My worst childhood fears included a face to face encounter with a vicious and extremely hungry polar bear. I was born in 1963 and until 1972 the climate was pretty harsh and there were frequent and often large ice-drifts reaching the north coast of Iceland from the Greenland strait. I remember a fjord full of ice just like the viking Hrafna-Flóki who named Iceland after walking up a mountain and looking down into a fjord full of ice.

My friends and I used the ice for some pretty dangerous games and liked running out to sea on it—and back. A polar bear was however never spotted in the Skutulsfjördur fjord where I grew up, in the town of Ísafjördur. Nevertheless people from Hornstrandir, an area north of Ísafjördur, had encountered them.

A friend of mine was on a trip to Fljótavík in the Hornstrandir nature reserve in late May 1972.  He is the same age as I and was nine years old at the time. His family originates from a small farm there and they still have a summer cottage on the land. Hornstrandir was deserted by people in the early 1950’s. They had arrived by boat—there are no roads leading to this place— and when they came ashore, the women and children walked to the cottage which was half a mile inland while the men, three of them together tried to get a tractor going to move their provisions to the cottage. Half an hour passed and that was when they saw it—roaming towards them along the shore—a huge polar bear. It was not in an agressive mood—not yet—as the wind stood off the men—and it probably did not see them. They ran into an emergency shelter which was luckily nearby and designed to house shipwreckers and people in need. When they were safe in the house they discovered a terrible thing. They had forgotten their rifle and the ammunition with their luggage on the shore. The three men had to think fast as their worst fear was that some of the children would run from the cottage to the shore. So they decided to send one out to fetch the gun and tossed a coin to decide who it would be. The other two watched the beast come closer. When the man ran out the polar bear saw him and started to move faster. It was not running though. The man managed to get the gun and ran into the house. They again tossed a coin to determine who would shoot the animal. My friend’s father was the one who got that assignment. He shot it with a single shot through the eye from about twenty meters. It was a 22 caliber bullet, designed to kill birds and small prey rather than large polar bears. This gracious predator fell instantly. A clean kill and everybody breathed lighter. The children and women—and themselves—for that matter were out of harms way.

When they opened the animal only one orange was found inside it’s stomach. So it was very hungry, extremely dangerous but probably very worn out as well.

Now I have sympathy for those beautiful animals although I feared them in my childhood and I think we had the resources not to kill this particular animal that visited us. Perhaps we could have moved it to it’s natural habitat on the drift ice near to Greenland. However we should not forget that this particular polar bear was found near townships where a lot of people live. Hungry polar bears are no lambs. Polar bears are still shot in Greenland and the bear population there seems not to be dwindling. You can even buy polar bear skins in Greenland and export them to other countries and this is under Danish law, Denmark being an EU country. I could have bought one when I was in Greenland last fall. It cost roughly USD 3000, ready to go on a wall or a floor.

There are many things that threaten the polar bear in modern times. The meltdown of ice because of global warming is the biggest threat. Pollution of the world’s oceans is another huge threat - because polar bears are at the top of the food chain, they accumulate a great deal of toxins, such as dioxine and quicksilver.

Living in the north presents many dangers. Meeting with a polar bear is one of them. The farmer who spotted the polar bear simply said to the media. “I did not fancy the idea of having it roaming in my grasslands.”

I also have sympathy for the farmer. I would not have liked to be meet a polar bear on my lawn. However it was quite a sad affair.

BB bjarni@icelandreview.com