He’s magnificent. We creep further inshore to get as close as we can while keeping a respectful distance. We can’t take our eyes off him. He also can’t take his eyes off us. For a full five minutes he doesn’t move a muscle but holds us in his magnetic stare - for what seems like hours. Clicking and whirring sounds stop and spellbound silence dominates.  He has his fresh kill and he’s not going to give it up lightly.

The wild animal I see before me now is not cute and lovable. It is an enormous, wild, rough at the edges male polar bear, dripping with blood from its dead seal, alert, poised and ready to pounce should someone or something get between it and it’s food. I do not feel like giving him a name and reducing him to cuddly toy status, that would be a grave insult. Huge respect and a dose of healthy fear seem the best responses. Easy done.

I think back to the polar bear I saw in a zoo many years ago.  A zoo is no substitute for what I’m looking at now. This is not the same animal, nothing like. I wonder what we think about when we present our children with a bear on a plate. (A bit like a pork chop wrapped in cellophane.) What exactly are we teaching them? That this is how a polar bear lives? Clearly not. That this is how they behave? Not even nearly. That this is what one looks like? Well, only just. It’s more like teaching them not to enquire or dream or imagine or, perish the thought, strive to see these animals in their natural habitat one day before the ice melts. Just have a quick look, eat your ice-cream and move on to the next one. Box ticked. 

As we go slowly astern and leave this animal to do what it does, I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to have witnessed such a sight - and a privilege it is, not an automatic right. There is no sense of entitlement here. Iconic and cliched polar bears may be, but these majestic animals are so for good reason. They’re worthy of our dreams and imaginings, as well as a bit of thought and care before we barge into the Arctic drilling for oil. It might be worth expanding the conversation a bit when we take our kids to the zoo.

Time has become an abstract concept. Not only is Svalbard time different from our homelands, but time aboard is different again to Svalbard time. We’re on ship’s time, the clock changed by two hours to make the most of the daylight. To take it even further, being on a boat in an alien environment thinking only of the here and now, means that the there and then grows more distant. The Clock, if it exists at all, is reduced to simply Day Time or Night Time, and with Dark Time fast approaching, the boundaries becomes increasingly blurred.

We clamber into our insulated gear and slide our way onto the Zodiac in the first light of a calm nearly-pink sunrise. The sun hasn’t hit our patch yet and we’re glad of the gear as we head for land.  There are huge lumps of waist-high ice littering the shore, mostly devoid of colour in the dawn shade. Cold icy ice, beautifully sculpted forms with serrated sea shaped surfaces. Walking among them in the shallow water, I can feel the cold of the sea through my boots, and I enjoy it as I would when listening to rain falling on a tent. Small friendly sounds of ticking and cracking rise up, the water that gently bobs through empty spaces quietly gurgling and popping, an obscure conversation in the stillness. Crouching down, human bodies passing by, bend the light, the ice diffusing and altering shapes into surreal and mysterious forms. So the world has changed once more, perception of the Arctic turned on it’s head when viewed at a different scale. 

Day Time for now consists of creeping around at ground level, observing and recording this strange icy world, connecting in small ways to these micro Arctic spaces, until the light fades and we swing back into Night Time and its now familiar habits.