THE LONELIEST POLAR BEAR (2024)

CHAPTER FOUR: BREAKING POINT

THE LONELIEST POLAR BEAR (1)

By Kale Williams
The Oregonian | OregonLive

Nora darted over a log and through a fake-rock tunnel. The old bear, Tasul, lumbered behind.

Nora jumped in the pool and zookeepers held their breath. It was the only part of the Oregon Zoo polar bear enclosure where she could be cornered. For a moment, it looked as if Tasul might go in after her.

“T-bear!” the keepers called, fire hoses at the ready. The older bear backed off.

Animal introductions could be tricky, but zookeeper Nicole Nicassio-Hiskey remained calm. She had known Tasul for more than 15 years, and she could tell when the bear was frightened, irritable or aggressive. Tasul showed none of those signs as she followed Nora. She was just curious.

The older bear had gotten used to company. She’d been with her twin brother, Conrad, for years before he died two months earlier.

Over the next few days, the older bear tried to make herself approachable. She looked away when Nora got close. She lowered herself to the ground to appear smaller. She tried to entice Nora to play, but Nora wasn’t interested.

Everyone involved with Nora’s upbringing – the Nora Moms in Columbus, her caretakers in Oregon and experts brought in to consult – stressed the importance of socialization. Nora needed to learn to be a bear, and the only way to do that was to spend time with one.

The exhibit was closed to the public for the introductions, but the zoo released a video of Nora tentatively walking the yard, obviously alarmed by Tasul’s presence. In the news release accompanying the video, the zoo described their first meeting as “extremely positive,” but going in “slow motion.”

In truth, Nora was starting to buckle under the stress.

• • •

Back in the dens, Nora grew inconsolable. She barked like an angry seal, loud enough to be heard outside the building. Not even her favorite toys and treats could pierce the fog.

Soon after the keepers from Columbus dropped off Nora in Oregon, she’d begun exhibiting stereotypical behaviors, repetitive actions that have no obvious purpose. She pawed at the concrete, digging imaginary holes. She paced in circles, bumping into toys but ignoring them.

She fixated on her keepers, and any time they left the room, she threw a tantrum.

Captive animals can develop emotional and psychological problems. Elephants sway, gorillas hold their knees and rock, birds pluck themselves bald. Perhaps the most famous animal to exhibit these symptoms was Gus, a polar bear at the Central Park Zoo in New York.

In the mid-’90s, Gus started swimming laps in the pool. Over and over again, sometimes for 12-hour stretches, he swam the same figure-eight pattern. Zoo visitors found it whimsical and ticket sales jumped, but his keepers grew concerned. Gus was called “neurotic” and the “bipolar bear.” The zoo paid $25,000 to a consultant who concluded Gus was bored.

The zoo gave Gus complicated puzzles, toys and a playroom. His repetitive behavior lessened but never went away.

Nora wasn’t bored — just lonely and scared. Her symptoms got worse as the meetings with Tasul continued. After a session with Tasul, Nora panicked and paced for hours. Even when the bears were apart, her keepers sensed Nora was apprehensive, as if she thought the older bear might be lurking.

She wasn’t getting better.

Mitch Finnegan, an Oregon Zoo veterinarian, prescribed Alprazolam, commonly known as Xanax. She took a pill once in the morning and another in the evening, hidden in ground horse meat, for a total of 4 milligrams a day. She paced less, but she remained anxious. Her dosage was upped to 6 milligrams per day.

Two weeks after that, Nora still paced. The zoo called in an animal behavior specialist who recommended a different approach. Nora was put on Fluoxetine, a generic version of the antidepressant Prozac.

• • •

At the heart of Nora’s story is a complicated question: Are zoos helping animals or hurting them? People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has taken a hard stance against zoos. Some parents won’t take their young children to see animals they say are being exploited for our entertainment.

But few animals live as nature intended anymore. Not the rhinos, who are butchered for their horns; or the elephants, who are out of space; not the orangutans, who have lost their homes to palm oil plantations. Not the manatee, the mountain gorilla, the poison dart frog or even our own pets. We dose our dogs with Prozac, like Nora, as they chew their tails and bark all day.

More than 180 million people around the world visit zoos every year. By that measure, the demand for them is self-evident.

