The Loneliest Polar Bear
Copyright © 2021 by Kale Williams
Map copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey L. Ward
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
The author owes a great debt of thanks to Oregonian Media Group, which published “The Loneliest Polar Bear” in its original form in October 2017.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Williams, Kale, author.
Title: The loneliest Polar bear / Kale Williams.
Description: First edition. | New York : Crown, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020049765 (print) | LCCN 2020049766 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984826336 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984826343 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Polar bear—Ohio—Biography. | Polar bear—Infancy. | Human-animal relationships. | Zoos—Ohio—Powell.
Classification: LCC SF408.6.P64 W55 2021 (print) | LCC SF408.6.P64 (ebook) | DDC 599.78609771—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049765
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049766
Ebook ISBN 9781984826343
crownpublishing.com
Title page art from an original photograph by Dave Killen © Oregonian Media Group.
Cover design: Donna Cheng
Cover image: Dave Killen, The Oregonian/OregonLive
ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Map
Chapter 1: Abandoned
Chapter 2: A Fateful Hunt
Chapter 3: First Feeding
Chapter 4: The Bear
Chapter 5: Signs of Trouble
Chapter 6: When Death Came by Dogsled
Chapter 7: Milestones
Chapter 8: Farewell
Chapter 9: Tasul
Chapter 10: Adaptation
Chapter 11: Arrival
Chapter 12: Sinking into the Sea
Chapter 13: Alone Again
Chapter 14: The Last Skin Boat
Chapter 15: Another Hurdle
Chapter 16: On the Edge of a Warming World
Chapter 17: Home, for Now
Chapter 18: Broken
Chapter 19: A Risky Repair
Chapter 20: Nora’s Keepers
Photo Insert
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Chapter 1
Abandoned
She weighed scarcely more than a pound, roughly the size of a squirrel. Her eyes and ears were fused shut. Her only sense of the world around her came from smell, and her nose led her in one direction: toward the gravity and heat of her mother, a six-hundred-pound polar bear named Aurora.
Their den was made of cinder block, painted white and illuminated by a single red bulb in the ceiling. The floor was piled high with straw. The air, heavy with captive musk and kept artificially cool to mimic the Arctic, was pierced periodically by the cries of Nora, a pink-and-white wriggling ball of polar bear, tucked into the folds of her mother’s fur.
The tiny cub slept a lot, waking only to nurse, which she did greedily and often, with a soft whir that sounded like a tiny outboard motor. She suckled even in her sleep, her curled tongue lapping at the air.
Around nine o’clock on the morning of Nora’s sixth day, Aurora rose, stretched, and ambled out of the den. The cub was completely reliant on her mom, alone and vulnerable without her. As the chilly air crept in around her, Nora cast her head from side to side, screeching as she searched for something familiar, something warm. When she found no answer to her cries, she began to wail.
Outside the denning compound, three women monitored what was happening. Zoo veterinarian Priya Bapodra peered at a grainy, red video—a live feed from inside the polar bear den—as a pixelated Nora squirmed on the screen in front of her. Zookeeper Devon Sabo took notes. Carrie Pratt, a curator, looked on. For five days, the women had worked in rotating shifts, keeping a twenty-four-hour watch on Nora, craning their necks to discern what was happening on the video monitors and pressing headphones to their ears, listening for any signs of distress.
When Nora was born, on November 6, 2015, she was the first polar bear cub to live more than a few days at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, which had opened in 1927. The den where she spent her first days was nothing like where she would have been raised in the wild, but it was as close as humans could muster in the suburbs of central Ohio. Nora’s birth in that concrete den represented all the ways humans and polar bears were inextricably tangled—for better and for worse. To some, Nora would become the wild north made approachable, an ambassador for a species few would ever see in the wild. To others, she was the physical embodiment of the political battle over whether humans were causing irreparable harm to the planet, a question settled by science long before her birth. Whether she liked it or not, she and her species had become the sad-eyed face of climate change. She represented the damage humans had done to the earth, and she offered the thinnest hope of setting things right.
But to the keepers in the trailer, she was not an ambassador or a symbol. Nora was a helpless cub who was in peril.
And so, at 8:55 a.m., as Aurora took one step away from Nora and then another, the women steeled their nerves and tried to stay calm. Aurora had left Nora alone before, but only for brief periods. In the wild, a mother polar bear never leaves the den, even to eat. The eight-year-old mother wandered down a hallway, past the food her keepers had left for her, and toward the other side of the enclosure. Sabo made a note in the log:
“Aurora gets up and goes into pool room.”
Soon after, phones around the zoo buzzed. An alert went out over a text message thread to the rest of the animal care team, letting them know something was amiss. Ten minutes passed. Maternal instincts are innate in animals, but Aurora appeared conflicted.
Bapodra kept an eye on the clock. Twenty minutes now.
As the time ticked by, the tension in the trailer grew. Nora’s cries reminded the keepers of their own children, only louder and more urgent. As long as her vocals were strong, they were willing to wait.
