Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America (10 page)

When the two bears approached, Wandee and I had agreed it was unwise to wake her. We were only four hours into at least an eight-hour day, and—to be honest—I never quite appreciated the magical appeal of staring into the eyes of a polar bear at close range anyway. It only reminded me of the artificiality of the situation in Churchill, the kind of reverse zoo that the tundra has become. It’s the tourists, confined to a buggy, that depend on the polar bears to approach and interact with them. And if none do, many buggy drivers told me, it’s the tourists who get bored or sometimes even insolent, griping on the ride home and stiffing their driver on tips. To me, the most moving part was always when a bear was done investigating the buggy and turned around and padded away, and how it kept getting smaller and smaller, swallowed by the endless negative space around it.

When Isla woke, I tried to explain what had happened outside. She pulled herself up to the window but could stare only at the vacant snow and ice. Sam was nice enough to show her the video he’d taken of the mother and yearling’s stand-off; for Isla, in other words, it wound up being just another digital video clip. She watched with blank eyes. But when, on the screen of Sam’s camera, the female huffed and the yearling trotted away—its head turned, its legs quickening into a momentary gambol—Isla seemed to experience that shock of recognition again. She looked at Sam, then at her mother and me, and said, very confidently, “Horses do that.”

In retrospect, what I remember most about our day on the tundra is an overwhelming feeling of relief—how struck I was that Isla was actually enjoying herself. I’d been focused on what the experience might come to mean for her years or decades later, as though it were a financial investment or a vaccination. I’d forgotten that watching polar bears could be fun.

We’d been in Churchill together for a couple of days already, and so much of what Isla was encountering there was spectacularly new to her: walking on snow, sliding on ice, shooting down the tremendous polar-bear-shaped slide in the town’s recreation center; the hilarious rustle that her snowsuit made when she ran back and forth down our hotel hallway. And she still seemed to have no saturation point—for her, newness never got old. In the last moments of our Tundra Buggy tour, we pulled alongside a small bear, slogging toward us from the middle distance. Isla leaned out of Wandee’s arms and through the window. Then she turned to me and said, “Look, Daddy! Polar bear!” as though it were still surprising, as though the only two words she had for that thing still needed to be said out loud.

THE LIFT

A
fter we got home to San Francisco, I got an e-mail from Daniel J. Cox, an accomplished photographer who’s been going to Churchill to shoot polar bears for twenty years and now volunteers for Polar Bears International as their in-house photographer every bear season.

Cox had been on a buggy with a tour for wildlife photographers when they came across a distressingly gaunt female polar bear fidgeting behind a snowbank. The temperature had finally dropped, and the wind was flaring, and this particular bear, without much fat left on her for insulation, was struggling to find a comfortable resting position. Her movements were erratic. Her shoulder blades arced above her head like a wishbone.

There was still no ice on Hudson Bay. The bears had come onto land that summer between late June and mid-July. They ultimately wouldn’t get back on the ice until around December 4, having spent as long as 162 days on land, or forty more days than what used to be considered normal, and maybe far longer than many cubs would be equipped to last. It was shaping up to be the sort of potentially cataclysmic off-year that the biologist Andrew Derocher had warned me about.

As Cox and his group watched, another, fitter polar bear approached the withered female. The female labored to ratchet herself onto her feet and eventually scuttled out of the snowbank to charge it and scare it away. As she did, the twin cubs clustered under her body for warmth came into view for the first time.

One of the cubs rose to look around. Its face was lithe and fluffy; it looked more like a wolf pup than a bear. It started to lean backward strangely, like a tree bending in a wind. Then its face and mouth twitched. Then the twitching radiated into the rest of its body and intensified. The cub was seizing up—convulsing in what veterinarians later assessed to be the last phases of starvation. As it shook, the mother sat stoically beside it, swiveling her neck back and forth, scanning the tundra. The cub died shortly after. Its sibling died two days after that.

Cox was e-mailing me a short video of the episode that he’d filmed and posted online. The footage seemed to have the potential to go viral and become iconic, a concise and transfixing scene of the violence of climate change, which is otherwise slow and abstract. Cox had put in a title card, explaining that, although science could never link the starvation of these two specific cubs to climate change, this was exactly what biologists expected to see more often. And he tricked out the scene with some acoustic guitar and cello music: This made it even more sorrowful without tipping into melodrama.

I’d read in many scientific papers about increased rates of starvation among cubs. But seeing a cub spasm and stagger through its last moments is a different experience, of course. Watching the video felt incriminating in the most paradoxical way: I felt unsettled by how much power our species is wielding on the planet, and I also felt powerless. In a way, the video represented the conclusion of the same story the teddy bear helped tell back in 1902: now, finally, society’s reach has expanded all the way to the top of the world and demeaned even the most remote and mightiest bears.