Animals at reputable zoos are vaccinated, dewormed and fed on schedule. Bears get their teeth brushed. Elephants stand for ultrasounds. Giraffes get their hooves trimmed. Zoo animals live much longer than their wild counterparts, and when they get sick, they don’t fall prey to a faster predator or get picked apart by scavengers.

Animal rights groups argue that zoos focus on endangered species that are considered charismatic, such as the polar bear, because they draw crowds. But a zoo full of frogs could never generate enough ticket sales to pay for the research into why frogs are disappearing in the wild. To save frogs, zoos need animals like Nora.

More than anything, though, critics of zoos say containing animals for any reason is cruel and makes them crazy and bored.

That criticism puts zoos on the defensive with the media. Keepers and PR staff refer to “enclosures,” “habitats” or “exhibits,” but not cages. Access behind the scenes, when granted, usually comes with a caveat banning photography to prevent the public from seeing bars.

PR staff at zoos rarely release information when animals are faring poorly. None of Nora’s ailments, physical or emotional, were revealed to her adoring fans when they were discovered. Not in Columbus and not in Portland. Metabolic bone disease and Prozac never made it into press releases about her milestones or into videos of her cute antics. It’s anyone’s guess how many other zoo animals suffer through similar problems.

Zoos sell a narrative of research, conservation and the highest standards of animal welfare. In most cases, the narrative is true. But it doesn’t fully answer the charge made by animal rights groups that some creatures just don’t do well outside their natural environment.

Animals like Nora present an impossible predicament. In the wild, she would have died soon after her mom left her alone. Without human intervention back in Ohio, she likely wouldn’t have survived the day. But confinement was crippling her body and her mind.

The love of her keepers, and her fans, was not quite enough.

• • •

Tasul had been slowing down for months. She was old and arthritic. In the wild, she probably wouldn’t have lasted this long. Wild bears usually don’t live past 20. Captive bears rarely make it to 30.

When keepers noticed blood in her mucus, they ordered an ultrasound. It showed abnormal growths in her abdomen. A biopsy confirmed early-stage kidney failure. Veterinariansalso suspected an ovarian tumor.

She neededsurgery.

Mitch fired a dart filled with sedatives into the old bear’s thick hide and she went down in minutes. Together, the keepers rolled her onto a cargo net and lifted her into a zoo van for the short ride from the polar bear enclosure to the medical center.

In the operating room, Mitch stood to the side as the surgeon made a nearly 10-inch incision lengthwise along Tasul’s belly. When they opened her up, it was worse than they had suspected.

Cancer lined the inner wall of her body cavity from her pelvis to her kidneys. Her lymph nodes were inflamed. She had likely been in a great deal of pain.

Mitch believed she couldn’t be helped. He picked up the phone.

Nicole was home with a bad case of the flu when she got the call.

The decision was heartbreaking but clear. Mitch helped administer a cocktail of pentobarbital to further sedate her and potassium chloride to stop her heart. Tasul died within minutes.

Afterward, Nicole arrived at the zoo. Tasul lay on the operating table while her keepers cried and traded stories during a makeshift wake.

They could touch her as much as they wanted now.

• • •

Just days after she had shared the enclosure with Tasul, Nora found herself alone again. For the first time in Oregon, the keepers put her on public display, allowing her to build a whole new fan base. She seemed to thrive when she had an audience.

Before Tasul died, the gift shop had devoted its most prominent real estate to polar bear T-shirts, polar bear snow globes, polar bear ceramic statuettes, polar bear water bottles.

Nora’s name was embossed in gold letters on black ribbon tied loosely around the neck of every one of the smaller stuffed bears.

A fluffy jumbo polar bear sat atop the display case with a much smaller stuffed animal tucked under its big left paw. It was meant to depict Nora’s new harmonious life with Tasul. But the staging on the display shelf was the closest the two bears would get.

Winter brought snow to Portland, and for the first time, visitors saw Nora in an environment that looked similar to her natural habitat. She romped through the yard as fat flakes fell around her. She pressed close to the glass as zoo staff engaged her in a game of peekaboo. In one of the coldest and snowiest winters the Pacific Northwest had ever seen, Nora’s warm breath steamed the glass.

After visitors left, she interacted with the security guards, following them along the exhibit and splashing in the pool to get their attention. She put her nose to the glass, trying to smell their coffee. When custodians washed the windows with giant, furry cleaning mitts, Nora’s paws mirrored them from the other side.

