Story Excerpt

How to Live With Polar Bears

by Octavia Cade

I have a fascination for polar bears. They have always struck me as a particularly terrible way to die. 

If you’re eaten by a polar bear, there’s a good chance that you’ll be eaten alive, because the human body just doesn’t constitute enough of a threat to permanently disable before the consumption begins. 

I could say the same about bull sharks or a pack of wild dogs, but it’s the bears that hold my attention. 

I think it’s because there’s so much room in them for metaphor.

 

There’s a man and a bear in the woods. We’ve all heard that hypothetical by now, all heard the responses, the negotiations. What kind of man, what kind of bear? Which would you rather meet, if you were a woman on your own? Truly, a fairy tale for the modern age.

When I say I’d pick the man, it’s because I’m thinking of polar bears. Brown bears, too, but they can interbreed with polar bears so I’m not too fussed about species difference there. That being said, I’m a little sick of being praised for thinking logically about the potential danger of my predators, because the logic of my choice is different than the logic I am being praised for.

Statistically—and this is the statistic that made the choice for me, immediately—if I have to beat someone’s skull in with a rock to save myself, I have a better chance with the man than the bear. It’s not that I’ve been able to hold their heads in my hands, one in each, and compare size and bone density, but if there’s a rock in my hand and a brain to beat in, then I feel pretty strongly as to where my luck will lie. 

Man or bear: it’s a choice that forgets there are three dangerous things in those woods. But if I’m stuck with the polar bear, well, there might be ways around that, too.

 

(1) Realize that I’m in the wrong fairy tale. 

Modern parable and metaphors aside, this isn’t Hans Christian Andersen, with stories of snow queens and those frigid northern vistas. 

New Zealand isn’t the Arctic. We have seals and sea lions, but these are coastal creatures, and if I’m deep in the woods then there’s something wrong with any polar bear that’s there with me. It’d have to be introduced. It’s probably starving. Their diet requires so much fat; no doubt this is why they go for the seals. It’s all that blubber. There’s no terrestrial animal here that can fulfill those caloric requirements. The biggest animal here now might not even exist: moose were introduced into the Fiordland rainforest back in the day, and in the circles of cryptid biology there they remain. There’s no real evidence that they continue to live there, but I like to think it’s true. 

Unfortunately, even if there are moose down in that deep southern forest, they probably wouldn’t do the bear much good. Too stringy; not enough fat. 

Then again, these days polar bears are transformative. Evolution might not move so quickly, but interbreeding does.

With climate change, the polar bear habitat is changing. All that ice, melting down. All that slow warmth, greening the Arctic. The polar bears are migrating, looking for food. They’re interbreeding with brown bears, and there’s something about the bastard offspring of a polar bear and a grizzly that doesn’t belong in fairy tales, or not the sanitized ones that pass for entertainment these days. The older stories, perhaps: the ones that were written in blood. 

I wonder what capacities these particular offspring take from each parent. The size, the temperament. The shape of the jaw. Polar bears are specialized in their physiology and their eating habits, their teeth and their skulls optimized for the soft flesh of seals. Brown bears are different. Brown bears hunt moose.

A new fairy tale, then. I’m not in the woods with a polar bear. I’m in the woods with a creature that is part polar bear, capable of a more democratic omnivory, and we’re both hunting for moose. There’s nothing to say that we couldn’t hunt them together: this polar bear, or iteration of it, is a form of shapeshifter. There are ways to deal with those. If I can shape a fairy tale as if it’s teeth and jawbone, I can shape a bear in the same way. 

I have options.

 

(1a) Build a bear.

There’s a reason that I’ve always been so drawn to Frankenstein. That it was written by a woman is one. That it features a mad scientist is another. But mainly, let’s be honest: it’s the creature. It’s so effectively horrifying, and that’s before it even does anything. Just looking at it, cobbled together out of corpses, and it’s clear that the creature is a monster.

There are many bear corpses to be used. I once saw a video of a starving polar bear dragging itself over the ice. I could only watch for a few seconds. The bear was just far enough away that I could feel sympathy for it. It was only when I cut it up for parts that I was close enough for familiarity to overshadow empathy. After a time, the butchery becomes routine. There are a lot of starving bears, the product of decreasing ice cover and access to food sources, but starvation makes for poor raw materials. That leg is so emaciated it can’t hold anything up; those haunches are so hollow that the bear can’t muscle its way through ferns and underbrush, let alone any beech trees. The bear needs to be able to walk and hunt, so I take the best parts that can be managed and shore up the rest with mechanism. The bear is held together with cogs and clockwork, but that doesn’t show too much beneath the fur, so I can call the pathetic creature close enough. 

I have to admit it’s not exactly a noble replica, but is that not the point of recreation? 

The problem with leaning too heavily into this fairy tale is that Frankenstein isn’t just a story of a mad scientist with significant ethical lapses. It’s that those lapses involve really bad parenting, and there’s a reason I don’t have children. There’s a lot I simply can’t be bothered with. They’d have to fend for themselves early. I’d probably try at first, when the bear is small and round and, even with implants, is of the cuddly type. Polar bears are mammals, and there’s a predisposition to bond with mother. Mammals are, after all, milk-producing creatures. Getting the milk from one body to another does require some sort of physical contact. I would, of course, be using bottles.

