photos and story © 2001 Doug Plummer
no use without authorization
A restless night. The ocean swell wakes me with mild alarm, as the boat rolls severely. It rocks me from side to side of the bunk, and I am glad to have put my laptop in a drawer. The next time I wake is to a generalized crash and shudder through the hull. I look out the porthole and the ocean is white. Polygonal wedges of ice stretch to the horizon and we are breaking through it. When I wake again we are in a fog and a still sea.
The polar bear has been elusive. All yesterday morning we cruised an area where they are known to occur. There were many tracks, but no bear. This morning we are near some islands, and walrus are sighted at a distance. A zodiac sets out with trip leaders, but they decide that because of the fog it is too dangerous to explore.
The sky lifts, at last. The ship shoves aside or crunches through pancake sea ice, white polygons outlined by opaque black water. One floe that passes directly under starboard has a straight line of huge polar bear prints.
I see him first. A yellowish, white shape, impossibly far away, but it is moving. It has legs. "I have a bear," I say quietly. Then louder, more confident of my sighting, "Bear! There, under the mountain that looks like Gilbrater, go left."
As the ship maneuvers closer, we see that there is a second bear, laying on another ice floe. Gulls are in the air around it. The first bear is making a beeline toward what is probably a kill. It walks straightaway off the ice, into the ocean, and swims.
As the new bear approaches, the one on the carcass slips into the water and swims away. Our ship parks just off the floe and we watch the interloper, unconcerned about us, tear the skin off the seal and gnaw on the fat layer underneath. It is a large carcass, that of a Bearded Seal. Entrails lay neatly coiled on the snow. Ivory and Glaucous Gulls dash in to forage on the edges, and fifty more birds wait in the water for their turn.
This is as good as it gets. Wayne Lynch, who has probably spent more time in more places with Polar Bears than anyone else living, has never photographed a bear on a carcass with anything less than an 860mm lens. I could shoot this one with my wide-angle panoramic camera. The captain moves the boat around the back side of the floe, and we shoot the bear from a different angle.
After a couple of hours (this bear wasn’t going anywhere), we back off for a belated dinner. It is Fourth of July. The Russian staff has prepared an American barbecue on the back deck. There are ribs and drumsticks, potato salad and cole slaw and wine. The picnickers are encased in arctic clothing. We graze our meal and we watch the bear gnaw his in the low sun. Eventually the satiated bear walks away from the carcass, swims to the shorefast ice, and wanders off.
Then we party. Beegees, Spice Girls and Russian pop music. We dance, vodka is drunk. I swing-dance with all comers. We form a circle, and improvise a group dance. For the first time this trip, I feel warm.
