On Being a Bear by Rmy Marion;

Author:Rmy Marion;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In a Biblical scene, children jeering Elisha are mauled by bears. “He turned around, looked at them, and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.” (2 Kings 2:24)

While bears are driven into hibernation by environmental changes, their emergence at the end of the winter is triggered by physiological changes. The first physiological factor to herald a bear’s emergence from hibernation is an increase in body temperature. Next will be a dramatic increase in heart rate, followed by a return to physical activity.

I remember seeing a bear’s den in Sweden, just a few steps away from a trail in the forest. It looked so cozy and comfortable, it almost made me want to curl up and take a nap right there and then! There were claw marks on the walls, and the ground was padded with blueberry bush branches. This bear den, like most others, was smaller than you might think: barely three feet high by about four feet deep at its longest point (about 1 by 1.2 m)—the bare minimum of space to conserve the maximum heat.

Polar bears’ dens are those I remember most vividly, and the first that springs to mind could well have been the last I ever saw. In February 1995, I was on a mission to photograph the inside of a den in Churchill, Manitoba. My guide was Moris, a man from the Cree First Nation whose father had been a trapper and polar bear hunter. We were riding our snowmobiles near the tree line to the south of the community, and the deep snow was slowing us down. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the temperature was a brisk minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit (-30°C). After several hours of searching, some spruce trees that had clearly been damaged by an animal caught Moris’s eye. We moved closer and could see the tracks of a mother bear and her cubs in the snow around the entrance to a cavity—a gaping hole in the ground less than twenty inches (50 cm) in diameter. Moris, who was admittedly still a little short on experience as a guide, was absolutely sure that the female had vacated the premises.

As I was preparing to wriggle my way headfirst into the den, something made me hesitate, and I unwittingly knocked a chunk of ice into the tunnel at my feet. This was met with a loud grunt from the packed snow below our feet. Moris and I beat a hasty retreat and jumped right onto our snowmobiles, which we had wisely left running. Observing from a safe distance, we saw a female and her two cubs emerge from the hole. The moral of the story? Check for yourself before you crawl into a bear’s den!

Some years later, with Moris as my guide once more—but after seeing the mother bear and her cubs emerge with my own eyes—I finally made my way into a polar bear den.

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