Mutual Aid and My Encounter with the Bear

"But I say courage is not the abnormal. Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches. The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment. It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse, And the failure to sustain even small kindness. Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being. Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality. Accomplishment. The even loyalty."

— Jack Gilbert, from "The Abnormal is not Courage"

This is not bravado. This is how it happened.

I woke to yelling. Cold in my tent, the shouts were urgent and unclear as I reentered the world from my usual troubled sleep. The wind blew. The sides of the orange tent moved without pattern, and people were shouting from somewhere.

“There's a bear!”

And “Wake up!”

And other things less clear and no doubt more vulgar.

I was groggy. My first thought was that somebody was most certainly getting fired for drinking from a Tuesday night into a Wednesday morning, or maybe getting canned for crying bear when there couldn't be a bear, or rather shouldn't be a polar bear at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet. It was the one concern my wife expressed before I left. I assured her that there were no bears in the part of Greenland where I was headed.

Then it sunk in that this warning might be true. For some reason I decided the night before to sleep in my thermals and socks. I usually sleep in shorts and barefoot. Otherwise, I feel constricted. My alarm began to sound and I sat up, hit snooze (why did I hit snooze?), grabbed my trousers from the day before and the first mid-layer I could find, then pulled them both on. I imagined in the moment that the bear, if there was in fact a bear, would be a great distance away on the ice, away from camp. My boots were in the slim vestibule made by the tarp and the entrance flap of the tent. Before I thought to put them on, I unzipped everything to stick my head out and take a look around. That's when I saw her.

Oh, hey. That's a fucking polar bear. (My response here will ring true to anybody who knows me well.)

She lumbered near the outhouses, maybe 150 feet away. Her fur was more yellow than I would have expected, had I expected anything at all when I stuck my head out of the tent. She swung her head as she shuffled through the snow, down and up, nosing the air.

Someone yelled, “Get back in your tent!”

I did. Immediately. I didn't zip the tent flap because I thought the sound would draw attention, but sat squarely on my knees in the middle of the floor. Feeling down the leg of my trousers, I unbuttoned the small pocket on one leg and pulled out my Opinel. I had other knives in my gear, but suspected that the search for them would cause too much noise and, again, draw attention. Still on my knees, I opened the knife and jabbed the air in front of me a few times. Then thought better of my hold and turned it around, I stabbed the thin blade downward and sideways at nothing. Then I sat with my knuckles resting neatly on my knees, the blade of my penny-knife pointed toward my lap, and I listened to my colleagues yell at the bear. The shouts brought comfort, until they stopped.

There was a disconcerting silence and the sound of her steps crunching the snow beside the tents. I had time to think.

First, I thought that my wife would be angry with me. Remember, I told her there were no polar bears at Summit Station. Next, I thought, fairly clinically, So, this is how it ends then? This is the end of my narrative. And when that big black and white and yellow head pushes through the open tent entrance, I will not stab the skull because that would do nothing but perhaps break my blade. I should stab at the neck. I gave the blade a few more downward slashes and replaced my knuckles on my knees. There will be noise and teeth and blood, I thought. And I thought that this is going to hurt. A lot. But I will fight. I repeated it. Fight. Fight. Fight. What else could I do?

No shit? This is how it ends? Go fuckin figure.

Then I thought, I love you, Monika. That was like a mantra, and then like punctuation to everything thereafter. Monika, this flashed through my mind: I was so sorry we didn't get you pregnant before I left.

The shouting from the Big House began again and comforted again. I stopped thinking for a moment. The crunching snow outside the tent was drowned out by the hollering.

Then there was the distinctive sound of heavy machinery, a click-click-clicking and rumbling at some distance. Although I was unthinking at that moment, I felt hopeful. Hope at the voices of my peers. Hope at the engine and whoever the hell had powered that thing up and in my direction, pushing a hulking and petulant mechanism forward with every intention of rescue. I sat still, knuckles gently pressed against my knees, knife in hand, and waited for that black and white head to appear. There was another silence.

Instead of the head and teeth and blood and pain, I heard my name. A command to run. I did, ripped open the door to the tent and ran. Before this moment, I had never run for my life. I ran without my boots, felt no cold through my socks, no thoughts now, through the snow to the western door of the Big House. I was greeted there with awkward hugs, and back slaps, and my fellows touching my arm as if to make certain I was real. They were surprised.

They thought I was going to die. Told me so. Had I thought more beyond where on the head to strike the bear with my feeble knife, or repeating “I love you, Monika,” though she would never hear it, or all that other strangely practical deliberation, I probably would have been more afraid. But I did not think about those other things. It is strange to note this now: although my mind was racing, I was entirely calm.

That scares me more than the notion of my end. That clinical calm scares me. Perhaps I am just too stupid to realize the magnitude of the dangers around me or too feeble-minded to wrap my brains around my own mortality. Admittedly, I'm a bit long in the tooth for that sort of ignorance.

It was a sort of resignation. This is where the story ends. I thought that. This is where it all finishes.

I had a good run, had love, was loved, did love. Felt joy. And sorrows, pain and the truest happiness. Was flawed. Yet, I felt the kind of comfort and goodness that each human should experience at least once in his life. I traveled the globe in search of what? Myself and others, surely. Honesty? Truth? I searched for goodness and for evil. Found neither and both.

Except, I thought none of this. I only thought that I love Monika, and where the hell should I effectively stab the shit out of this bear, and less articulately, So, this is how it fuckin ends? and I suspect there was a moment when I thought, Lame. I still got things to do. But I don't remember thinking that last one. Sounds like me. And then I was running in my socks through all that white. Through that indifferent cold.

I've had some time to think about it. We've been trapped together inside this building for a day. I've tried to do my part as far as maintaining the safety of us all. I fashioned spears from kitchen knives and bamboo. That sounds ridiculous. Don't worry, it felt ridiculous. I've stood watch while they slept. These fellows, some who barely know me, some who knew me from a few years ago, but none who really know me as a friend, responded in desperation, and refused to concede to the idea of futility, and showed great courage in the face of a few minutes of what was described to me later as real terror. They hollered, howled, cursed, threw Frisbees and kitchen implements, peanut butter and leftover fish, powered heavy equipment as fast as that fucker would go, all to distract this quite innocent creature from mauling me to death.

This was not survival of the fittest. This was not what Darwin figured. This was all Kropotkin. This was a factor of evolution, evidence of that strange desire for our success as a species, basic fucking human compassion, the value of a human life—no matter the life. This was mutual aid, concern, care, perhaps a strange and welcome sort of love. And as we sit around this big room, waiting for a hunter to show up and kill this poor animal who wanted only to live, but who will never leave now, I cannot think how to articulate my gratitude to them.

They lounge and make jokes to lighten the mood. Or read silently. Listen to music, their heads buried in earbuds, the tinny music sometimes still audible. They plan station layouts to solve the new bear problem, and they're kidding and not kidding at the same time. Or they make fun of each other's sleep habits, or just note that, “you [do this] when you sleep.” One of the men who saved my life told me that I was restless and spoke in mine. I don't know if I do regularly, you'd have to ask my wife. Now, as I write this, and listen to them talk, and watch them move around this confined space, animated, individual, brave, at once together and apart, it strikes me that they cannot now or perhaps ever know the gratitude I feel.

Or the hope.