a trace of pink in the white fur between her
legs. The lips of her vulva were swollen. Her genitalia were in size
and shape like a woman's. I looked away. I felt I had invaded her
privacy.
For the remainder of the day I could not rid myself of this
image of vulnerability.
Four
LANCASTER SOUND
Monodon monoceros
IAM STANDING at the margin of the sea ice called the floe edge
at the mouth of Admiralty Inlet, northern Baffin Island, three
or four miles out to sea. The firmness beneath my feet belies
the ordinary sense of the phrase "out to sea." Several Eskimo camps
stand here along the white and black edge of ice and water. All of
us have come from another place--Nuvua, 30 miles to the south at
the tip of Uluksan Peninsula. We are here to hunt narwhals. They
axe out there in the open water of Lancaster Sound somewhere,
waiting for this last ice barrier to break up so they can enter their
summer feeding grounds in Admiralty Inlet.
As I walk along the floe edge--the light is brilliant, the cease-
less light of July; but after so many weeks I am weary of it; I stare
119