The Great White Bear (18 page)

"And then this giant once again behaved in a manner I had completely failed to anticipate," the scientist wrote. "He suddenly got terribly frightened."

The bear fled for the safety of the water, so fixated on his goal and on retreating from the unseen force that had hit him that he ran through the middle of a wall of walruses.

"One time, I was behind about a three-inch-thick steel door, and a big bear came and made a beeline for where I was, knew exactly where he was going, didn't hesitate, and put both his front paws on that door and proceeded to march in," recalls Robert Buchanan, who as president of the not-for-profit Polar Bears International has spent many years among the polar bears of Hudson Bay. "I had no idea he was coming through, of course, and the only thing I had at my disposal was a broomstick, and I just started beating the living piss out of his nose just as hard as I could and as fast as I could, and he looked at me like he thought I was stupid. And I just kept whacking it, and he started to back off, like, 'Well, this is not worth the trouble,' and crawled back out."

By and large, reckons Buchanan, polar bears generally aren't that interested in humans as potential victims. Unlike blubber-coated seals, he says, "there's just not that much on a human being to interest them." But on those occasions when a polar bear does attack, it is often as not exceptionally hungry—as in the case of the bear that killed Stalker, which, according to the vet who examined it, had "no more than a few ounces of fat" on its body—or very young (or perhaps both, as the latter condition is often an indicator of the former).

"The ones who give you the most trouble, just as in our world, are teenagers," Buchanan continues. "Teenagers in the polar bear world usually don't have enough nourishment or are not smart enough yet to understand the risk for them, but they are going to be the meanest and most aggressive. One thing adult polar bears won't do, and subadults haven't always learned this yet, is they will not attack unless they're pretty sure they're going to get that person, or that seal. They will not waste that energy unless they're absolutely comfortable they're going to make that score. So when they put their ears down, you're in deep doo-doo."

University of Calgary professor Stephen Herrero, author of the seminal volume
Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance,
agrees: "A typical encounter with a polar bear, it is not going to be interested in injuring you or hunting you," he says. "But, in the event that a polar bear does decide you look like something to eat, then you'd better be well prepared, because they're a difficult bear to deter once they get into predatory mode, and they can get into that mode so suddenly."

In a 1990 study, Herrero and Susan Fleck found that, of twenty documented fatal or injurious polar bear attacks in Canada between 1965 and 1985, fifteen were apparently the result of predatory behavior, three an apparent case of a mother defending her young, one apparently a combination of both, and one of unknown motivation. Of those predatory fifteen, thirteen were identified as being by males, of which seven were subadult and four were described as "thin" or "skinny." As was the case with the bear that attacked Chaffin, eight of the twenty involved attractants such as garbage, animal carcasses, or food, and another was near an Inuit hunting camp.

"Bears are curious by nature and make a living by exploring possible things to eat," Herrero points out. "And so managing odors is one of the biggest factors in improving your safety."

In general, Herrero and Fleck wrote in their paper, their data "support the conclusion that polar bears, especially males, can be predators on people. The data also show that such events are rare."

Others put it more strongly.

"People talk about polar bears stalking and hunting humans," said Tom Smith, a polar bear researcher at Brigham Young University, as we sat eating dinner one evening on the shores of Hudson Bay. Outside, a light dusting of snow was insufficient to hide the solitary bear that lay a couple of hundred yards away in the fading daylight. "Well, if that's so, they're doing a pretty piss-poor job of it."

In the previous 125 years, Smith pointed out, polar bears had killed 8 people in Canada and 2 in Alaska. In recorded history, they have killed 19 in Russia. Conversely, of the 353 polar bear—human interactions Herrero and Fleck catalogued in Canada, 14 resulted in human injury and 6 in death. But as a direct result of those encounters, "at least 251" of the polar bears were killed. A separate study counted 50 serious encounters between polar bears and people on Svalbard; 1 of the people involved died, and 46 of the bears.

