The Great White Bear (15 page)

And so the battle begins.

Mating battles between mature males are rarely observed, but their ferocity can be inferred. For one thing, male polar bears are significantly more massive than females, an example of a phenomenon known to biologists as sexual dimorphism, in which males and females are dramatically different in size, appearance, or coloration. Almost invariably, when males are substantially larger than females, they are also significantly more numerous and must therefore compete with each other for the attention of a possible mate. There are reckoned to be, if anything, slightly more female polar bears than males, making the species the exception to the rule; but the long period over which females raise cubs means that during any given mating period, only approximately one-third of the mature females are available to breed. Competition, therefore, is intense, and further evidence of the severity of the fights that take place can be found in older males, which have far more scars and broken teeth than do females of the same age. Geoff York has told me that "I have seen two males, absolutely battered, exhausted, and emaciated, following a female to breed. The male in the rear of the group had one ear hanging to the side of his head and numerous slash and puncture wounds. A massive slash to the groin was large and deep enough to insert your full hand, yet this bear continued its pursuit." As he wryly observes, such behavior is why it is assumed males live shorter lives than females.

When one male has seen off his rivals and emerged victorious, he escorts the female away from the more heavily trafficked areas of prime seal habitat where the greatest number of bears is likely to be found, nudging and leading her to more secluded or remote spots, either high on a mountainside or far out on the pack ice. And then they begin to mate.

The couple spends several days together, during which they mate repeatedly. They copulate several times before the female releases an egg, and several more after that before the egg is successfully fertilized, a strategy that ensures the egg is not released without a mate being available and that it is not wasted on a mate that is unsuitable.

The female may mate with more than one male, and when she gives birth, each of her two or three cubs may be sired by different fathers. Whether she breeds with one or more, the end result is always the same. The two go their separate ways and likely will not see each other again.

The male wanders off, perhaps in search of another mate. In time the female will begin probing snowdrifts, looking for a suitable spot to make a den and give birth. But it will be a few months before she is ready to take that step. For now, she must eat.

In the distance
, near the horizon, there is movement. From where he stands, on the edge of the fast ice, the bear cannot quite make out the nature of the creature that is moving, or whether it has seen him. He raises his nose to the air, catches the scents that blow on the breeze: faint, and faintly familiar.

It is not a smell to which he is altogether accustomed, not the easily identifiable odor of a walrus on an ice floe or a ringed seal lying in its lair. But it is not entirely new to him. He has smelled it before, sometimes stronger, sometimes intermingled with a variety of fantastic and otherworldly sensory delights; in times past, on his way to the shores of the bay, waiting for the ice to freeze, he had dared to explore their provenance. He had been younger then, and hungrier, braver perhaps, more desperate certainly.

He had ventured forth in search of food, had been able to procure some scraps here and there, had even managed to avoid being seen in the process. Even so, as he became older and wiser, more accomplished at finding food where he was supposed to, where his mother had taught him and his brother so long ago, the need and temptation to take such risks disappeared.

He placed his front paws on a hummock to gain better elevation, but the scent was already starting to diminish. The creature was moving away. For a moment, the bear's predatory instincts urged him to follow, to stay upwind and to close the distance until he could make a decision on whether to attack. But it was an urge he could easily enough resist. The ice was fractured here, there were many leads, and seals were plentiful. There was no need to invest precious time and energy in stalking that potential prey. Besides, the effort might prove not only fruitless but potentially dangerous. Even on those occasions in the past when he had managed to snatch food scraps from the midst of such creatures, he had felt an uneasiness, a sense of danger always lurking.

Far better to turn back out to the pack ice. Let the creature take its scent off the fast ice and back onto land, unmolested.

That ours became the dominant species on Earth owes much to a series of circumstances, some confluent, some leading to others, some the product of good fortune, others of evolutionary adaptation: intelligence, a social nature, bipedal motion, an omnivorous diet, opposable thumbs, the use of fire and tools, an ability to adapt to a variety of climates and survive catastrophic events that limited or eliminated competitors and predators—ultimately, of course, our ancestors' development of agriculture and the knowledge to alter the environment to suit our tastes rather than being obliged to adapt to its whims.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider, by way of example, the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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