The Great White Bear (4 page)

For the females, it is of course important to conserve as much energy as possible once bedded down; they will need every ounce they can find, given that they will be surrendering calories to their cubs without eating for at least four months. Far better to sit and wait out a potential threat than to run or fight.

Which is not to say that neither of the latter ever happens.

"I remember one time we were in northern Southampton Island, and we were just building an igloo for the night," Harington told me, with a chuckle at the memory of the tale that was to come.

"I was with Tam Eeolik [Harington's Inuk guide] and [Eeolik's son] Tony. I took one of the bear dogs; I could see some ruffled snow on the edge of a rise. So I told Tony that I was going to go up and have a look at it. So I took the best bear dog we had—and these are dogs that are specially trained to go after bears, to corner them, to hold them for the Inuk to come up and kill them. So anyway, I took this husky and went up, and it looked like it was an abandoned den; there was lots and lots of snow below the entrance area. I started digging away at the entrance and the bear dog that was up with me went up onto the snow above me, and all of a sudden the roof fell in and this female came out and reached for the dog, and this famous bear dog vanished over the hills in no time. I could just see the end of his tail."

Harington is not the only one. Geoff York, now a polar bear expert with the World Wildlife Fund but at the time a researcher at USGS, recalls an occasion when he and Steven Amstrup had an unexpectedly and uncomfortably close encounter with a den's inhabitant.

In an attempt to learn more about denning behavior and den construction, USGS researchers had attached radio collars to a number of pregnant females the previous fall and, with the arrival of spring and those females' departure (as determined by the collars' GPS readings) for the sea ice, York and Amstrup visited the now-empty dens, into which they crawled and which they measured and documented.

"In the course of that, we stumbled across some dens of non-collared bears," he recalls, "and we were always particularly careful in those instances because we didn't know if anybody was at home or not." One of those dens was between two that had been built and occupied by bears that wore collars and, with their cubs, had departed; all three were within a hundred yards of each other. Approaching by helicopter, the biologists surveyed the scene from the air and landed.

"We shouted and hollered, threw snowballs into the den," he continues. "Steve Amstrup stuck his head into a hole and looked around. Nothing. We shut the helicopter down and got the gear out. And polar bear dens are mouse-hole-like—the entrances are much smaller than you or I could comfortably squeeze into, so we typically make them larger. And Steve was about to do that when his leg sort of popped into the tunnel and he heard a hiss. And he just about had time to say, 'Bear' before she came out. And he was standing in her exit hole. Steve went from that hole to the helicopter in nothing flat; I looked up and he was gone. I took a step backward, stepped into a crevice, and fell backward and landed on my back like a turtle."

Like Harington, York chuckles at the memory and makes light of parts of it—a benefit of having survived the incident.

"She saw me on my back and thought, 'Well, if you're going to make it easy...'" He smiles. "She starts walking over, and she looked enormous, and the only thought that passed through my head at the time was 'So this is how it ends.' I did have a .44; lucky for me and for the bear, it was in a holster that was completely inadequate and it was difficult to remove. My eyes were fixed on her and as she came closer, I yelled out, 'Steve!' as loudly as I could. I saw him out of the corner of my eye wheel round with his sidearm drawn, and luckily in all the commotion, the pilot saw what was happening, fired up the helicopter, and she took off."

That the bear took so long to respond to the scientists' presence highlights the fact that, particularly once cubs are born, it is clearly more desirable to hunker down than to take action that might expose the young family to the winter elements. The fate, described earlier, that befell the cubs whose mother had denned on the pack ice may have been a consequence of the riskiness of that particular environment; but the odds of survival of cubs exposed to the winter air are no greater for cubs whose den had been on land.

Furthermore, it seems fair to infer that mother and cubs feel secure in their little home. For example, field studies have shown that denned polar bears seem remarkably tolerant of nearby human activity, including aerial and ground traffic; only when helicopters took off or landed within a matter of feet of the den did researchers even record the bears making any kind of noise in response. Buried in their snowdrift, together in their warm, dark sanctuary, much of the time they are blissfully unaware of, and largely unconcerned by, any threats that may be passing by in the world outside.

