Camping with polar bears makes me nervous. So I was nervous a lot in my three weeks camping and working in the northeast Greenland National Park this summer. And although I didn’t see a bear, I saw plenty of enormous footprints in the snow, and others in our group did see bears – a bear walking along the sea ice past Daneborg, a bear padding along the beach, a bear swimming in the sea. Our helicopter pilot even snapped a photo of a bear at a thousand metres elevation next to her snowy den, where, presumably, she had her cubs. None of these things comforted me. The closest encounter was in our basecamp, just a few hundred metres from the Danish Military Base, Daneborg, an encounter that was rather too close for a fat, little husky puppy.
Around midnight one evening, the Sirius patrol soldiers were woken by the sound of their dogs going crazy. Rushing out, they saw a polar bear with a puppy in its mouth. A tasty snack. The puppy’s mother attacked the bear, biting it from behind, whereupon the bear dropped the puppy and took off toward our basecamp, a couple of hundred metres away. There, our scientists were awoken by shouting soldiers who’d followed the bear and were now tearing around the wooden decks of their sleeping quarters chasing it. They fired a heavy rubber pellet, designed to both hurt and to scare the bear. When the pellet hit its target with a thunk, the bear simply looked around as if to say ‘What was that?’
Fortunately the evening ended with everyone alive, if a little rattled, puppy included.
