Or Be Killed

Or Be Killed

Polar bears live and hunt in the snow and ice of northern Canada. They are powerful and dangerous animals, and have no enemies - except, of course, human beings, who take their land, and hunt and kill them.

In the wild there is only one law among animals - kill, or be killed. Cam knows that, as she was once a hunter herself…

When Cam first saw them, they looked like white against white, moving past walls of snow shining in the early light. Then they became actual figures. A mother polar bear and two cubs. The adult’s beautiful neck was waving as she smelt the air. Then the bear turned, and Cam saw the black nose and dark eyes. And in an electric moment she saw the bear see her too - and knew she was standing too close.

The hair on Cam’s neck stood on end. She looked around her, at the frozen piles of rubbish from people’s kitchens and houses. Maybe she could hide somewhere here, although she knew the bear would smell her. And her breath rose like white smoke in the cold air, making a flag that the bear would certainly see. The clear air was still so cold, this early in the spring, that it felt like a trap, ready to close around her.

Cam’s father had been a hunter. He had often taken her with him on hunting trips. She remembered the cloud of hot air rising from the opened stomach of a freshly killed animal. She imagined the heat of her own insides rushing out of her.

‘I only kill what I can eat,’ her father used to say proudly. ‘It’s a law of nature.’

And Cam remembered seeing the bloody meat of the dead animal and looking forward to eating it.

The mother bear had pushed her young ones behind her, protecting them lovingly. She faced Cam across the snow-covered distance less than a hundred and fifty metres away, and growled.

Cam heard the low, threatening sound, and it made her feel cold to the bone. She felt sadness rise inside her. It had been stupid of her to come out to this place alone, with no weapon. She knew that bears often came here, looking for food among the piles of garbage. She knew that, and still she had come. Restlessness had driven her from the house, and she had wanted to walk. But she had been too busy with her thoughts to notice that she was entering the garbage area. And now here she was, right in the middle of the rows of frozen rubbish.

Nearby, the tops of the garbage piles were hidden by shining snow, which had built up over months of hard dark winter. Cam looked wildly around but she couldn’t see any weapons she could possibly use. A loose chair leg, perhaps, that she could throw. A last desperate attempt to stop 250 kilos of angry bear coming any closer. Cam’s heart was beating fast in her chest. She could feel her own blood rushing through her ears, and it deafened her.

Slowly, she took a step backward. The bear moved forward, hot bear breath in a cloud around her head. Cam saw how loose the bear’s skin was on her bones. She must be hungry, her cubs must be hungry. At the edge of Cam’s view, they were searching fruitlessly among the frozen garbage. Rubbish that had been spreading, little by little, since long before they were born, on the land where bears had lived for centuries. Rubbish that was poisoning the huge hunting ground where the bears had once had no enemies, only plenty of food.

Now, Cam knew, the climate was too warm for seawater to freeze as much as it used to, so there was less and less pack ice. Polar bears hunt for their food over the pack ice, which meant that now they couldn’t find enough food. So here they were, driven by need - because of human beings.

In spite of her fear, Cam felt both ashamed and sorry. Suddenly the mother bear, once a fierce and proud hunter, was now just any animal, searching through garbage for bits of old food.

The bear put her head down and began to move forward. Cam held her breath and tried to keep calm. She was weak, had only two legs, and could not run as fast as her hunter. The bear stopped and growled loudly at her, a rough, angry sound. Cam could see that her fur was very thin in places. Was this natural, or caused by hunger?

In her mind’s eye, she saw the first animal she had killed as a hunter years ago. And she remembered how certain she had been that it was right for some animals to die because other animals needed them as food. She saw the great, clean white area of windswept ice, out of which this huge, beautiful animal had appeared, driven by a mother’s need to find food for her young.

Then Cam felt herself, bright hot blood rushing through the red meat of her body. She knelt down in the snow and began to take off the scarf around her neck.