When Europeans first penetrated the Arctic's icy depths, they did so often with a sense of adventure but also with foreboding—a foreboding that almost certainly only grew as awareness of the Arctic's hostile nature spread and intensified, as reports from returning vessels spoke of the horrors and dangers the region presented, and as other vessels failed to return altogether. In that context, a profound apprehension of the predator that lurked silently and threateningly in the shadows was entirely understandable, and a resolve on the part of sailors to defend themselves, even proactively, no less so. But gradually, the motivation morphed from fear to necessity and desire—for warm fur to protect them in a cold climate, for food to eat and fat to burn—and thence, ultimately, to fun; instead of shooting polar bears out of self-defense, Arctic explorers shot them because they could. "Europeans took to killing any bear they saw," writes Barry Lopez. "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."

As early as 1585, the men of an expedition commanded by John Davis in search of the Northwest Passage came upon "white bears of a monstrous bigness," whereupon they, "being desirous of fresh victual and the sport, began to assault them." The following day, they found a polar bear sleeping peacefully. So they shot it in the head, "whereupon we ran all upon him with boar spears and thrust him in the body."

Lopez recounts a tale told by William Scoresby, in which walrus hunters set fire to a mound of blubber on the ice specifically to attract polar bears. A female and two cubs approached, the mother leaving the cubs at a safe distance as she approached the fire and tried to hook flaming pieces of blubber from it. Seeing the difficulty she was experiencing, the crew threw her some small pieces, which she took back to the cubs. And then they took aim at first one cub, and then the other, and shot them both. For thirty minutes the mother "laid her paws first upon one, and then the other, and endeavored to raise them up." She called to them, touched them, looked upon them "with signs of inexpressible fondness."

So the sailors shot her, too.

Scoresby tells another tale of how, in 1812, another mother bear, also with two cubs, approached a ship he commanded. This time, the sailors shot the mother and captured the cubs, which, "though at first evidently very unhappy, became at length, in some measure, reconciled to their situation; and being tolerably tame, were allowed occasionally to go at large about the deck." That didn't prevent one of them from trying to escape, leaping overboard onto the ice, attempting to wrest from its neck the noose that tethered it to the deck and to run as far from the ship as it could until, realizing it was held fast, "he yielded himself to his hard necessity, and lay down on the ice in angry and sullen silence."

The fate of those bear cubs is not reported, but that of other polar bears captured alive is a matter of public record—and indeed has been for a surprisingly long period of time. Ptolemy II, king of Egypt from 285 to 246 BCE, purportedly kept one in his private zoo in Alexandria; Roman emperors acquired at least some and on occasion deployed them against gladiators; and the Japanese emperor Korehito received a pair as a gift upon his accession in 858 CE. The provenance of such bears is unknown; more recently, in 1928, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter
Marion
encountered—again—a female with two cubs, whereupon the crew shot the mother and one of the cubs, hauling them aboard for food and fur. They retrieved the terrified, angry cub that remained, stowing her first in the fore hold and then, after she contrived to escape, in a cage that was swiftly fashioned for her. Named after the vessel on which she was forcibly transported, Marion was ultimately delivered to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, where she lived for twenty years.

By then the great age of Arctic exploration had passed—as had, more significantly for the fate of polar bears, the commercial whaling industry that had both resulted from and inspired much of that exploration. Fewer men setting sail on lengthy expeditions into the deepest depths of the Arctic ice pack for months or years on end meant fewer men to come into contact with polar bears and shoot them on sight. But the world by then was also growing rapidly smaller, and the Arctic, like much of the rest of the globe, was increasingly within reach.

The 1940s saw airborne hunters flying to Alaska to shoot polar bears for sport and bring back their hides as trophies to hang on the wall or place on the floor. Over the course of just one year in the 1950s, the farthest distance from the Alaska shore that a polar bear was shot climbed from 60 miles to 200; during that decade and the next, airborne hunters reportedly on occasion strayed so close to the Siberian coast in their search for quarry that they prompted the scrambling of Soviet fighter jets. By the 1960s, the Norwegian Travel Service was declaring the polar bear hunt on Svalbard to be "one of the finest big game hunts in the world ... hunting them in the pack ice is an experience a hunter can never forget," while a Soviet biologist was lamenting that there were now more polar bear hunters in the Arctic than there were polar bears for them to hunt.