Most polar bear cubs born in captivity live less than a month. Only about a third survive to adulthood. When keepers are forced to raise the cubs themselves, the odds are worse. Cubs can’t regulate their temperature on their own. Without their mothers, they succumb to disease and infection. They suffer from malnutrition and bone issues because their mother’s milk is impossible to replicate. The keepers knew all that when they created Aurora’s birth plan, drafted long before she went into labor. The twenty-three-page document was kept in a binder in the denning compound, and each member of the team had a copy on their phone. The plan accounted for all conceivable scenarios, including pulling a cub from its mother. “It will not be possible to return the cubs to the female when their condition improves or they have been stabilized, as she will not accept them,” the plan read.
The women in the trailer knew that if they stepped in to help Nora, there would be no going back. The responsibility of raising the helpless cub would fall to them. Between them, the women had decades of experience hand-raising jungle cats, livestock, and primates. But none of them had ever raised a polar bear. There were only a handful of people in the world who had even tried.
At the one-hour mark, something had to be done. Sabo went into the compound, carrying more straw to coax the wandering mom back to her cub. She walked along the narrow path called the keepers’ alley and quietly dropped the straw next to the den where Nora lay crying.
Aurora didn’t respond.
Another hour went by and Sabo went into the denning compound again. This time she brought fish. On the text thread, Sabo relayed what was happening. Soon, other keepers showed up to watch. Questions swirled in their heads. Could something have driven Aurora from the den? What else could they do to encourage her to return? How long should they wait?
Three hours had gone by, and now the keepers gave Aurora a deadline: one more hour. If Nora appeared to weaken, they would swoop in sooner. None of them wanted to raise Nora themselves. Her odds would plummet the instant they plucked her from the den. But they didn’t want to stand by and watch her die, either. Left alone, her odds were zero. They grabbed a plastic bin and lined it with heated water bottles and blankets. Without her mother’s warmth, Nora had to be getting cold.
At 12:43 p.m., almost four hours after Aurora left the den, Nora’s cries weakened ever so slightly, and she looked sluggish. It was November 12, Bapodra’s birthday, and the veterinarian had plans with her husband that night. She called and told him to put the plans on hold.
It was time.
* * *
—
A little less than half a million years before Nora was born, the earth was going through a significant warming period.
It was hot enough that part of the Antarctic ice sheet collapsed and sea levels rose dramatically, in
some places more than sixty feet higher than they are today. Sea surface temperatures rose, too, and coral flourished in balmy shallow ocean waters. The ice sheet that covers Greenland receded, and boreal forests took root on the shores of the usually frigid island. A band of brown bears migrated north, taking up residence in these forests and in similar places around the Arctic, colonizing northern latitudes normally off-limits to them.
And then, roughly 400,000 years ago, the climate changed again. Temperatures dropped, glaciers re-formed, and the northern brown bears were cut off from their southern counterparts. The evolutionary tree split and a new species was born: the polar bear.
At least that’s one theory. Others place the polar bear’s divergence from the brown bear (known colloquially as the grizzly) at four to five million years ago. Some say it happened more recently, within the past 200,000 to 300,000 years. Polar bears are still so closely related to brown bears that it’s possible for them to interbreed, and they have done so many times over their evolutionary arc, especially when a warm climate has allowed the two species’ ranges to overlap. (Recent documentation of these interbred bears birthed the term “pizzly,” a polar bear–grizzly hybrid that sports a beige coat.)
That interbreeding, the mixing of DNA from the two species, is one reason the exact timing of the evolutionary split remains elusive, and there are few ancient polar bear fossils from which to draw conclusions. However long they’ve been around, though, polar bears must have managed to rapidly specialize in order to survive in the harsh conditions of the Arctic.
Over generations, as forests gave way to snowy tundra, lighter-colored brown bears found themselves with better camouflage than their darker cousins. As a result, they were better hunters and reproduced more successfully, passing their lighter-furred genetic code on to their offspring until the entire species was white. Eventually, polar bears would have two layers of fur: an outer coat of clear hairs with hollow cores, which provide excellent insulation, and a dense inner layer of shorter hair. Their ears shrank to conserve heat. Their paws grew larger to provide better traction on snow and ice, and webbing formed between their toes to help them swim. Fat grew in a thick layer beneath their skin and enshrouded their organs, to fight off the bitter cold.
Their diets changed, too. Where the brown bear mostly ate grass, fruit, insects, and the occasional fish, the polar bear’s diet would come to consist almost entirely of blubber-laden animals from the ocean. Polar bears are opportunistic hunters, eating whatever they can catch easily, including walrus and small whales. But they have historically relied on seals for food. Seal blubber was the only food dense enough in calories and plentiful enough in Arctic waters to support an animal that can grow to 1,700 pounds, up to half of which can be fat. And so polar bears came to bring the full measure of their cunning, patience, and brute strength to hunt their main prey. Their sense of smell became so powerful that they could locate seals through feet of ice. They learned to locate the air holes seals use to breathe, and wait. They learned that sometimes that wait could last for days. When the seal surfaced, the bear learned to plunge its long neck into the water, haul out the seal, and crush its skull.