Nora was ornery before the crowds arrived. She stomped and chuffed. To Nicole, it seemed like Nora was complaining that no one had come to see her.

As soon as the first people showed up, the growls stopped and Nora belly-flopped into the pool straight toward the windows.

It was great for social media videos and for the crowds.

But that isn’t how polar bears are supposed to act.

• • •

It’s impossible to know all the lessons that Nora would have learned from her mother if she’d stayed with her, but experts know that key skills are impulse and temper control.

Of the eight species of bear, only polar bears are dedicated hunters. They rarely scavenge or forage. They hunt seals on sea ice, a skill that requires cunning and patience, traits usually taught by mom.

Nora had not learned those lessons. She paced less, either because of the medication or because she was settling in now that Tasul was gone. But she was still prone to tantrums. She barked and batted her food bowls across the floor. When frustrated or anxious, she turned her back on her keepers, shunning them.

The fits were hard for the keepers to watch, but all animals, even humans, need to learn to deal with adversity. Her handlers talked constantly about how to help her.

Soon after Tasul died, Jen Degroot and the other keepers started a relaxation exercise for polar bears they called “Zen sessions.”

On a rainy day in December, Jen prepared for one of the sessions, loading a pie tin with lake smelt. Nora was only a year old, but she could read people and their energy. Jen took a series of deep breaths to center herself.

A few steps from the zoo kitchen, down a corridor lined with barred doors, Jen called out to Nora, who came lumbering up to an opening. Jen knelt on a piece of cardboard to insulate her knees from the cold concrete and began to offer fish through a gap in the bars.

No words were spoken, but Nora lay down immediately, head resting on her fluffy paws. Jen began feeding Nora the smelt at 5-second intervals. To a casual observer, it wouldn't look very Zen, but Jen took careful mental notes.

Between fish, the cub let out a low growl and shook her head. Her vocalizations were important. If she could wait for the next fish without stressing, it meant she was learning patience.

Nora was still in a critical stage of development. What she learned during her first two years would dictate how she interacted with other bears, which would be important for breeding. And it would affect her quality of life, which, to her keepers, was most important.

The keepers practiced the Zensessions with Nora every day. She improved through winter and early spring, but Nora was still missing something that her keepers couldn’t provide: the companionship of another bear.

The zoo had been planning for years to tear down its polar bear facility and build a new one. Demolition had been postponed twice for Nora’s sake.

With Tasul gone, the zoo would not be bringing in another bear. They’d be shipping Nora out.

She needed a new home. Again.

• • •

One April morning, Nicole watched Nora walk up a ramp toward her den. The young bear seemed playful, as usual, but her gait was off.

That’s really weird, Nicole thought to herself. That’s new.

Nora was favoring her front left leg. It looked like the elbow bowed out just a little. Nicole called the zoo vet, who came by later that day.

By the time Mitch arrived, Nora couldn't put pressure on her left front leg, and her elbow jutted out as she walked.

She’d developed a habit of jumping into the pool and slamming against the window with her front paws. Mitch hoped she was just sore from playing, but he suspected it was more.

Mitch knew about her history with metabolic bone disease, so he asked the vets in Columbus for Nora’s old X-rays.

In May, Nora was still limping. Mitch sedated her and took another set of X-rays.

One of the bones in her forearm was stunted, and because the pieces didn’t fit right, her elbow was being forced out. He sent the X-rays to orthopedic surgeons around the country.

“All joints are trashed,” a vet from another zoo wrote in the assessment. “She is or will be an arthritic mess, especially because she is such a big animal.”

The surface where Nora’s bones met was "so F-ed up," the vet wrote.

Joints require a high degree of precision, especially in an animal like Nora, who nowweighed 330 pounds. If the bones don’t match perfectly, like a piston in a cylinder, the joints wear out.

That was happening to Nora. During those few weeks back in Columbus when she didn’t get sufficient vitamins and calcium, Nora’s bones had softened and her left elbow had become deformed. Her keepers in Ohio thought they had corrected the problem, but they hadn’t.

Any surgery would be complicated and might make things worse. Operating on Nora was ruled out.

Meanwhile, her anxiety and aggressionintensified.It was hardto tell if she had outgrown the dose of antidepressants or if she was in pain, but Mitch upped her dose of Prozac either way.

He added two daily doses of anti-inflammatory pain medications to the schedule of drugs Nora was taking. Experts recommended she spend as much time as possible in the water to ease the load on her joints. Nora already loved the water.

