travel essay: a baby polar bear

They amble toward us, unconcerned with our presence. Every so often, the mama spreads her massive form out in all directions, shifting her enormous weight over the thin ice. The baby polar bear tumbles along behind her, his large paws belying his tiny size. As far as the eye can see, the surface is a sheet of ice, dotted here and there with holes. As they pass the holes, the mama stops, sniffs, puts her front paw in the water, sniffs again, and then they move on. She repeats this every few minutes as they make their way closer to our ship.

I stand on the bow watching their progress. The baby – five or six months old or so, one of this years cubs, as we say – runs ahead and then turns back as if to say, “come on, mom, let’s go.” He’s ten feet or so in front of her, but then he stops to take a poo, his tiny-ish form hunched forward on his two front paws, wobbling just a little bit.

Onward they come, their ivory fur just a smidge darker than the snow and ice below them. Their paw prints are a visual reminder of their path – and they will remain for months. Next week, next month, maybe this same ship will come across this patch of ice and say, “oh yes, we remember being here with the two bears.” Eventually, water or snow will fill their path, erasing only their tracks, not the memories we have of them being here, in this place, at this moment.

The baby runs forward again, bumping into his mama as she stops and sniffs again. They’re hunting, looking for seal at the water holes. Mama turns, the baby rolls on to his back, and they are playful for a minute. Her mouth is open wide, clearly showing us her large teeth, so very capable of ripping any of us to shreds, as she playfully nips at her offspring. It’s endearing; this massive, dangerous creature has maternal instincts just like any other mother. Onward, now.

Just below the hull, maybe thirty feet off, they stop. The baby keeps looking at us, and I zoom out with my camera (as far as I can) to show how close they really are. Mama goes on, crossing in front of our ice-held hull, but the baby stops. He wobbles a bit on three paws and then he stands up. A collective gasp, combined with the sound of a hundred and fifty cameras clicking away, goes up from us onboard. I zoom in, catching the way he crosses his paws in front of his chest, the way his little snub nose is lifted up in the air, the three little black dots on his snout, and his coal black eyes boring into mine.

After just a minute, or maybe it was less  –  to me, it was suspended in time  –  he drops down, not moving his eyes from our mysterious shape. One can only image what we look like from down there. He totters after his mother, toward the water line, a quarter mile or so away from us. Further away is a mound of snow, and he runs up the side of it, only to slip and fall down the far side of it seconds later. We giggle out loud, and a minute later his small form is visible once again on the top of the mound.

People begin to move around me, heading back toward dinner, dessert, post-dinner drinks, their voices now louder than a whisper. I stay, and so does the ship, watching the world’s most dangerous land predator move back into the inner Spitsbergen, into the ice, away from the water line and away from us.