Arctic Dreams, page 13
There is a famous object of Dorset art—the Dorset culture flourished in the Arctic between about 500 B.C. and A.D. 1000—which archaeologists refer to as a “floating” or “flying” bear. The best-known example was found at a site called Alernerk, near the present village of Igloolik on Melville Peninsula in the eastern Canadian Arctic. It is carved from ivory, about six inches long, and dates from about A.D. 500. The bear’s head and body are streamlined, the forelegs sweeping back along the sides and the rear legs trailing. The bear appears to be gliding or flying. There is something human in the shape of the rear legs, and it is incised with a stylized skeleton, a backbone and ribs, with the cervical vertebrae and limb joints clearly marked. The underside—the chest and abdomen—is longitudinally concave, suggesting the lack of a body; and there is a tiny compartment with a sliding wood cover in the neck, which apparently once held red ocher.
The Dorset culture, particularly toward its close, may have been dominated by influential shamans who made these carvings. Dorset shamans in self-induced trances “flew away,” departing their human bodies for a spirit realm at the bottom of the sea or on the moon. Here they consulted, appeased, and cajoled on their own behalf or on behalf of their patients. They were frequently accompanied on these journeys by powerful helping spirits, and among these the polar bear was without peer. The bear helped the angakoq, or shaman, get outside his body so he could fly. (The skeleton carved on the bears is thought to emphasize this disembodied form of travel.)
One of the most interesting things about these carvings is how realistic they actually are. At first I thought they were stylized like modern Eskimo soapstone carvings. After I saw polar bears on the ice, I realized it was instead my conceptions that were stylized. Polar bears strike poses in real life that are but slightly exaggerated in Dorset and modern carvings—a reminder of the native eye, the kernels of realism that lie within seemingly exaggerated native ideas.
I once asked Ray Schweinsburg about polar bears that went down into the sea, that swam down to the bottom of the ocean with their angakoq companions. “Once,” replied Schweinsburg, “I saw a set of bear tracks that led up to the edge of a large hole in the ice, where they disappeared. There were no tracks coming out, and there was nowhere else the bear could have surfaced in that floe ice. You can easily understand the view that there are bears walking around on the bottom of the ocean.”
And if you have ever seen a polar bear swimming 30 feet below the surface in clear water, watched it stroke and glide, turn and roll down there like a sea otter, you would not wonder that bears could fly.
The artistic and philosophical evocation of the polar bear by Eskimo and pre-Eskimo cultures leads one to believe that their insight derives from a special affinity with the bear. To an extent, the Eskimo and the polar bear are alike, the lines of their successful adaptation to the Arctic being parallel. The prey of both, though not the principal prey of some Eskimo groups, is the ringed seal. Their hunting methods—waiting patiently at the aglu, various kinds of stalking—are strikingly similar. (Polar bears arrived in the Arctic ahead of the Eskimo, and it is likely Eskimos learned, or at least refined, some of their techniques by watching bears hunt.) Some groups of Eskimos move off the land and onto the sea ice in winter, like bears. And after about two weeks at a place where seal hunting is good, the area seems to be hunted out for both sorts of hunter, and they move on. Both make their living at the edge of the sea ice and along the shore. And both live with the threat of starvation if the seals disappear.
Man and bear are affected as well by the vicissitudes of a harsh climate, which seems to give each of them a discernable aura of successful endurance. Anthropologists and biologists turn to the same words to describe each: “tough,” “practical,” “tenacious,” “inventive,” “a one-time learner.” And they note a difference between the two. Bears seem occasionally to lose their temper when they are hunting. “I have seen [a polar bear] watch a seal for half a day,” wrote a traveler, and failing to catch it by any stratagem, “it roared hideously, tossing snow in the air, and trotted off.” Other observers have seen bears smash off projections of ice or smack the water repeatedly in frustration after just missing a seal. Eskimos rarely lose their temper, and almost never when they are hunting. The usual response to failure in these circumstances is laughter.
