The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World by Safina Carl

Author:Safina, Carl [Safina, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2011-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

Behind its cloudy veil, the sun never grazes the horizon, never alludes to night. Only a smudge of dusk marks the days. In the Arctic summer, one feels little need of sleep. So we sleep briefly. Before sleeping we rounded Sørkapp, the southern cape of Spitsbergen. We are south of the island of Edgeøya, in the Barents Sea, headed basically north.

It’s a different realm, an ocean two-thirds ice. The rhythmic rocking and whoosh of water is replaced by the thud and grind of ice along the hull. The normal pattern of bright sky and dark water is inverted; under a pewter sky, we travel a sea bright with the reflective dazzle of broken pack ice stretching miles and miles.

Even here, in the harshness of Dante’s ninth circle of hell, life abounds. A halo of kittiwakes and fulmars continue to seek some harvest from the furrow of our churning propellers. Guillemots, like ducks in tuxes, paddle between ice plates. An immaculate Ivory Gull comes floating into view, briefly ghosting by—and then is gone. One lone Walrus, a large male weighing perhaps three thousand pounds, is napping on a berg. His size and his astounding white daggers afford him peaceful sleep in the realm of the ice bear.

* * *

A crimson stain on distant ice. I raise my binoculars.

Like binary stars gripped in each other’s gravity, two massive bears, burning white-hot in the vast freeze, attend their kill.

One engorged bear continues pulling listlessly at the well-worked wrack of bloody bones and bits. The other has just plopped down in satiated stupor a few paces away. His face looks dipped in crimson paint. Three hundred yards away, a third bear, much smaller, much whiter, rests on a blocky floe. It may also have smelled the kill from afar and come for scraps, waiting for the bigger and more dangerous bears to take their fill and—I’m sure—to leave.

The bear that has been pulling at the carcass decides to slip into the water and begins paddling away like an enormous white beaver. A small galaxy of orbiting Ivory and Glaucous Gulls waste not a moment squabbling onto the smear and frame that was a seal.

About 200,000 years ago off Siberia or Alaska, advancing ice sheets forced Brown Bears to venture far onto sea ice. They found Ringed Seals, and no competition. Killing Ringed Seals on a frozen ocean was an extreme new niche. And here is the resulting extreme new bear: Ursus maritimus, the “sea bear,” in its true realm.

A Polar Bear is designed for two constants: hunting and heating. Its translucent white camouflage is merely its most obvious adaptation. Beneath their shaggy, hollow guard hairs, Polar Bears are insulated by dense underwool. Under that fur, beneath their black skin, lies thick blubber. For pulling seals from ice holes, for swimming, and for stalking prey where there’s nowhere to hide, the whole bear is elongated. Long neck. Flattened head. The big shoulder hump of other bears—gone. Their canine teeth are long, stabbing daggers, and their “molars” are sharpened for a diet that’s almost 100 percent meat.

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