landscaped aquarium the size of a swimming pool? Even if, in the photographs one took of it, it appeared as a yellowy dot scarcely distinguishable from its icy habitat?
The way we look at polar bears is indicative, I think, of a larger confusion, a larger and perhaps untreatable blurriness in our vision. It’s as though the more pictures we take of the world the less clearly we see it, as if our megapixelated screens weren’t windows but kaleidoscopes. Even in the perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter, Fridtjof Nansen was less confused about the meaning of polar bears than I was, standing on the bridge of the Louis at the height of the Arctic summer. In my cabin belowdecks I’d been reading both Farthest North and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, which perhaps explains at least some of my confusion.
Polar bears appear almost as frequently in Farthest North as does the eponymous whale in Moby-Dick. They sneak onto the Fram. They eviscerate sled dogs. One bites a harpooner named Peter Henriksen on the hip before Henriksen delivers a roundhouse to its noggin with an oilburning lamp. One bear Nansen encounters in the dwindling light of October he describes as “a beautiful white fellow rummaging among the flotsam on the beach,” but as darkness falls he’s less given to aesthetic appreciation and instead, understandably, to either hunger or fear. One bear he calls a “monster,” another a “demon,” another a “ghost.” Nearly every bear the mariners of the Fram meet, including the one that tasted human flesh, ends up dropping to the ice, felled by a ball, then flayed by knives, then turned into dinner and blankets. Of the execution of a mother bear by firing squad and her two cubs by a pack of sled dogs, Nansen writes, “It was a glorious slaughter, and by no means unwelcome, for we had that very day eaten the last remains of our last bear in the shape of meatcakes for dinner. The two cubs made lovely Christmas pork.”
Compare this with the chapter of Arctic Dreams, published less than a century after Farthest North, in which Barry Lopez accompanies a team of biologists hunting for Ursus maritimus on Lancaster Sound. From Lopez, we learn many wonderful ursine facts,38 but his ultimate aim is to dispel the old myths. European explorers, he notes, eventually saw in the polar bear “a curious image of themselves”—“a vaguely noble creature, wandering in a desolate landscape, saddled with melancholy thoughts”—whereas Lopez seeks to see the bear itself, and succeeds more than any writer I’ve read.
And yet, he too ends with a curiously anthropomorphic image—an image, he writes, “of vulnerability.” The biologists he’s traveling with have shot a female with a tranquilizing dart. “As I sat there,” Lopez writes, “my companions rolled the unconscious bear over on her back and I saw a trace of pink in the white fur between her legs. The lips of her vulva were swollen. Her genitalia were in size and shape like a woman’s.” Lopez, feeling like a prurient voyeur, looks away. How far we’d come since the Victorians. This anesthetized beast is no monster of God but a damsel in both estrus and distress. The polar bear, in other words, remains symbolical, and since the publication of Arctic Dreams, it has grown more symbolical still. I can’t help wondering whether vulnerable images of polar bears—usually less graphic and more sentimental than the one Lopez gives us—have become as common and therefore potentially as obfuscating as the monstrous images with which, in my mind at least, they compete.
Even in that National Geographic documentary, the portraiture of the bear kept wavering confusingly between pity and fear. As the ice diminishes, the baritone narrator informed us, so does the bear’s habitat. Less ice, fewer seals, more hungry bears eager to snack on Swedish graduate students. If that weren’t bad enough, evidence suggests that one class of toxins drifting to the Arctic (flame retardant polybrominated diphenyls) are elevating the rates of polar bear hermaphroditism. Roll a tranquilized polar bear over now and it might well be difficult to determine its sex. Whatever the sex, a polar bear is now the totem of global warming, and photographs of them—stranded on an ice floe, or swimming in open water—are in great demand, which is why the Snapper joined us on the first leg of the voyage. He shot pictures of Macdonald and Gobeil deploying their box corer, and of scientists tossing bottles from the stern (he asked me to