A diet so rich in fat would prove fatal to humans, but polar bears persist, even thrive, with extremely high levels of cholesterol. As their hair changed color and their paws got bigger, their genes changed, too. Polar bears gained the ability to metabolize vast amounts of fat without clogging their arteries, taking it out of the bloodstream and storing it for insulation. But to get the fat they need, polar bears need seals. To get seals, they need ice.
Since they diverged from their brown cousins, polar bears have ranged across the Arctic, from the icy shores of the islands in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago to the far reaches of northern Russia to the frozen coast of Alaska. As those places see ice cover diminish, polar bears have less access to their main food source, and nutrition plays an integral role in reproduction. Mother bears generally give birth in December and January, and new moms spend the next several months rearing their cubs in dens before they’re ready for exposure to the outside world. Adult bears mature late, have few litters, and expend a great amount of time and energy raising their young. Without proper nutrition, females lose weight and give birth to fewer, weaker cubs. Sickly cubs are less likely to survive, so as ice disappears, so too does the polar bear.
Given the threats their wild counterparts are facing, zoos are particularly invested in the survival of captive bears. Nora was one of only two surviving cubs born in the United States in 2015. A twin brother had lived less than two days and died with an empty stomach. Zookeepers believe he never tasted his mother’s milk.
Every cub—wild or captive—shoulders a share of the burden of a species in peril. That burden weighed heavily on Nora and her keepers as they tried to figure out what to do with the abandoned cub.
* * *
—
Devon Sabo was the first to enter the polar bear compound. Nora was alone in the den, bathed in red light. Aurora, her mom, had left the small room and wandered toward another room on the other side of the denning compound. The keepers, who had been watching a live video feed from a trailer next to the building, knew this was their chance to act.
Sabo went to the far side of the denning compound with a plate of smelt, one of Aurora’s favorite snacks. She grabbed a fish with a pair of tongs and called Aurora. She was distracting the bear so Aurora wouldn’t notice as the door slid shut behind her.
Curator Carrie Pratt came in next. Moving slowly, she quietly secured the door with a padlock. As it clicked into place, any remaining bond between Nora and her mother was severed.
Chapter 2
A Fateful Hunt
Nearly twenty-eight years before Nora’s birth and 3,615 miles to the northwest, Gene Rex Agnaboogok set out from his house on the edge of the Inupiat village of Wales, the westernmost community on the North American continent.
He packed only what he needed: warm clothes, a rifle, cigarettes, and coffee, as well as extra gas and food in case he got stuck. It was late in March, but the temperature was still well below zero, and sea ice stretched far out into the Bering Strait. Heading out alone, he knew there would be no one to help him if something went wrong.
He gunned the engine on his snowmobile and cruised along the waterfront, past the remnants of traditional houses built of sod and newly assembled constructions of wood and steel, past the tall cross sticking out of the snow-covered dunes that marked the spot where hundreds of his ancestors were buried. Heading northeast, Agnaboogok was soon in untouched country. On his right, a vast lagoon sat frozen and unmoving. To his left, in the middle of the strait, the Diomede Islands marked the International Date Line and the border between the United States and Russia. It was a clear day, and beyond the islands, Agnaboogok caught glimpses of the Siberian coast.
Three hours into the hunt, Agnaboogok had come up empty. The stereotypes of the north—cold, empty, and barren—were proving correct. Agnaboogok hadn’t seen more than a passing fox in the distance, too far to get a shot off and too small to warrant chasing down. Then, just before 11 a.m., he found prints so large they could come from only one animal. An adult polar bear could feed several families for weeks. Agnaboogok followed the plodding tracks away from the coastline and out onto the Bering Strait.
Close to shore, four-foot waves of ice sat frozen in time—a rough, unmoving sea. Wind whipped around the cape, picking up snow and piling it in drifts. Agnaboogok’s snowmobile bumped along over the ice until the sea stretched flat for hundreds of yards. There, where the ice had been blown smooth, Agnaboogok lost the bear’s tracks. He throttled back the engine. Now nearly a mile from shore, he needed to regroup.
He was close to the edge of what is known as fast ice, sheets that are fixed to the mainland, and at the foot of a pressure ridge. Currents in the strait, where the Pacific and Arctic oceans mix and swirl, had stacked icebergs up into towers, three or four stories tall, that stretched in a line parallel to the shore. Beyond the ridge, broken ice and ocean. Agnaboogok picked the tallest iceberg and hiked up to get a better view. He pulled a Marlboro Light from his shirt pocket and sipped coffee from his thermos, scanning the landscape with binoculars for anything he could hunt.