The Eskimos’ affinity for the polar bear is easy to understand from the parallels in their ecology and the similarity of their dwellings, mentioned earlier; and from knowing the esteem with which Eskimos regard a successful hunter. And from seeing a polar bear stripped of its skin, how disquietingly human its appearance is. But there is something far deeper in their involvement, for each is prey to the other.
The bear fears both the killer whale and the walrus when it is in the water, for it has no lethal leverage there. On land, it is wary of the walrus and of men, too, but it will stalk both. A hungry bear will test the resistance of either. The image of a strong, determined, cunning animal stalking them must have entered the minds of all people who felt their vulnerability out on the sea ice. Over that uneven topography the bear could draw near without ever being noticed. The fear of being hunted is vestigial in us, a dim memory from the open savannas of southern Africa. For a man waiting alone at an aglu for a seal on a winter afternoon, looking around in the half-light, alert at a subconscious and primitive level for the triggering sound of the bear’s footfall, the fear must have been palpable.
Bears approached men as though they were a kind of resting seal. Some of these encounters must have ended with a pounce, a single blow, a man dead. But some of them were finished with a seal harpoon or a knife, a bear dead of a fatal miscalculation. Of the latter, some were encounters deliberately courted, by men on the verge of manhood. These were not simply terrifying moments but moments of awe and apotheosis. These were moments that kept alive within the culture the overarching presence of a being held in fearful esteem. Tôrnârssuk, the Polar Eskimo called him, “the one who gives power.”
To encounter the bear, to meet it with your whole life, was to grapple with something personal. The confrontation occurred on a serene, deadly, and elevated plain. If you were successful you found something irreducible within yourself, like a seed. To walk away was to be alive, utterly. To be assured of your own life, the life of your kind, in a harsh land where life took insight and patience and humor. It was to touch the bear. It was a gift from the bear.
Knud Rasmussen, an arctic traveler, once asked an Eskimo man about happiness, about exhilaration, and he answered, “To come across fresh bear tracks and be ahead of all the other sledges.”
To men who grappled, instead, with abstractions of geography, with dreams of a mother lode of wealth in the New World, the bear was something else. In 1597, during that winter they saw the sun rise early, Barents and his men were frightened often by polar bears. Bears had killed two of the group the previous year, and now they seemed to prowl continuously around Barents’ winter quarters. His men watched, unnerved, as the bears dragged huge slabs of meat (from a beached whale) past them in the dusky light. On April 15, 1597, when no bears had been seen for weeks, one of the men volunteered to crawl into a den—“but not to farre,” wrote Gerrit de Veer, “for it was fearfull to behold” with hoar-frosted hairs dangling from its ceiling and its ice-covered, claw-scraped walls. De Veer’s chronicle—and a later one by Jacob van der Brugge, about a 1634 expedition to Svalbard that also suffered predation by bears—projected an image of the polar bear as a ghostly marauder. The image persisted throughout the period of arctic exploration, and was one the polar bear lent itself to. Bears loomed together suddenly in numbers on a foggy beach, like white wolves. They tore open graves and strewed the bodies about, which men found more ominous than if the bears had eaten the corpses. They entered camps boldly on their large, silent feet and, accustomed as they were to the crack and explosion of sea ice, were not startled by gunfire. Explorers who arrived at their caches to find them torn apart by bears—sacks of flour dragged off in one direction, sleeping bags in another, equipment crates smashed to kindling, food tins surgically opened with the rake of a single claw—felt violated. Those who ate bear meat indiscriminately thought they had been tricked by their victims—poisoned—when they suffered the nauseous lethargy, the crushing headaches and loss of skin and hair that came from eating the bear’s liver. Or when they developed trichinosis from eating the bear’s flesh.10
Thousands of miles from familiar surroundings, genuinely frightened, and perhaps strained by the grim conditions of shipboard life, Europeans took to killing any polar bear they saw. 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. Travelers regularly shot them from the ship’s deck, for target practice. One idle summer afternoon in 1896, a whaling captain in Amundsen Gulf with nothing else to do shot thirty-five, for sport. The curious and unaggressive bear, so easily attracted to a ship, an object cruising so oddly in the ice, time and again stepped into its own death. In 1875 the crew of a whaler was playing football on a shelf of landfast ice in thick fog next to the ship. In the middle of the game a polar bear appeared and began chasing the ball in and out among the men. The whalers fled. Such stories only confirmed some in their sense of being offended, of being trifled with in this difficult place. They shot the animals with colonial indifference.
