Almost 100 years ago the ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson went hunting for food while traveling across the sea ice with a small party:
We proceeded eastward along the deserted coast without adventure. “Blessed is that country whose history is uninteresting” applies to Arctic expeditions as well. Having an adventure is a sign that something unexpected, something unprovided against, has happened; it shows that some one is incompetent, that something has gone wrong. For that reason we pride ourselves on the fewness of our adventures; for the same reason we are a bit ashamed of the few we did have. An adventure is interesting enough in retrospect, especially to the person who didn’t have it; at the time it happens it usually constitutes an exceedingly disagreeable experience. On May 2d, near Point Dease Thompson, through incompetence of my own, I came near having a serious one; that I did not actually have it was due to the incompetence of a polar bear. After completely outmaneuvering me at the start, he allowed a fondness for grandstand play to lose him the game at a critical moment.
The thing happened in the afternoon. As usual, I was hunting caribou eastward along the sea-front of the Melville Mountains that lie parallel to the coast a few miles inland. The sled and the Eskimo were traveling more slowly along the coast and were several miles behind – for one thing, the sled was heavy and the ice rough; for another, they used to stop an hour or so each day to cook a lunch at which I was seldom able to join them. I had seen no caribou all day nor the day before, and our meat was low; therefore I stopped whenever I came to the top of a commanding hill to sweep the country carefully with my binoculars. The land showed nothing but a white wolf or arctic fox now and then; ptarmigan there were, but they are too small game for a party of four that is going to go a year on nine hundred and sixty rounds of ammunition; the foxes. Too, were beneath our notice, though their meat is excellent; but a wolf that came within two hundred yards seldom got by me, for a fat one weighs a hundred pounds, and all of us preferred them at this season to caribou, except Pannigabluk, who would not taste the meat because it is taboo to her people.
This day the wolves did not come near, and the first hopeful thinking I saw was a yellow spot on the sea ice about three miles off. After watching it for five minutes or so I was still unable to determine whether or not the spot was yellow ice or something else than ice; had my party been abreast of me or ahead I should have given up and moved on, but as they were several miles behind I put in a half-hour watching this thing that was a bit yellower than ice should be; now and then I looked elsewhere, for a caribou or grizzly may at any time come out from behind a hill, a polar bear from behind a cake of ice, or a seal out of his hole. After sweeping the entire circle of the horizon perhaps for the sixth time I noted that the yellow spot had disappeared – it was, therefore, a polar bear that had been lying down; after sleeping too long in one position he had stood up and lain down again behind an ice cake.
A moment after noting this I was running as hard as I could in the direction of the bear, for there was not telling how soon he would start traveling or how fast he would go. I had, as soon as I began to suspect the yellow spot might be a bear, taken careful note of the topography behind me with relation to the spot’s position out on the rough sea ice, for it is as difficult to keep a straight line toward an invisible object among the ice cakes and pressure ridges as it is in a forest. The mountains behind, however, could always be seen, and by their configuration I tried to guide myself straight toward the bear. Every three or four hundred yards I would climb a high pressure ridge and have a look around with the glasses, but nothing was to be seen. I did not, in fact, expect to see anything unless the bear had commenced traveling, in which case he would perhaps expose himself by crossing a high ridge. When at last I got to the neighborhood of the animal, according to my calculations, I climbed an especially high ridge and spent a longer time than usual sweeping the surroundings with the glasses and studying individual ice cakes and ridges, with the hope of recognizing some of those I had seen from the mountains to be in the neighborhood of my bear; but everything looked different on near approach, and I failed to locate myself to my own satisfaction. I had decided to go a quarter of a mile or so farther before beginning to circle in quest of the bear’s tracks. My rifle was buckled in its case slung across my back, and I was slowly and cautiously clambering down the far side of a pressure ridge, when I heard behind me a noise like the spitting of a cat or the hiss of a goose. I looked back and saw, about twenty feet away and almost above me, a polar bear.
Had he come the remaining twenty feet as quietly and quickly as a bear can, the literary value of the incident would have been lost forever; for, as the Greek fable points out, a lion does not write a book. From his eye and attitude, as well as the story his trail told afterward, there was no doubting his intentions: the hiss was merely his way of saying, “Watch me do it!” or at least that is how I interpreted it; possibly the motive was chivalry, and the is was his way of saying Garde! Whichever it was, it was the fatal mistake of a game played well to that point; for no animal on earth can afford to give warning to a man with a rifle. And why should he? Has a hunter ever played fair with one of them?
Afterward the snow plainly told the short – and for one of the participants, tragic, - story. I had underestimated the bear’s distance from shore, and had passé the spot where he lay, going a hundred yards or two to windward; on scenting me he had come up the wind to my trail, and had then followed it, walking about ten paces to leeward of it, apparently following my tracks by smelling them from a distance. The reason I had not seen his approach was that it had not occurred to me to look back over my own trail; I was so used to hunting bears that the possibility of one of them assuming my own role and hunting me had been left out of consideration. A good hunter, like a good detective, should leave nothing out of consideration.
Stefansson doesn't say what he did next. My guess is that he skinned the bear, cut up much of the meat, loaded it into the skin, and pulled it back to the rest of his party using the skin as a sled.
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