Other than that, there was little they could do.

kwilliams@oregonian.com; @sfkale

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REACT AND ACT

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP POLAR BEARS

EDUCATE CHILDREN ABOUT POLAR BEARS AND CLIMATE CHANGE


• Contest for kids: Draw Nora for chance to win an iPad
• Gather your friends and play the Path of the Polar Bear board game • Test your polar bear knowledge with a crossword and word search • Send us your Nora coloring pages and you might see them on OregonLive.com

DONATE TO GROUPS THAT HELP POLAR BEARS AND FIGHT THE EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

DISCUSS THE ISSUES

COMMENT ON THIS PROJECT: Click here to tell us what you think

Talk about the issues at school, at the dinner table or with friends. Here are a few starting points:

What would you have done after seeing how Nora reacted to meeting Tasul?

Do you agree or disagree with zoo critics who say containing animals for any reason is cruel? Why?

Should zoos conduct research on animals? Why or why not?

THE LONELIEST POLAR BEAR

CHAPTER FIVE: SURVIVAL

THE LONELIEST POLAR BEAR (2)

By Kale Williams
The Oregonian | OregonLive

Nora’s nose quivered as the smells of the Oregon Zoo blew through her yard.

Polar bears can detect a seal from 20 miles, so she must have inhaled the scent of the penguins over in Pacific Shores, the hot fried dough of the elephant ear cart, the orangutans dangling from their fingers in the Red Ape Reserve and even the coyotes roaming the West Hills of Portland. None of it would seem strange to her. The aromas of many continents had mingled in her imagination all her life.

On land, she moved awkwardly, her back feet pigeon-toed and front legs slightly bowed, but in the water, she was majestic.

She clambered out of the pool and shook a cylindrical aura of droplets from her thick fur. She blinked in the sunlight fracturing off the turquoise water. She loved to snag the head of a bristle brush and position herself with her rump in the pool. With a swift arc of her neck, she would fling the toy over herself and then execute a back dive after it.

Every time she did, the shrieks of her fans echoed through the viewing area and off the climate change infographics.

“Don’t you want to snuggle her?”

“She must be so lonely.”

Over in the zoo’s gift shop,Nora’s name had disappeared from the polar bear merchandise as her time in Portland neared an end. All that remained were a few polar bear baby bibs, a smattering of refrigerator magnets and the last of the shiny ceramic figurines relegated to a remote corner of the store.

Her final day on public display was a mild Sunday in September, a respite from a scorching summer. That morning, keepers tossed down cardboard boxes wrapped like going-away presents. After she shredded the colorful paper, the enclosure looked like a polluted, abused beach.

“Norais going to a new home in Utah to be with another bear,” a volunteer explained to the crowd, though he left out the extent of her emotional troubles.

The Association of Zoos and Aquariums had found a companion to joinNorain her new home. A bear named Hope would be traveling from Toledo, Ohio. Hope’s mom was Nora’s grandmother, so Hope wasNora’s aunt.

Both bears would be sent to Utah’s Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, which had recently lost its beloved bear, Rizzo, to kidney failure. Hogle had an experienced staff and a newer polar bear exhibit called Rocky Shores.

The cubs had vastly different upbringings, but that was good. Hope had been raised by her polar bear mother and knew more about being a bear thanNoradid.Nora and Hope were both about to turn 2, the age when wild bears leave their mothers and set out on their own.

For much of her last day, Nora padded gingerly around the yard, her limp imperceptible to those who didn’t know to look for it.

She pressed her face against the bars that led to her swim flume, where a researcher had measured her oxygen use on the zoo’s underwater treadmill. In the afternoon, she napped in a mound of manufactured snow.

“She may not understand the importance of this day like we do,” the volunteer said to the crowd.

In the back of the viewing area, spinning placards showed visitors “10 things you can do to help save polar bears,” such as driving less or turning off lights.

A toddler fiddled with the first sign indifferently as his father sat on a bench posting a video of Nora online. A few feet away, a globe showed the Arctic sea ice in stark relief.

“That’s where it was in 2005, and that’s where it was in 2016,” another father said to his son.

“It’s all shrinking,” the boy replied.

• • •

THE LONELIEST POLAR BEAR (3)

In the Arctic, the problems Nora’s wild counterparts face can be reduced to one thing: the search for food.