In 1965, the
New York Times
was moved, in an editorial, to fulminate against the burgeoning Alaska hunt:

The polar bear is a victim of a peculiar—and particularly repulsive—expression of man's egotism. Wealthy men have taken to hunting bears in Alaska from airplanes. Two planes are used to herd the bear to an ice floe suitable for landing. While one plane lands and the hunter gets out, the other plane maneuvers the bemused animal within the hunter's gun sights. More than 300 polar bears, a new record, were killed in this fashion last winter in Alaska.

This kind of hunt is about as sporting as machine-gunning a cow.

The trophy hunt in Alaska was, however, the epitome of decorum compared with the situation in Norway. There, polar bears were being killed not just for sport but also because the sealing industry saw them as a threat to their livelihood; consequently, the methods used to bring about their death were ruthlessly efficient rather than adventurous. Set guns were placed in wooden boxes on small platforms; approaching bears would seize the bait that had been thoughtfully left for them, triggering the guns, which shot them at point-blank range in the face.

That same year, Alaska senator Edward "Bob" Bartlett had addressed his colleagues with his growing concerns:

I am informed that there are no accurate or reliable figures on the total world polar bear population or the size of the annual kill. Scientists know very little about the habits of habitat, reproduction, longevity, or population structure. They do not even know the answer to the basic question of whether there is but one population of polar bears moving from nation to nation on the slowly revolving ice pack, or whether there are two or more populations. Are there Soviet bears and American bears, Danish bears and Canadian bears, or are there just the bears of the world?

In conjunction with then—Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, Bartlett called for "...an international conference of Arctic Nations to pool scientific knowledge on the polar bear and to develop recommendations for future courses of action to benefit this resource of the Arctic region."

That gathering, the First Scientific Meeting on the Polar Bear, convened in Fairbanks, Alaska, in September 1965, its forty-six expert participants in general agreement that continued indiscriminate shooting would likely, at some point, have an impact on polar bear numbers, if it was not already doing so. But how much impact?

There was, as Bartlett had noted, no agreement on whether there was but one circumpolar bear population—as advanced by Soviet representatives at the meeting—or several, the view generally held by others. Whether divided into one population or several, there was nothing resembling consensus on how many polar bears in total roamed the Arctic. Five thousand, said some. More than 10,000, reckoned Canada's Richard Harington. Between 10,000 and 19,000, according to official U.S. estimates. As high as 25,000, according to others. Nor was there an accurate accounting of the number that were being killed, although a quick calculation by those in the room produced a figure of 1,475 annually, by sealers, sport hunters, and Natives alike. Depending on which population estimate you favored, that was anything between 6 and 30 percent of the world's polar bears being shot every year. Even given the most optimistic assessment of their numbers, that was unlikely to be sustainable.

Acknowledging the possible existence of a problem was one thing. Agreeing on a way forward was another. The Soviet Union had banned hunting in 1956 and in Fairbanks urged the other Arctic states to follow suit; but there was much money to be made in the United States from the Alaska hunts, the Norwegian representatives insisted their nationals had to kill bears to protect the country's sealing industry, and Canada and Denmark (the latter of which administered Greenland) argued that any ban would violate the long-established rights of Inuit to engage in subsistence hunts. A fallback proposal, for a five-year hiatus during which denning areas could be mapped and sanctuaries established, was met with scarcely more enthusiasm.

Not that the Soviets themselves embraced all ideas placed on the table. When the United States floated a five-year international circumpolar research program, in which bears would be fitted with radio collars that could be tracked by satellite, the Soviet delegation—noting the presence of representatives from the Pentagon and State Department at the meeting, and noting further that the man giving voice to the notion was an officer of the United States Navy—raised the fur on its collective back, issued a feline hiss, and ensured that such a suggestion would not be re-aired for the duration of the conference.