My Grandfather Says the Polar Bears Are Coming Soon

by RINA OLSEN

My grandfather says the polar bears are coming soon. He ought to know—he’s met some before, back when he was on the Chukchi Peninsula. He was a soldier in the Soviet Union back in the ’50s, and during routine military expeditions polar bears would come ambling by, curious about the tank rumbling through the thick snow. He’d lean out from the hatch with a tin of condensed milk and a bear or two would stand up with their paws against the frosty steel sides so he could pour the contents out for them to catch in wide, strong, black-lined jaws, pink tongues flailing as they lapped up the sweet liquid, sharp teeth glinting with saliva in the sharp winter sunlight.

My family doesn’t live in the Soviet Union anymore, or Russia as it’s called now; we settled in Alaska long before I was even born. By the time I was born, my grandfather was already babbling about the bears even though it’s quite rare to see a polar bear in Scammon Bay. I’ve never seen one around here myself, actually.

Even so, he taught me what to do if I ever met an aggressive polar bear. “Strip and run.”

“What?”

“Get naked and run in the opposite direction. Polar bears are very curious, so they’ll stop to sniff your clothes for a long enough while to buy you some time before they start chasing after you again. It’s your best bet—you get to stay alive if you don’t die of exposure or if the polar bear doesn’t catch up to you.”

Like unwrapping a candy bar before eating it, I’d thought. I didn’t need to know this. When would I ever encounter a polar bear?

I visited him in his nursing home the other day. That’s how I know he’s still talking about the bears. He was sitting up in bed with the sheets all rumpled around his chopstick-thin legs, his eyes wide in his skull as he watched the television intently. He looked up when I entered. “Ah, you’re just in time! The polar bears are coming, look—” He pointed at the screen, where a polar bear was wading into the sea. Its fur darkened slightly and stuck to its skin. I looked, just to satisfy him. He had always liked nature programs, but he seemed to have become particularly interested in them since he’d moved into the nursing home.

The camera zoomed out as the polar bear swam farther and farther out to sea, a single white dot in an enormous expanse of dark blue. It paddled rhythmically, propelling itself forward without any fear of what lay in the deep unknown below those calm paws. In search of a haven amidst rapidly melting ice floes, the polar bear swims toward an island that has become a refuge for arctic animals in their shared plight, came the voiceover.

The program cut to a scene of polar bears reaching an island with brownish-gray sands and birds that squawked and fluttered away as they approached. One bear was eating something, its snout pinkish-red with blood. Its jaws snapped at a mangled string of meat, white fur clinging to the flesh. Due to global warming, homeless and starving polar bears are being forced into cannibalism—sometimes even killing and eating their own cubs.

I shuddered and reached for the remote to switch the channel.

“No, no!” My grandfather batted my hand away and leaned back against his pillows, watching calmly as the bear gnawed on its offspring’s bones.

Later, I caught the 1:40 bus back home. I sat in a window seat and leaned my head against the pane, absentmindedly watching the trees flash by. The bus bounced and screeched to a stop in front of the traffic light, the one by the abandoned fish factory that was still haunted by the scent of salt and fish blood. The factory stood alone in an empty lot filled with rusty metal parts and litter that didn’t quite make it into the grimy dumpsters lining the walls. The sea lay beyond the concrete, just as solemn and gray.

My gaze drifted to a dumpster with its lid open. I squinted. A plastic bag fluttered from it, wriggling in the wind. No—not a plastic bag, that was . . .

My eyes widened. I put my hand to the window and leaned so close that my breath fogged on the pane. What I had taken to be the bag’s handles were the hind legs of a polar bear.

The bear raised its head. Its fur was matted with dirt and sediment where the ridges of its spine were visible beneath its flesh, like a snow-covered mountain range. Its sides were sunken, not round with blubber like the one I’d seen swimming on television. It was chewing on something the way a human would chew gum, cheeks and jaws and teeth working together in intense concentration.

The bear withdrew from the dumpster and hopped down to limp across the concrete, head swinging from its lowered neck, hips rocking painfully like my grandfather’s whenever he got up in the morning back when he was still living at my parents’ place. I watched it go, loping across the concrete that refused to allow it to leave any tracks, leave any trace that it had existed at all. I wondered where it was going, if it had found what it was looking for. Food, probably. Maybe it was going to get a friend, a mate, a cub, and show them that there was food in this gray, barren desert instead of in the white desert they had left. And they would bring more of their kind, and more, and more. They were coming, after all.

The light turned green. The bus lurched forward. I craned my neck backwards, watching the bear grow smaller and smaller until it was either a puddle of condensed milk or a tiny white sun—I couldn’t tell which—on the horizon where the concrete met the sea.