The most disturbing and deplorable aspect of nineteenth-century encounters with polar bears was a perverse manipulation of the bond between a female and her cubs, a common amusement of sailors aboard whaling and sealing ships. William Scoresby tells of an incident involving walrus hunters who had set fire to a pile of blubber to attract bears. A female and two cubs drew near. The female settled her cubs at a short distance and then started trying to hook pieces of blubber out of the fire. The men watched from the safety of the deck as she fought with the flames. They threw her small bits of blubber, which she took to the cubs. As she approached them with the last piece, the men shot the two cubs dead. For the next half hour she “laid her paws first upon one, and then the other, and endeavored to raise them up.” She walked off and called to them, she licked their wounds. She went off again and “stood for some time moaning” before returning to paw them “with signs of inexpressible fondness.” Bored, or perhaps mortified, the men shot the female and left her on the ice with her cubs.
Sometimes a cub was taken alive, for a zoo or as a present for someone. In November 1876, a Sir Allen Young shot a female and one of her cubs from the deck of a steamship. The other cub he lassoed as a gift for the Prince of Wales.11 The cub fought wildly until it was secured with chains to ringbolts in the deck. The female was butchered and the cub wrapped in her skin in the hope of appeasing him. Three or four days later the cub succeeded in tearing free of the ringbolts. He was then placed in a small cage, where he remained for the duration of the voyage. The cub roared for hours on end and pulled at the length of chain still around his neck. He was tormented by the ship’s dog, which stole his food and bit his paws. The origin of the meat he was fed can be imagined. By the time the ship reached England, the cub lay prostrate in his cage, convulsing and panting. He died a week later. “Had he lived,” wrote Frank Buckland, reflecting the attitudes of the age, “he would, no doubt, have been an honour to his country and his race.”
These stories, of course, are from another era; but the craven taunting, the witless insensitivity, and the phony sense of adventure that propelled them are not from another age. They still afflict us. For these men, the bear had no intrinsic worth, no spiritual power of intercession, no ability to elevate human life. The circumstances of its death emphasized the breach with man. During these same years, by contrast, the killing of polar bears by Eskimos occurred in an atmosphere of respect, with implicit spiritual obligations. The dead bear, for example, was propitiated with gifts. Such an act of propitiation is sometimes dismissed as “superstition.” “Technique of awareness” would come much closer to the mark, words that remind you of what you are dealing with.
Europeans were ill at ease in the Arctic. The polar bear was for them a symbol of the implacable indifference of an inhospitable landscape. Whatever remorse they suffered over their harsh treatment of the polar bear eventually became admiration, but for a bear that was really a curious image of themselves. De Veer’s marauding ghost bear, which became an impediment to Western progress and then an amusement, a nuisance, finally became a vaguely noble creature, wandering in a desolate landscape, saddled with melancholy thoughts. A romantic, estranged, self-absorbed creature.
In the stories Eskimos tell, down to the present, the polar bear is most often cast as a helper or companion of one sort or another, like Tôrnârssuk. But he is known as Kokogiaq, too, the ten-legged or many-legged bear. One time, one winter, it seemed people who went off hunting in a certain direction never came back. What happened to them was that there was a ten-legged bear down there. When people looked over there, Kokogiaq moved his legs around a little. It looked like people walking around on the ice. So other people went down there to see them. That’s how Kokogiaq got people. Finally a man got the bear to come after him. He got him to chase him into a place in the ice where Kokogiaq couldn’t turn around. Then that man ran around and killed him from behind with his spear. When people go hunting down there now, they always come back.