Still, some people who watched the video asked a question that hadn’t occurred to me: why hadn’t Cox put down his camera and called in wildlife officials to feed the cubs, or even chucked out some of the tour group’s hamburger meat? Some saw the video as an exploitative snuff film. It played right into the cynicism I’d encountered in Churchill about the motives of modern polar bear conservation—the suspicion that it’s all empty PR. I’d come to realize that people in Churchill cared just as passionately about the species as anyone in Polar Bears International does. But if you refuse to accept the premise of climate change, as they did, then you also reject the idea that the survival of polar bears hinges on influencing some opaque emotional calculus of far-flung SUV drivers and politicians and the size of their carbon footprints. You believe, instead, that the survival of polar bears depends on
the survival of polar bears
—the physical welfare of the individual animals on the land. Dan Cox believed his footage could help polar bears. But you had to make a certain mental leap to see it that way. In the simplest terms, it was a video of him
not
helping polar bears.

Nasty comments proliferated online. Some people were angry. (“Shame on you, Mr. Cox, shame on you!”) But some seemed only to feel betrayed, unsure what exactly they, as donors to Polar Bears International, were supporting. “Your agency is out there to help and protect these magnificent animals,” one person wrote. (Cox had posted the video on his own Web site, but his affiliation with PBI is well-known.) One way for people to contribute to PBI is by “adopting a polar bear cub.” And though it is only a “symbolic adoption”—for $100, you get an adoption certificate, a tote bag, and a gourmet white-chocolate polar bear—it was hard to reconcile that messaging with what they saw in the video.

Cox wrote a response, and leading bear biologists lined up to defend him, noting, for starters, that feeding bears is illegal, and that the cub was in such poor condition that it was likely to die regardless. But they most of all stressed that feeding individual bears would only put a Band-Aid on the problem of climate change—it missed the point. Robert Buchanan told me that the reactions he saw were indicative of a knee-jerk, “bunny-hugging” attitude that, frankly, he can’t stand. Here were folks who burn a disproportionate share of the world’s fossil fuels feeling self-righteous about polar bears. “They’re killing polar bears from the comfort of their easy chairs,” Robert told me. “Excuse my expression, but fuck ’em.”

There’s no accounting for the polar bear’s magnetism. The bear seems to have evolved to wrench out human emotion as efficiently as it evolved to rip ringed seals out of the ice. Robert was betting the species’ survival on that appeal. He believed that that emotional connection could be enlarged and channeled into action. But the empathy that Cox’s video generated almost seemed to be too much—too raw and unwieldy to be channeled into anything.

To me, the starvation video hinted at a bigger problem: that, maybe, this approach to polar bear conservation was reaching its breaking point. The polar bear had been useful as a pure white, cuddly harbinger of horrible things—a victim of climate change at just the right remove from our own species to be palatable and approachable and inspire us to change. Until now, working to save polar bears and working to stop climate change have meant the same thing. But they’re starting to diverge. The lives of the actual polar bears in Churchill—the most visible polar bears in the world—will become increasingly grim. Cubs will starve or be cannibalized, and a greater number of worn-down animals will crowd into the viewing area waiting for ice. If we choose to help them survive, it will require a kind of narrow, hands-on management—like getting out there and feeding them meat—that does nothing to stall climate change. Meanwhile, conservationists will have to work hard and more inventively to spin the animals’ worsening predicament in the same inspiring terms, without seeming dishonest or oblivious.

—

T
HE LIFT HAPPENED
on a Friday afternoon. Not far from the Churchill airport, a crowd formed outside a huge Quonset hut left over from the military days. Yellow caution tape was strung along the roadside, and tourists gathered behind it, a hundred yards away, as more school buses pulled over to park, their flanks and windows discolored by a crust of dust and frost.

The Quonset hut, known as D-20, has been turned into what Manitoba’s provincial conservation agency calls a “polar bear holding compound,” though nearly every reporter who comes to town prefers the phrase “polar bear jail.” It’s the centerpiece of the government’s Polar Bear Alert Program, a protocol for handling bears that wander into Churchill in the months before freeze-up. The program was put in place in the early eighties, partly in response to the mauling of Tommy Mutanen. Sightings of bears in town are reported to the agency through a hotline—675-BEAR—and bear patrol officers respond to haze it with pyrotechnics and noise-making shotgun shells or chase it back onto the tundra with their trucks.

Any bear that can’t be chased away is drugged and transferred to one of the twenty-eight cells inside D-20. It’s held there for about a month and not fed during that time, so it won’t connect sneaking into Churchill with being rewarded with food. At the end of its sentence, if Hudson Bay still hasn’t frozen over, the bear is drugged again, airlifted by helicopter, and released north of town, closer to where the ice first forms. The idea is to dissuade bears from entering town again. Once a bear becomes comfortable mingling with humans, there is usually no choice but to shoot it. There were nine polar bears inside D-20 that afternoon. If you put your head close to the building’s corrugated side, you could occasionally hear them growling. Soon there would be eight.

