On December 6, 2005, a polar bear was born in captivity. His mother rejected him and his twin, and his twin died. The survivor was an adorable baby polar bear, but that phrase doesn’t need the initial adjective, does it? A baby polar bear is a little puffball, white with button eyes and perfect and cuddly. Zookeepers raised him. I fell in love. His name was Knut and he was a bit of an international sensation.
Knut was raised by zookeepers at the Berlin Zoo, most memorably Thomas Dörflein, a ponytailed zookeeper who fed him from a baby bottle and scratched his head. The internet filled with photos (like the one above) and videos of Knut and his keeper. Looking back, it seems this must have been early in the days of being able to watch video on the internet. I think I still had dial-up at home. It was a special event, cooing with coworkers over a tiny fluffy animal, while now you can do that any time you want on a screen in your pocket.
A few years later, I got to see Knut on a trip to Berlin. His enclosure was covered in sand and it got into his fur as he rolled and wallowed, turning him dirty yellow. Another woman about my age was there for the same reason and even said something friendly to me in German about how cute he was or something—I was embarrassed to admit that I didn’t speak German very well and laughed in an understanding way. We watched him, companionably, that famous bear across a narrow moat.
The Knut I knew from the photos and videos had gone through a kind of transformation, from puffball to massive yellow animal, from baby to adolescent, from imaginary to real. Two years ago the polar bears of my imagination underwent a similar transformation when I went to Svalbard, one of the few places where humans and polar bears overlap.
Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago at 78 degrees north, far above the Arctic circle. People who have read The Golden Compass (known as Northern Lights in the UK) know Svalbard as the place where ice bears rule, and are surprised when I tell them it’s a real place—a real kingdom of real polar bears.
It turns out that a kingdom of polar bears is not a safe place to go. Someone in your group is supposed to have a rifle and a flare gun whenever you’re outside of Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s main town. I didn’t have to learn to shoot; I was there to hang around with a posse of Norwegians who all knew how to handle a gun.
The rifle strapped on my snowmobile made the threat seem real. So had the dead, stuffed polar bear watching over the baggage claim at the airport, paws as big as my face, with lethal-looking claws. A week and a half before I arrived, a couple on the island shot and killed a polar bear that had made its way halfway into their cabin. (This is very Norwegian. Living in a small town on an island 500 miles north of northern Norway wasn’t enough; they had to have a getaway in the “country.”) Two years before that, a bear killed a British teenager when the boy emerged from his tent. When you camp in Svalbard, you set up a tripwire system, but the one this group had set up failed to go off. The bear seriously injured four other members of the group before someone managed to kill it.
Polar bears in the wild are expected to decline as sea ice gets scarce and the Arctic warms. When I entered their habitat the polar bear completed its transition from adorable puffball to deadly predator. And not just a predator of seals in some abstract ocean food web; potential predators of me.
Like those polar bears that attacked humans in Svalbard, Knut is dead, too, but not at the end of a rifle. When he was only four, he died at the zoo, probably of viral encephalitis. Now when I look back at videos of baby Knut, I see the puffball, but I also see the predator that he could have become.
I’ve still never seen a polar bear in the wild, and that is fine with me. I am happy for them to stay out on the ice, as long as there is ice for them to hunt on.
Photos: Shutterstock