Polar bears have been observed eating walrus and small whales, but up to 90 percent of their diet is ringed seal. Seal blubber is the only food dense enough in calories and plentiful enough in Arctic waters to support an animal that can grow to 1,200 pounds.

Polar bears rely on cunning, patience and brute strength to hunt their main prey. A bear can smell a seal through 2 feet of ice. It locates the air holes the seal uses to breathe, and it waits. The wait can last for days. When the seal surfaces, the bear plunges its long neck into the water, hauls out the seal and crushes its skull.

Even a small seal contains 100,000 calories, enough to sustain a bear for a week. When the ice melts in the summer, most bears head to land to forage or fast. Polar bears have been seen eating birds, grass and trash on the outskirts of villages and towns. But nothing they eat on land comes close to satisfying their caloric needs.

Without ice, polar bears can’t hunt. They lose weight and give birth to fewer, weaker cubs. Sickly cubs are less likely to survive, so as ice disappears, so does the polar bear.

• • •

Off the coast of Alaska, the shadow of a helicopter swept across the snow. A hundred feet up, in the passenger seat, Karyn Rode wore a headset and goggles and scanned the craggy landscape for tracks.

Every spring since 2008, Karyn had traveled to her remote research base 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the Chukchi Sea. The open terrain was Nora’s ancestral homeland. Her father, Nanuq, was orphaned about 200 miles from here. Polar bears can roam farther than that in a week.

The frozen sea looked like a whitewashed version of the moon. It always amazed Karyn that anything could live out here.

“Is that a track?” Karyn’s voice crackled over the headset as she guided the pilot. “I think that’s a track.”

The paw prints crossed and faded out in blown snow.

A wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey based in Portland, Karyn had studied polar bears long before she started working with Tasul at the Oregon Zoo. Her research was cited in 2008, when polar bears were identified as threatened under the Endangered Species Act — the first imperiled animal ever listed due to climate change.

The helicopter bobbed and lurched. Early in the afternoon, Karyn spotted a bear lumbering across flat, open ice.

“You see it right in front of us there?” the pilot asked over the headset.

“I do,” Karyn said.

The helicopter swooped low, and the bear broke into a lope heading north. Another biologist stood in her seat, aimed a tranquilizer gun at the bear’s shoulder and fired a dart.

Within minutes, the pilot landed near the sleeping bear and Karyn went to work.

First, Karyn took samples: blood, hair, stool and a biopsy of fat. The bear groaned and twitched. She ran a tape measure along the bear’s length and around its midsection. She and another biologist set up a heavy-duty tripod with a net and a chain hoist. They rolled the bear onto the net and lifted it to get its weight: 542 pounds.

To track the bear if it were ever caught again, they tattooed its inner lip. This one was Bear 21736.

It was a female, so Karyn fitted it with a radio collar. Male necks were too big.

“Good looking bear,” Karyn wrote in her log.

She stuffed the test tubes into a box lined with hand warmers so they wouldn’t freeze. Later, Karyn would analyze the samples based on what she learned from Tasul at the Oregon Zoo. The results would tell Karyn what the wild bears had eaten.

About an hour later, the bear began to rouse and lifted its head in time to see Karyn’s helicopter take off.

The information she gathered illustrated how bears were adapting to their changing habitat. The ice in the Chukchi Sea was retreating faster than elsewhere on the continent: nearly 20 percent per decade. And it was breaking up earlier than she’d ever seen it.

Because the sea was shallow, the bears still found seals. But the wide, flat areas Karyn needed to sedate the bears were few and far between. Many parts of the Chukchi were slush and open water.

In a good year, Karyn tagged more than 30 bears. This year, she caught three.

Ten days before her trip was to end, the ice ran out. For the first time, Karyn and her team had to pack up early and leave.

• • •

THE LONELIEST POLAR BEAR (4)

The Hogle Zoo sits at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, which tower over the eastern edge of Salt Lake City. Nora arrived at her new home in mid-September on a 100-degree day.

Zookeeper Kaleigh Jablonski had worked with the zoo’s previous polar bear, Rizzo, for almost three years. But the Rocky Shores exhibit, an $18 million project built in 2012, had been vacant since Rizzo died in April.

Kaleigh had imagined the exhibit would stay empty for a while, because polar bears aren’t in abundant supply. When she heard two cubs were coming, she was overjoyed.