If there’s one thing that decades of watching videos of New Zealand conservation workers has taught me, it’s that feeding endangered infants tends to go better when the feeder has some resemblance to what it’s feeding. There are a lot of sock puppets in those videos, hands transformed into birds. I can’t see myself wearing a polar bear onesie in the bush. I don’t think Victor Frankenstein would have done it either. It’s the small things, building up. The resentments. Sooner or later that cute little ball of fluff is going to be active and gangly and rebellious, and I don’t want a rebellious polar bear. I just want something to hunt with: the fairy tale of motherhood become shared predation.

“But I don’t even like moose,” the polar bear whines, or it would if it could talk. But this is the wrong fairy tale for that, and I didn’t include the mechanism for any human vocalization in my enhancements. 

If I were a better parent I would teach the bear to hunt moose in the rainforest and like it but, like Victor, I am not much of a parent. The bear I have built is unpleasant to look at. No one wants an ugly baby. No one wants a whiny child either, and so when the bear moans and bitches about the taste of moose, I tell it that at least the moose had parents who were proud of it. The moose had better manners and did not make such a mess of its dinner. The moose did not lurch its gigantic, misshapen body through the beech trees and whinge “Are we there yet?” 

It’s not that I’m entirely lacking in sympathy. The creature in Frankenstein would have had mine if it had just clobbered its father like Victor deserved, but when push came to violent shove, the creature lacked gumption. Victor had gumption. It takes cold nerve to go hacking up corpses and stitching them together; I note that when the creature wanted a bride, it was still too good to get its own hands dirty. It would murder and whine about it, but would it pick up a scalpel and needle? Of course not. The creature was too afraid of nightmares for that. 

It’s no different with the bear. That gawky, irritating thing I constructed out of parts and mechanisms wants me dead, I’m sure of it. If I were the bear I would want me dead. If I were the bear I would make me dead. That’s where the bear falls down. This fairy tale is Frankenstein, not bears and men in the woods, and the monstrous creation of a mad scientist doesn’t lurk in the woods, ready for rending. It runs off like a fucking coward, no matter how big and ugly and capable it is.

That’s one way to beat a polar bear in the woods: build badly, and make no secret of your disappointment. 

 

(1b) Build a bear differently.

There are different types of resurrection. Different types of necromancy, too. They do not all need the same ragged pieces of corpse, and procuration is so much easier in laboratories and museums than it is out on ice floes.

It’s one thing to bring back a dead species, use genetic engineering to resurrect at least a simulacrum of a woolly mammoth or a dinosaur. That has the potential to draw in donors, but the thought of resurrecting a species that isn’t dead yet is not nearly so appealing. It seems a lot of effort for a low reward—but then, as I said, recreations don’t have to be perfect. Look at all the fuss about those bloody dire wolves. They’re not dire wolves. They’re gene-edited wolves, an attempt to create a similarity, but the dire wolves of the late Pleistocene were significantly divergent from the source material of their modern-day counterparts. 

The polar bears are not dead. They are not much for survival, in the New Zealand woods, but in the right fairy tale I can take care of that. If genetic engineering can make a grey wolf look something like a dire wolf, then I don’t see why a polar bear cannot be altered to take on the characteristics of the giant short-faced bear. That thing is as extinct as dire wolves and may have been the largest land-living carnivorous mammal, which makes the prospect of resurrection entertaining. I admit my research is sloppy, but I’m looking for a bear with more gumption than the Frankenstein bear, more adaptability, and Arctodus simus is potentially more suited for forest life. Its closest living relative, the spectacled bear, is arboreal, so there’s some hope for it. 

I don’t deny it’s a gamble. A polar bear and a giant short-faced bear are two very different creatures, and even if one can be altered to resemble the other in some superficial ways, that doesn’t speak to behavior. Who knows what manners the short-faced polar bear would have, and how predatory it might be? The evidence pertaining to A. simus is hardly definitive.

Some of that evidence speaks to a diet high in vegetation, with meat gained primarily from scavenging. That, naturally, is the bear I get. What, I ask you, is the point of building a bear that looks as intimidating as this one if the only moose I can get it to hunt is practically offal? I have always liked experimentalism, but this one seems a wash. It does, however, lead to another way of beating a bear in the woods, because when the short-faced polar bear discovers the augmented corpse of its previous iteration, slumped against a beech tree after having no doubt moped to death, it begins to feed. I can’t say whether or not its predecessor tastes better or worse than moose, or indeed than seal, and I can’t say whether the short-faced polar bear thinks the Frankenstein bear kin enough for its meal to be considered cannibalism or not, but I do know that the stupid thing chokes on a prosthetic hip joint when trying to crack open a femur, and that’s enough to convince me that my first instinct was right: motherhood is not for me. 

There’s no sense dragging a bear up in the woods if all it manages to do is die there. Certainly, in both cases I have beaten the bear, but it hardly feels a fair match. I can see myself walking away and feeling rather cheated. All that time and effort, for such indifferent ends?