The stories go like that.
Often in a story about Kokogiaq or Tôrnârssuk there is some hint not only of the bear’s biology (how that wedge-shaped body could get caught in ice where a man could slip through) but of its personality. The bear’s melancholy wandering, for example, is underscored in a Polar Eskimo story about a bear who falls in love with a young married woman. He cautions her never to tell her husband of their meetings because her husband will surely try to kill him. But she takes pity on her husband’s failures in hunting bears and tells him where her lover lives. Far away, the bear hears her whispering to her husband in the night, and he leaves his home before the husband arrives. He goes straight to the woman’s snow house. He raises his paws to smash it in—and then he lowers his paws to his side. Feeling betrayed, overcome with grief, he sets off on a long and solitary journey.
To the European mind the story is poignant. For the Eskimo it is charged with danger. For the bear to go off preoccupied with such a subject means it will not be paying attention to where it is going, that it may fall through bad ice or miss signs that will lead it to an aglu and sustenance.
A bear’s long, solitary journeys across the frozen ocean, science tells us, are not precisely what the imagination once conjectured. And now, too often, wherever they go someone is in the way. Between 1978 and 1981, eighty-four polar bears were killed in the Canadian Arctic as threats to human life. The threat is real. In 1973, a bear killed a tractor operator near Kendall Island in the Beaufort Sea. In 1975, also in the Beaufort, a bear killed a construction worker on the deck of a barge. In August 1975, a polar bear severely mauled a man in a scientific camp on Somerset Island. And at Churchill, Manitoba, bears mauled people in 1966 and 1967, and killed a boy in 1968 and a man in 1983.
The former deaths are associated with industrial development in the Arctic; the attacks at Churchill derive from a more peculiar set of circumstances. For many years, polar bears at the southern end of Hudson Bay have come ashore in late July and early August with southward-drifting ice. Females commonly den for the winter in country between the Nelson and Churchill rivers, while adult males and subadults of both sexes drift northward up the coast to the vicinity of Cape Churchill, 25 miles east of the village, where coastal ice is likely to form earliest. They remain in this vicinity, “temporarily removed from their specialized predatory niche,” as one scientist put it, throughout September and October.
This unusual staging was not discovered until the 1960s, when bears began turning up at the village of Churchill. Scientists theorize that when a Hudson’s Bay Company post at the mouth of the Nelson River closed, an American Strategic Air Command base closed, and military maneuvers ceased at Fort Churchill, all in 1957, the hunting pressure on polar bears was relieved and the population began to increase. By the mid-sixties, polar bears were turning up in large numbers at garbage fires in Churchill, frightening people. The people, in turn, began tormenting the bears by shooting them with small-caliber weapons and chasing them with cars.
In recent years, though the bear population has continued to grow, a program of warning, local education, deterrence, and management has reduced the numbers of bears killed, and there have been few attacks. Residents of Churchill now regard the bears, somewhat fondly, as a tourist attraction. Others who have visited the area find the sight of bears ominous and peculiar—some with huge dark numerals painted on their sides, some rooting in the smoke and flames of the smoldering dump, where a bear once died from trying to eat an automobile battery.
The parade of amateur and professional photographers, filmmakers, and television personnel, baiting bears with jars of mayonnaise and importuning Churchill people to assist them in staging various scenes, is unending. More than anything, Churchill represents a moment in time when an animal in a comparatively accelerated state of evolutionary development has encountered another creature evolving at a very much higher rate of change. Churchill, for the moment, is the answer to the question of what industrial development in the Arctic means—along with the thirty or so bears shot each year in northern Canada as “nuisances” and threats. The bears at Churchill, it should be observed, depart the day the ice will support their weight.