She’d loved animals since shesaw a marine mammal show at age 6. She’d worked with giraffes, cape buffalo and seals before moving to the zoo in Salt Lake City, where she spent most of her time with bears.

Kaleigh knew Nora and Hope had fans who would be watching to see that everything went smoothly. Meeting after meeting had been held to plan for their arrival.

Nora’s long-term prognosis remained unknown. Her keepers were confident that once she got comfortable with her companion, she wouldn’t need anxiety medication anymore.

As for her bones, they wouldn’t know much until she finished growing in a couple of years. In the worst case, her adult weight would stress her joints and cause so much pain that she would have to be put down. More likely, she would deal with some discomfort and a slight limp for the rest of her life.

When Nora arrived, Kaleigh felt the pressure of it all.

Then she saw her. Nora walked out of her travel crate and into the small yard where she would spend time in quarantine alone. Flood lights illuminated the gravel as Nora cut straight to the pool.

“Hey, baby girl! You’re here!” Kaleigh squealed. She couldn’t help it. Even the fiercest animals at the zoo got the baby talk.

• • •

About 200 miles south of where Karyn Rode conducted her research, in an Eskimo village on the westernmost point of mainland Alaska, the story of Gene Rex Agnaboogok and the polar bear is legend.

Just 155 people live in Wales along a quarter-mile strip with one road, one public internet connection and one truck buried to its windows in snow.

On a clear day, villagers can see Russia across the Bering Strait.

Gene still lives here, in the house where nearly 30 years ago he played with two orphaned cubs, including Nora’s father.

His straight, black hair is streaked gray, and a white goatee circles his mouth. The scar on his leg that the polar bear gave him has nearly faded. He still hunts by snowmobile, but he is 60 now and careful when climbing icebergs.

“You don’t heal easy like when you’re younger.”

At Gene’s house, the wind has weathered the green siding gray. Inside, the faint smell of old fish mixes with the aroma of cigarette ash. Most of the floor, chipped down to the plywood, is taken up by his mattress, piled with sheets and blankets. The house is warmed by an electric heater and a stove, which Gene fed with wood as he boiled dried cranberries into juice.

His job cleaning out honey pots doesn’t afford him as much time to hunt as he had in 1988. Besides, hunting is harder now. The seasons are unpredictable.

The walrus and whales come a month earlier than they did when Gene hunted as a teenager. Ice that used to support the weight of a hunter and a snowmobile now flexes and sinks weeks earlier. He used to hack more than 4 feet through ice to hit water. Now, maybe 2 feet.

The last time Gene killed a walrus, the iceberg he butchered it on drifted 20 miles, rocking in the waves the whole time. He had a boat, but Gene was afraid and a long way from home. The same thing happens to polar bears. Ice drifts farther and faster with the warming climate. Scientists found that bears in the Chukchi need to catch three more seals per year to make up for the extra energy they use.

• • •

The people of Wales rely more these days on the two stores in town. But food is not easy to bring to the remote Alaskan coast. And it’s not cheap — especially when 40 percent of the villagers are unemployed and the median income is less than $30,000 a year. Most planes that land here are loaded with food like mayonnaise, ramen and powdered drink mix. A gallon of water is close to $9. A sack of sugar is almost $20. Gas, which runs the boats, four-wheelers and snowmobiles, can cost $8 a gallon.

Down the road from Gene’s house, the tribal elders say that boys still learn to tell when a fox is rabid, to track a moose, to kill an animal without letting it suffer and to use every part. It’s been that way in Wales for hundreds of years.

Gilbert Oxereok learned by listening to stories his grandmother told, then by earning his way onto a hunting boat. Now he teaches his nephews.

“The first thing you’re taught is respect,” he said. “You hunt with respect. When you kill something, you use it. It’s not a game. It’s a way of life.”

He’s 60, just like Gene, and still hunts at least twice a year. In the spring, he hunts to replenish what has been used up over the winter. In the fall, he hunts so he and his family can eat through the cold months. Gilbert, Gene and the others have noticed that things are changing fast.

“I’m not an expert” on climate change, Gilbert said. “I just have to live with it.”

Gilbert sees bare ground where he used to see snowbanks. He sees insects he hasn’t encountered before. A recent issue of National Geographic informed him that shipping is expanding as the waters become easier to navigate, polluting the sea. But Gilbert already knew that. He pulls seals from the water coated in oil and covered in sores because parasites thrive in warmer temperatures. He can’t eat seals like that.