In the den it is warm, the chamber's insulated properties and the body heat of the bears combining to make the air inside as much as 70°F warmer than the Arctic winter outside.

The eggs became implanted once the female found a spot for her den; a few weeks after she had made her home in the snowdrift, the cubs were born. Polar bears sometimes give birth to three cubs, rarely four, almost never one. On most occasions, as in this instance, there are two.

When they were born, seven months after the mother had been impregnated, they were blind and weighed roughly two pounds, but they were already covered with a downy coat of fur—so gossamer-fine that newborns are sometimes inaccurately referred to as "naked" or "hairless"—and their tiny paws were tipped with sharp claws. That latter feature enabled them to clasp more tightly to their mother's coat as they suckled. To our taste buds, the milk they ingested would be rich and rank: the fat content of polar bear milk is on average a little over 30 percent, compared to just 4 percent in human breast milk. But it is rich for a reason: high in protein as well as fat, it enables the cubs to grow rapidly.

At roughly thirty days, their eyes opened. Twenty days later, they sprouted their first teeth and started to develop a sense of smell. Despite the confined space, however, there was little, beyond the body odors of the three bears, for that newfound sense to discern: the mother kept the den spotless, immediately burying the cubs' feces and urine in the snow. (She, consuming no food and imbibing no liquid, expelled no waste of her own.) By the time they were two months old, the cubs began exploring their surroundings and adding to them, carving out their own small chambers as they tumbled with each other and crawled over and around their mother.

Now, a further month later, they are ready. Already the cubs have grown to sixteen pounds in weight, and in providing the nourishment that has enabled her offspring to grow so rapidly, the mother has depleted most of her resources. The cubs are set to make their entry into the outside world, and she is desperate to eat. Arching her back, she powers upward, breaking effortlessly through as much as three feet of hard, wind-packed snow. "A human could
never
break up through that ceiling," marvels Thomas Smith, "but polar bear mothers have no problem."

Having created a hole in the roof of the den, she sticks out her nose and sniffs the air. Sensing no danger, she slowly emerges, and, after confirming that the path is clear, with a soft, low grunt she signals to her cubs that it is safe to join her. With that, they scramble through the opening and for the first time experience the world outside the den.

It sounds on paper the slightest of shelters for the most powerful of predators. A hole in a snowdrift, sealed by more snow, scarcely seems sufficiently substantial to provide privacy and protection for one of the largest truly carnivorous mammals on Earth. And yet, the hostile environment is an impediment to all but the most curious and determined, and the monochrome surroundings render the dens invisible to all but the keenest, most experienced eyes.

"During the months of December and January, there's no evidence of any dens anywhere," says Mike Spence, a Cree tracker, owner of the Wat'chee Lodge near the polar bear denning area south of Hudson Bay, and a guide for photographers and naturalists wanting to see bear dens, and mothers and cubs emerging from them. "It's snow, it's creeks, it's willows, it's all of that. But then in February and March, well, a lot of it is experience, but you're looking for certain things. You know where some of the locations are, you travel, you track, there's been some disturbance so you look for that. If you see tracks, follow the tracks. It's difficult, but you keep at it."

Photographer Thorsten Milse, whose book
Little Polar Bears
is a pictorial paean to the inherent adorableness of furry white bear cubs, willingly admits in his tome that without the expert guidance of Mike's brother Morris, "I would not have been able to take a single shot of a polar bear, nor would I have been able to catch a glimpse of white fur."

Finding the location is just the beginning; while the emergence of females and cubs can be approximately predicted at a given location down to a matter of weeks, greater precision is impossible and there are no warning signs, no indicators of imminent appearance. One moment there is a snowdrift, the next a black nose, curious eyes blinking into the sunlight, a polar bear mother seeing the world anew and her cubs taking it in for the first time. With just the slightest loss of concentration, the briefest aversion of gaze, the moment can easily be missed.

