The Great White Bear (16 page)

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 during 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:

[B]ut our master held the dore fast to, and being in great haste and feare could not barre it with the peece of wood that we used thereunto; but the beare seeing that the dore was shut, she went backe againe, and within two hours after she came againe, and went round about and upon the top of the house, and made such a roaring that it was fearefull to heare, and at last got to the chimney, and made such worke there that we thought she should have broken it downe, and tore the saile that was made fast about it in many peeces with a great and fearfull noise; but for that it was night we made no resistance against her, because we could not see her. At last she went awaie and left us.

It was not their first close encounter. Two months previously, for example, another bear advanced with apparently malicious intent while several of the crew were outside, forcing them to retreat rapidly toward their shelter and grab their firearms:

We leavelled at her with our muskets, and as she came right before our dore we shot her into the breast clean through the heart, the bullet passing through her body and went out againe at her tayle ... The beare feeling the blow, lept backwards, and ran twenty or thirty foote from the house, and there lay downe, wherewith we lept all out of the house and ran to her, and found her still alive; and when she saw us she reard up her head, as if she would gladly have done us some mischefe; but we trusted her not, for that we had tried her strength sufficiently before, and therefore we shot her twice in the body againe, and therewith she dyed. Then we ript up her belly, and taking out her guts, drew her home to the house, where we flead her and tooke at least one hundred pound of fat out of her belly, which we [melted] and burnt in our lamps. This grease did us great service, for by that meanes we still kept a lampe burning all night long, which before we could not doe for want of grease; and every man had means to burne a lamp in his caban for such necessaries as he had to doe.

At times the crew must have wondered if polar bears would ever leave them alone. On each of the last three days of May 1597, as the shipwrecked men took advantage of the returning sun to work outside, approaching polar bears forced them to retreat to the safety of their house and the security of their weapons; each time, they shot the bears dead. On the final occasion, however, the bear took its revenge from beyond the grave:

Her death did us more hurt than her life, for after we ript her belly we drest her liver and eate it, which in the tatse liked us well, but it made us all sicke, especially three that were exceeding sicke, and we verily thought that we should have lost them, for all their skins came of from the foote to the head, but they recovered againe, for the which we gave God heartie thanks.

What de Veer and his fellow mariners could not know was that polar bear livers are exceptionally high in vitamin A—a valuable vitamin, to be sure, when consumed via a diet rich with carrots, broccoli, and leafy vegetables, but potentially lethal when ingested at the kind of levels found in the livers of polar bears (a consequence of the bear's diet revolving around seals, which themselves carry what, to humans, would be toxic levels of vitamin A).

Within two weeks of that episode, Heemskerck, Barents, de Veer, and the others escaped not only the attentions of the ice bears, but the confinement of Ice Haven. Their ship had not sunk but had been irredeemably damaged by the punishing ice, so the men piled supplies into two of the boats and gently threaded their way around the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya and into what is now the Barents Sea. A week later, that sea's eponymous discoverer died of scurvy; he and a crewmate who died the same day were taken ashore and hurriedly buried. The rest eventually—and remarkably—reached the coast of the Kola Peninsula and safety in the form of the ship that had begun the journey alongside them the previous summer.

De Veer's account of the voyage proved hugely popular and was widely translated; of his life following his return to land, little is known. It would not be especially fanciful to posit that he found contentment in the Arctic henceforth being a place to which he returned only in his memories, or that as he tossed and turned in his dreams at night, he more than once imagined himself confronted with a ravenous polar bear. For not only had he and his crew had to cope with their marauding attentions while shipwrecked; on Barents's previous voyage, on which de Veer had also sailed, an especially aggressive bear had both attacked some of his comrades and even set about eating them. This incident, too, de Veer recorded in detail in his book, beginning with the moment when, as two of the crew worked ashore,