Thin Line Between

136 marybeth holleman Thin Line Between For Tom I n the slant light of late afternoon, the polar bear’s fur is not white as snow but a silhouette of buttery tones against bands of pale blue sky, granite sea, and marbled sand. Wet from her swim across the channel, her fur spikes along the curve of her back and ripples as she pads the shoreline. She mouths a scrap of whale skin, flipping it into the air, then sniffs another piece and pushes it over with one swipe of her great paw. Ten feet away, from inside our truck, we watch, silent except for the click of cameras, until she walks out into shallow water, hopping lightly among a drift of gulls that scatter before her. This, my first sighting of a polar bear in the wild, comes less than an hour after my son, husband, and I arrived on Barter Island at Kaktovik, an Inupiat village wedged between the Arctic Coastal Plain and Beaufort Sea. Six years ago, when I first heard about, and decided to come see, these polar bears, they were considered to be a healthy population, safe on their sea ice. Four years ago, I heard the first reports of polar bears drowning as they tried to reach a rapidly shrinking summer-ice sheet. Since then, the news has spiraled much more quickly than I could have imagined, so that this trip is now shot through with sorrow: according to the latest projections, Alaska’s polar bears will be gone within thirty years. We’ve arrived near the end of the bone-pile feeding season. Kaktovik whaling crews set out in their umiaks just after Memorial Day and usually reach their quota of three bowheads within weeks. After cutting and distributing the whale blubber, muktuk, among the two hundred Inupiat residents, they load the whale bones, plus a fair amount of skin, sinew, and gut, into a pile at the end of a three-mile-long sand spit that arcs out into the sea in front of the village. CRSUM09 nonfiction.indd 136 5/22/2009 12:43:41 PM 137 Holleman That’s what brings in the polar bears. The spit fans out at the end, a swirl of sand littered with the bone piles of previous years. These old bones are weathered to a pale gray patina, in sharp contrast to the new pile, bloodred and ragged. Together, they form a Dali-like sculpture, a monument to the millenia-old relationship between people, whales, and polar bears. The bears are arriving earlier every year, eager to scavenge whale carcasses, restless from their long summer hunger. Even before the umiaks are launched, their white heads emerge from the water, scanning the shoreline and sniffing the air for the pungent scent of blubber. This year, the landed whales are much smaller, and so the fall feeding ends earlier. Villagers prefer small whales because they are tastier and easier to handle, but smaller whales mean less for the polar bears. During our fourday stay, the number of polar bears on the bone pile dwindles down to one, and then, on our last morning, none. I feel no small amount of ambivalence about this trip, so much so that I almost canceled it. It seemed hypocritical to fly the 650 miles from Anchorage to Kaktovik just to see the animals who are dying because of the very fossil fuel expended to bring us here. It seemed like I was making a choice, by getting on that plane, that I was personally signing their execution papers. But there may have been another reason lurking beneath the surface: maybe I didn’t want to look them in the eye, knowing what I know. Maybe I’d rather let it all remain abstract, polar bears and shrinking ice packs. Maybe I wasn’t ready to face the truth. I had wanted to see them for so long, and that desire had just grown more desperate with the bad news. Perhaps it was selfish ; perhaps I just wanted to check them off my life-list while they were still around. But I also believed that, by seeing them firsthand, I might...