Night Season

It was seven in the morning when I emerged from my tent. Morning was a relative term, as in this part of Alaska the sun barely rose above the horizon in winter. It was cold enough that the moisture in my breath crackled in the air, practically freezing as I exhaled.

I turned on our portable gas stove to get some coffee boiling. Jack came out of his tent a few minutes later and gave me one of his packets of MRE rations. We ate quickly before they could freeze.

“Think we’ll see him today?” Jack asked.

“I hope so. The sooner we get in out of this cold the better.”

The him in question was a certain juvenile polar bear, nicknamed “Otto”. He was one of the radio tagged bears the university had been studying, and a few weeks ago his signal had gone dark. They sent us out to see if we could find him.

“I’m thinking we should try that ridge to the west today,” Jack said. “Even if he’s not there, we might be able to spot him from the top.”

I nodded. Actually, the chance of spotting a white bear at any distance in all this snow was virtually nil, but it was as good a place to look as any. We cleaned up our campsite and set off trudging through the snow in our snowshoes.

Luckily the wind was fairly light, which made traveling a bit easier. It took us an hour to make it to the ridge, then we started climbing. Soon we were panting with the effort. It was a good three hundred yards to the top, and steep enough it took all our concentration to keep from sliding back down. We were just over halfway up when I noticed something odd off to our left. It was a red blotch that stood out in all the white. I pointed it out to Jack, and we headed over.

We climbed up to the spot and stood staring. It was Otto, or what was left of him. We could see the smashed radio collar amidst the eviscerated carcass. It looked like he’d been torn open with a chain saw.

“What could do this to a polar bear?” I asked.

“I’m thinking a bigger polar bear,” said Jack in a strained voice. I turned to look at him, and saw his eyes were fixed on the top of the ridge. I followed his gaze and saw it.

The bear was huge, at least 800 pounds if he was an ounce. He was standing at the top of the ridge and looking down at us. He licked his lips.

“You know, polar bear attacks on humans are extremely rare,” I said in a voice that was almost conversational.

“Think he knows that?”

“I don’t think we should hang around and find out. Let’s start backing up slowly.”

We started backing down the slope, which is not easy in show shoes. The bear watched us for a few steps, then started heading down. Naturally, the going was much easier for him. He stopped to sniff Otto’s carcass, and I hoped he would stay by it, but he apparently decided we looked tastier, as he kept coming towards us. He appeared to be in no hurry, as if he sensed we could never get away.

“You know those MREs we brought with us for our lunch?” I asked. “I think this would be a good time to drop them.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

We pulled off our backpacks and dumped the contents on the ground. There was some other survival gear besides the MREs, but we had no time to get picky about what we’d keep. The bear stopped and sniffed the MREs, then settled down and started tearing them open. We hastened our steps and finally made it to the bottom. He was still there when we turned and jogged back to camp as fast as our snowshoes would take us.

“Okay,” Jack said when we got back to camp. “I think we’re done here.”

“Yeah, I’d agree. We’ll let them know they have a new bear to tag. I’m sure they’ll be ecstatic.”

We broke camp and packed our gear onto our snowmobiles. We roared off into the afternoon night.