A school bus pulled up around the back side of D-20. There was a kind of VIP section there, with Robert Buchanan and his people milling around in their matching blue Polar Bears International parkas. Martha Stewart’s crew was there, too. Now off the bus came another group of dignitaries: the Canadian chapter of the World Wildlife Fund had arranged a trip to Churchill for some of its corporate partners, including a cohort of young executives from Coca-Cola, which has used polar bears in its commercials since the nineties. The World Wildlife Fund and PBI were actually paying for this afternoon’s bear airlift from D-20. The government was grateful for the help in exchange for doing the lift at a certain time and allowing all these guests to watch the spectacle up close, and Martha’s crew to film it. (PBI was also making its own educational film, which would be distributed to zoos and aquariums.) While we waited for the lift to start, I chatted with Steven Amstrup, Polar Bears International’s senior scientist, and soon Martha’s producer—the same raspy fellow from that afternoon on Buggy One—came to Amstrup with a question. The producer kept hearing people call polar bears the “world’s largest land carnivore,” and he wanted to know if that was true. Were they bigger than the Kodiak bears in Alaska?

Amstrup explained that polar bears are equal in size to Kodiak bears, which are the world’s largest brown bears.

“So,” the producer said, “can Martha say ‘world’s largest land carnivore’?”

“Well,” Amstrup began again, “I’d like to correct that.” Polar bears are actually classified as marine mammals, he said, since they spend most of their time on sea ice. But the polar bear certainly isn’t the largest predatory marine mammal. That would be the orca.

The producer thought a second. He didn’t know what to do with that information.

In the end, Amstrup and other PBI higher-ups would describe the segment that Martha produced as among the most solidly reported and properly messaged media pieces they’d collaborated on. (In an in-studio segment of the episode, while preparing a baked Alaska with the comedian Andy Samberg—the theme of the show was “Cold”—Martha even wore the blue Polar Bears International parka that the staff had given her, which, everyone had noticed, she declined to wear in Churchill.) Even now, outside D-20, there were signs that PBI and the television crew were starting to understand each other better.

“What do you want to call them?” the producer finally asked Amstrup.

Amstrup thought a second. “I like to say, ‘Polar bears are the world’s largest nonaquatic predators,’” he said, though he seemed to understand that it didn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

The producer smiled good-naturedly. “We’ll see if she’ll say that,” he said, and walked away.

—

I
T BEGAN WITH A HELICOPTER
landing right in front of us, a hundred feet from the D-20’s open door. A man in a reflective vest hustled out and hitched a fluorescent orange cable connected to the chopper’s undercarriage to the pile of black netting on the ground.

Then out of the Quonset hut came a small ATV, towing a plywood flatbed. The tranquilized polar bear was on it, flat on its belly, positioned to face backward, so that the ATV didn’t blow exhaust in its face. Its fur was yellowing and crimped in places. Its huge muzzle was black with dirt. Two wildlife officers walked on either side of the bear in uniform, holding shotguns, like security guards or pallbearers.

When they reached the netting, the ATV driver climbed down. Then the three officers together lifted the plywood from its base. One cradled the polar bear’s neck in his arms, as an EMT would, and they spilled the animal onto the netting. It was on its back now. Its left paw had landed across its chest, in the posture of a drunken uncle after Thanksgiving dinner.

Behind the yellow tape, every tourist was holding a camera. There was something ritualistic about the scene—the way no one watching or participating in it said a word, yet all the players knew their parts. It was a ceremony of our saving a polar bear, or at least going out of our way to coexist with it peacefully and not kill it when it encroached on our turf. One PBI volunteer later told me that she’s cried at bear lifts in the past. The tears were partly because it’s difficult to see an animal laid out and drugged and partly because she was just so happy. “I am saving a bear that, in earlier years, would have been shot,” she explained. Here, really, was a metaphor for everything I’d seen in Churchill: the polar bear placed like a slack white prop in the center of a crowd that longed to do right by it, that was so impressed by the animal and cared so much that it could scarcely comprehend what to do with that concern.

Soon the helicopter’s propeller churned again. The men came hurrying out of the noise toward the crowd. They were motioning at us with their arms. Their mouths were saying, “Stand back.”

The chopper rose. The orange cable underneath it unwound and straightened. Then the edges of the netting began to lift. The furry shape inside folded in on itself, head and legs cradling toward the center. The bear contracted into a U. And then—impossibly—the entire package was off the ground, rising ten, then twenty-five feet in the air. The helicopter soared over the nearby power lines and kept climbing. The bear twirled slightly like a tea bag beneath it.