Free The Great White Bear by Kieran Mulvaney Page B

air that reaches its skin and traps it against its body, enveloping the bear in a thermal blanket. Polar bears, in effect, are mobile, furry greenhouses. That, by itself, is remarkable enough.

    As Robert Bieder has observed, the polar bear is a creature of paradox. It is a white bear with translucent hair and black skin. It is an enormous predator that walks softly and almost silently across the ice. It is an Arctic resident whose major problem is not staying warm but keeping cool. And the winter, when other bears are generally hibernating, is for the polar bear among the most active times of the year, as it stalks the ice in search of seals.
    To the members of a sixteenth-century voyage of exploration, it was a white bear "of a monstrous bigness." Eighteenth-century whalers dubbed it the "farmer," tending the ice fields across which it wandered. Scientists call it
Ursus maritimus,
the sea bear. But it is in Norwegian or German—where it is known as, respectively,
ijsbjorn
and
eisbär
—that the nomenclature most accurately describes the species.
    For these land carnivores that are officially classified as marine mammals are, above all else, creatures of the ice.

Ice
    We were moving.
    It was morning, I was in my bunk, I had been asleep, and when I woke up I could feel the movement of the ship. I lay there, blinked a few times, rubbed my eyes, stretched, gathered my thoughts.
    We weren't supposed to be going anywhere. The previous day we had arrived off Barrow, the northernmost town in the United States, on the Beaufort Sea coast of Alaska. We had dropped anchor that afternoon; we were not scheduled to weigh it for several days, time for new crew to arrive and existing crew to leave, and to change the on-board complement of scientists and journalists.
    But we were unmistakably on the move. And yet, something about our motion didn't feel right. It was almost as if we were moving ... backward.

    Frank Kamp, the chief mate, had been the first to spot the impending collision. He had been on anchor watch, alone in the wheelhouse early in the morning, plotting our upcoming course on the chart, keeping the bridge tidy, casting an occasional eye out the window.
    The watch had been uneventful, as anchor watches often are. The Beaufort Sea current was strong, driving at several knots along the Alaska coast; but although there was some ice, it was not especially plentiful. Floes appeared sporadically, mostly passing harmlessly by; those that appeared to be on a collision course looked to be of little consequence, but even so, when necessary, Frank nudged the rudder just enough to lessen or avoid the blow. Not that the strengthened hull could not withstand the impact, but there was no point subjecting it to any more encounters with ice than absolutely necessary. Besides, a series of jarring, thumping impacts throughout the night and early morning would have done little to endear the first mate to his fellow mariners.
    As early morning dawned—the transition from night to day barely perceptible at this latitude in summer—the fog descended. Peering through the binoculars, Frank scanned what passed for a horizon, then paused. He lowered the binoculars, raised them again, wondering if his mind was playing tricks on him and finally realizing that he truly was seeing what he thought he was seeing. There was indeed an enormous ice floe headed for the ship, one that no amount of rudder turning could avoid. This one was going to hit, and when it did it was going to do more than briefly rouse a few people from their sleep.
    He rushed below to fetch the captain, but barely had the pair made it back to the wheelhouse than the floe struck. The force of a half-million tons, one billion pounds of frozen water, drove into the
Arctic Sunrise,
and after token resistance the ship acquiesced to its demands. Now we too were headed along the coast at several knots, powerless to deny the urgings of the enormous piece of ice that had made us