Surely there must be another option. I am not quite out of fairy tales yet. Perhaps if I learn to beat them on the ice, I can find a way to beat them in the woods. A sort of graduated approach to bear-baiting, luring them in and learning before applying that education in a more familiar environment. Luring is much easier than construction.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far, it’s that bears are fairly food-oriented. 

 

(2) Feed the bears. It won’t go badly.

This is, of course, a lie. Even I can see that, watching a video of some idiot up in the northern hemisphere feeding biscuits to a polar bear through his kitchen window. I think they’re biscuits. (I haven’t seen the video for a while. They could be scones, I suppose, or bread rolls, but really the choice of baking is not the problem here.) He’s feeding the bear by hand, and I can only suppose that it isn’t really hungry, because if it were—and a polar bear is an obligate carnivore, with an inescapable need for meat over gluten—it would just eat his hand. Or, more likely, bite down on it with not quite enough force to take that hand off at the wrist, but enough to drag the man out through the window.

I think we all know what would happen next.

Any variation from this extraction would only slow things down a little. Maybe the man can’t fit through the window as a whole, in which case it would be hand-arm-head before chunks are taken out of the torso. It’s not like that massive bear head can’t fit through. A few good swipes from that paw could probably destroy the window frame. It wouldn’t take much. And anyway, one can’t bake biscuits (or scones, or bread rolls) every day without running out of flour eventually, and if the bear has been habituated enough to associate the house with food, one quick trip to the supermarket for more ingredients would likely have a short and chewy end. 

For all that I’m in the wrong fairy tale, without woods and in a world too saturated with light and the dry, stinging scent of ice, I can’t help but wonder: there I am, in a kitchen, and there is a bear outside waiting. I feed it every day, Scheherazade with cake instead of folk tales, and the bear, not hungry, takes it from my hand. Little sponge cakes, stuffed with whipped cream and raspberries. Flaky pastry, stuffed with currants and candied orange peel. Profiteroles with custard inside, rolled in chocolate sauce. Perhaps the bear would lick the chocolate from my fingers, if bears can even eat chocolate. Maybe it’s bad for them, in the same way that it’s bad for dogs. I’d have to look it up, but a polar bear is so large that even if I rolled a hundred profiteroles, a thousand, and fed them one by one through mullion glass it would probably have no effect. The bear would still be waiting for me when I made a run for the supermarket, and if its jaws smelled of cocoa I wouldn’t have to breathe it in for long.

I’d keep at it for as long as the ingredients lasted, though. The man in the video seemed fine. Why should I be any different? And there’s something magic about it, as if the bear, too, has wandered into a fairy tale not its own. I suppose in a fairy tale for bears, it would wander the woods (wander the ice) and find within those woods or upon those floes a cottage made of meat. Seal carcasses, piled up into walls like logs. Chunks of frozen walrus flaked off for shingles. And within a witch, a cauldron of fish stew, and—a fire doesn’t seem right. Not for the warming Arctic, not for the warming glaciers, and not for a creature so burdened by pelt and the prospect of melting. I don’t think the bear would like the fire, but the witch has to keep warm enough that her blood draws the bear, and in this particular scenario that witch would be me, so the bear will just have to put up with it. I built that house for it, reddened my arms with slaughter and felt quite bad about it; the seals looked so betrayed. I had to stack them with their faces turned to the outside so that the interior isn’t wall-to-wall judgment. In the face of such sacrifice, the bear has no grounds to bitch about hearths. At least in this fairy tale it’s not choking on prosthetics, so a little gratitude wouldn’t go amiss.

I don’t know what the windows are made of. Ice, I suppose, although perhaps seal blood might freeze enough to allow it to be made into panes. Such windows would be opaque at best. I’d want to see the bear coming; that sharp, violent snout shoving its way through blood windows, without warning, would be enough to upturn the cauldron. At least with warning I can open the window. Pieces of stewed fish, passed through, or—because I’m a better baker than a cook—dumplings or damper bread, with the fish tucked away inside. Something the both of us will eat, assuming of course that the bear doesn’t huff and puff and blow the house down. Wrong fairy tale, again, with the wrong cottage and the consistent lack of woods, but I can’t imagine what story a bear would like best, and so I’m forced to improvise. Carnivory in multiple forms, I suspect, hence the house and the stew and the edible witch, reaching through windows with her hands full of invitation and her body full of blood. 

The only icy fairy tale I know is “the Snow Queen,” about how a piece of glass in the eye—or was it ice?—could turn a person numb and forgetful. No, it was a splinter of mirror. Never mind, ice will do. It has reflective properties, and if the bear takes my dumpling, inhales my damper bread, and closes jaws around my wrist and pulls, I’ll shatter through that icy pane of window and there’ll be a splinter in my eye to go with the tears which are soon to come. I’m not sure there’s a splinter large enough to numb my incipient bloody death, but then again, I did call the bear, insert myself into its fairy tale, and build a house of meat. I stuck my hand through the window, I called it for dinner. What did I think would happen?