“We just slit the belly and let them sink.”

• • •

Hunters killing fewer polar bears will not save them. Neither will Karyn Rode’s yearly trips to study them. Every bear in every zoo could give blood and walk on a treadmill, and polar bears would still face a grim future.

The only thing that can save polar bears is for the sea to stay frozen. And that can happen only if humans stop spewing heat-trapping gases into the sky.

That’s according to a report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service called the “Polar Bear Conservation Management Plan,” written by more than two dozen scientists. The 100-page document, released in late 2016, is frank.

“Short of action that effectively addresses the primary cause of diminishing sea ice, it is unlikely that polar bears will be recovered.”

For most bears to remain in their habitat, the Arctic can warm no more than 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. In the Paris climate accord, 195 countries agreed to take steps to limit global warming to below that level.

In June, President Donald Trump announced plans to withdraw the United States from the agreement.

The native people and the polar bears hunt on the same ice under the same sky in the same cold air. Gene’s people, the Inupiaq, say that polar bears are smarter than most people, and they understand their native language. If a polar bear attacks, the legend goes, just talk to it in Inupiaq — “Adaa-piglutin!” — and it will listen and go away.

They see that the bear Gene made an orphan, and the daughter of that bear born in a zoo, and the women who raised her, and the researchers who studied her, and the people who come to see her are all connected, just as commuters in Atlanta and factories in Detroit are connected to fishermen off the Alaskan coast. Just as ice melting in one place causes flooding in another.

After Gene shot Nora’s grandmother, he walked close to her and shot her again. He did that because his parents taught him that respect means never letting another creature suffer.

If you do, they warned him, you will eventually suffer the very same fate.

• • •

Two keepers from Oregon had accompanied Nora to Salt Lake City. Now they stood to the side.

They knew that at Hogle, Nora would have, in theory, everything she needed for a good life. She’d have bucketloads of smelt. She’d have more open space. She’d have an expert medical team keeping an eye on her bones. She’d have a polar bear her own age — a relative, even — to keep her company.

And there would always be her fans, more and more of them flocking to see this beautiful, charismatic girl, limp and all.

Would that be good enough?

Her keepers in Columbus could make her warm, hold her tight and wade into the water to show her it was safe. Her handlers in Portland could teach her patience. And now her keepers in Salt Lake City would manage her pain and help her adapt yet again.

But they couldn’t conjure the Arctic from concrete, or turn the ocean into ice or set Nora free. No matter what anyone did, Nora’s life would never unfold as nature intended. But neither would the life of the bear that Karyn Rode’s research team darted in the snow.

They knew Nora’s odds were long, and they had weighed those odds against the consequences of doing nothing. Their promise to Nora, and to Bear 21736, was not that they always get it right, but that they try.

They try because polar bears will die out unless people care enough to change. Making people care is what Nora does as well as any animal on Earth.

On that first day in Salt Lake City, when Nora left her crate, she walked past her Oregon keepers and went straight toward Kaleigh. The keeper crouched on the other side of the metal fence as Nora approached until the two stood nose-to-nose, faces inches apart, for what felt like forever.

Then Kaleigh started to cry.

kwilliams@oregonian.com; @sfkale

Scroll down for ways to get involved

MORE PROJECT NORA • What happens when temperatures rise?What you can do to helpNora: She just might be the cutest cub on the internet

To get an email alert when special projects are available:

REACT AND ACT

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP POLAR BEARS

EDUCATE CHILDREN ABOUT POLAR BEARS AND CLIMATE CHANGE


• Contest for kids: Draw Nora for chance to win an iPad
• Read “Hope for Nora,” a children’s book about the polar bear’s journey • Gather your friends and play the Path of the Polar Bear board game • Test your polar bear knowledge with a crossword and word search • Send us your Nora coloring pages and you might see them on OregonLive.com

DONATE TO GROUPS THAT HELP POLAR BEARS AND FIGHT THE EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

DISCUSS THE ISSUES

COMMENT ON THIS PROJECT: Click here to tell us what you think

Talk about the issues at school, at the dinner table or with friends. Here are a few starting points:

What have you learned while reading The Loneliest Polar Bear?

Do you feel different about zoos or about climate change?

How might you change your behavior after reading this series?

What can humans do to save polar bears?

What do you think is the best outcome for Nora?

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