In 1982, filmmakers Hugh Miles and Mike Salisbury endured a tortuous month attempting to film a den opening on Svalbard, for a BBC documentary series entitled
Kingdom of the Ice Bear.
Setting out from the archipelago's capital on March 4, they endured several days of storms, an overturned snowmobile, the extreme discomfort of camping on the sea ice and trying to distinguish between cracking floes and approaching bears and wondering which was worse, and the frustration of two false alarms—setting up to film what turned out to be a temporary den, and recording cubs that on review appeared to be suspiciously large and ultimately proved not to be newborns at all.

On March 29, the filmmakers and their guides stood in the remnants of a temporary snow shelter they had built that had been ruined when, in their absence, it had been visited by a bear that "rather inconsiderately re-emerged straight out through the front wall." Suddenly, Miles "became aware we were being watched." They looked up at a nearby snowbank and saw, poking out of the snow, "a bear's face blinking at us in the bright sun."

The face retreated into the snow, and Miles and Salisbury set up their cameras in readiness for the bear's reemergence; but not until midafternoon did the head again appear, and then only briefly. By then the sun had disappeared and the wind sliced into them; Miles recognized that—not altogether unexpectedly, given that he had spent several hours sitting still in a half-standing ice hide at 35 degrees below zero—he was shivering almost uncontrollably. The team retreated to their base camp, where Miles clambered into a snug sleeping bag with a warm drink until, after a couple of hours, warmth returned to all but his extremities.

After a sound night's sleep, Salisbury and the now-recovered Miles returned to the ice house, but the bear poked her head out of the snow just twice in ten hours of observation. Finally, on April 1, they saw what they had come so far, and endured so much, to see. At around eight thirty that morning, as their cameras rolled, the bear's head poked out of the den's entrance, followed by those of three cubs, one slightly smaller than the others and all three paler in color than the yellowish white of their mother. The cubs' first sight of the outside "was greeted with terrified squeaks, and they looked down the steep mountainside with trepidation," Miles and Salisbury wrote later. "The female fussed over them, then walked a few confident paces down, whilst two of the cubs followed gingerly, sliding backwards, with claws clutching the snow. The other stayed in the den entrance and cried so loudly that the female returned, and suckled all three in the sun."

After the effort they had gone through to make it this far, the filmmakers hoped that the bears would tarry a day or two before leaving the den behind, but that afternoon, "the female emerged purposefully, and started down towards the sea ice, followed protestingly by the little cubs." Although disappointed, Salisbury and Miles followed the mother and cubs at a discreet distance as they headed out onto the sea ice and away from shore, "in the realm of the seal, and within sight of her first meal for four months. We bade them a fond farewell and watched their departure into a white haze, feeling very sad it was all over."

Miles and Salisbury confessed to feeling quite emotional at being able to conclude their traumatic odyssey by witnessing, unnoticed by the bears they observed and far from any other humanity, the sight of a mother bear and her offspring taking their first tentative steps together. It is an emotion echoed by Thorsten Milse in
Little Polar Bears:

When the moment finally arrives, I'm always gripped by excitement: a den in the middle of the snow ... a small black nose ... you hold your breath ... and then a white face appears. Cautiously and with some curiosity, a polar bear cub peeks out. Behind the cub, the mother's head gradually appears. For that one moment, I forget about everything else around me; as if in a trance, I press the shutter release of the camera. The endless wait has been worthwhile, the many hardships are forgotten—and I am suffused with a feeling of indescribable happiness.

Milse's book is a compilation of beautiful images of bear mothers and cubs in the Wapusk National Park in Manitoba, home to some 1,200 den sites, the principal denning area for the bears of Hudson Bay, and the largest denning area in the world. Although most dens worldwide—such as the one filmed by Salisbury and Miles—are within a few miles of the coast, for the bears that den in Wapusk, it is a forty-mile trek to the ice of Hudson Bay.