On a dazzling spring day in Svalbard, I was driving my snowmobile across a land of brilliant whites and blues. The air was so clear that I felt like I could see all the way to the North Pole, if only the Earth didn’t curve. Behind the other snowmobilers and me lay mountains, glaciers, and valleys still blanketed by what had likely been the last blizzard of the season a couple days prior.

We had already been snowmobiling for several hours from the Isfjord Radio Hotel, having come up over an enormous glacier (no stopping allowed in case a crevasse suddenly opened) and past a ship abandoned in the 1900s. We’d even made a pit stop at an ice cave and descended briefly into its marbled onyx depths. What more could we wish for on what had already been an otherworldly day?

By late afternoon, we had ridden into the interior of the Arctic archipelago, edging closer to Longyearbyen. The coast was now 15 kilometers away. So, too, was any hope of glimpsing a polar bear – or so we thought. Ursus maritimus, the Latin name for the species meaning “sea bear,” is quintessentially a marine mammal. Polar bears like to prey upon seals, so they prefer to stay out on the sea ice to hunt, or at least near shore so they can dive into the water for a phocine feast.

So imagine my surprise when, ripping across the middle of Svalbard, our guide unexpectedly signaled for us to stop. We slowed down and parked our machines in a neat row. “There are some polar bear tracks here,” she stated, rifle at the ready case of an unwanted encounter. Clearly, this wasn’t her first rodeo. The other snowmobilers and I, however, were trying to keep our collective cool as we hopped off our vehicles. With hushed excitement, we began admiring the enormous set of paw prints that seemed to have come up from Coles Bay to the north before disappearing into a straight line far into the distance – fortunately, away from us.

People patiently took turns photographing the paw prints. When it was my turn, I gingerly placed one hand and then the other in the air over the paw print. I couldn’t believe that the combined length of my two hands could fit inside the paw print. Whatever bear had walked here must have been massive.

The nanook, as Inuit call polar bears, bears the frightful distinction of being the Earth’s largest living land carnivore. A guide published in 1860 accompanying the New York City exhibit of a menagerie belonging to legendary circus ringmaster and animal trainer I.A. Van Amburgh described, “As the lion is the tyrant of the African forest, so the bear remains the undisputed master of the icy mountains of Spitsbergen and Greenland.” (Spitsbergen was the original name given to Svalbard by the Dutch upon discovering the mountainous islands. And polar bears were actually called “white bears” in English until the late eighteenth century – a name which persisted for quite some time after, as the page from the guide at right illustrates.)

The largest male polar bear ever recorded, which was killed in 1960 in Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, maxed out at 2,210 pounds (1,000 kg) and 12 feet (3.7 m) tall. The bear’s size was likely the reason for its demise, as it was hunted as a sport trophy by a man from Oregon named Arthur Dubs. The ill-fated animal was subsequently displayed at the Seattle World Fair in 1962, for which the city’s Space Needle was also built.

Polar bears dwarf in comparison to the African bush elephant, the largest land animal, which can weigh up to 13,000 pounds (6,000 kg). Those gentle giants, however, are herbivores. The tusked grazers don’t stalk and hunt humans in the unsettling manner for which polar bears, uniquely among bears, are notorious. The Arctic species evolved in a sparse environment with no natural predators. Though Arctic Indigenous Peoples traditionally hunt polar bears, encounters were not frequent enough to teach polar bears to instinctively run upon encountering a human. Instead, when desperate, they might see us as a food source. (To imagine what it feels like to become prey, look no further than the late Australian philosopher Val Plumwood’s haunting essay on being prey, written after she survived a crocodile attack.)

Hungry like a polar bear

Polar bears are hungriest in late March and early April, just before seals start to pup. Unlike other bears, they don’t hibernate. Polar bears hunt all year long and are actually most active in winter, when sea ice is abundant. During this period, though, they burn through most of their fat reserves.

The paw prints we spotted in the middle of Svalbard were likely made by a polar bear that should have been able to start feasting again given that it was early May. Still, given the threat to human life posed by the Arctic’s apex predator, our guide was probably relieved that the animal was nowhere to be seen. Most of us tourists, however, were disappointed. The paw prints seemed to be the closest we’d come to seeing a polar bear. Our guide estimated that it must have laid the tracks within the past few hours.

Lingering done and photos snapped, we hopped back on our snowmobiles and charged on across the snowfield. The rumble of our motors roared through the air. As the wind rushed against my face, I looked off to the right towards where the paw prints had led, still hoping to see something. Five minutes passed. At least I came close, I reassured myself.

Suddenly our guide raised her arm again, motioning for us to stop. My heart skipped a beat. Maybe this time, our eagle-eyed guide had spied the beast behind the tracks.

“Over there!” she called out. “There’s a polar bear walking behind three reindeer.” Our guide had found us the icon of the Arctic.

The polar bear, lumbering slowly behind the three trotting ungulates, was nearly a kilometer away. That meant that we could safely stay and watch it. In Svalbard in 2025, a new regulation went into effect mandating that between March and June – when the animals are most famished – people must stay at least 500 meters from a polar bear. Outside of spring, the minimum distance drops to 300 meters.

The regulation was put into place out of an interest of safety for both people and animals. Some Svalbard residents, however, have complained of overregulation, which risks hurting the tourism and film industries. Under previous regulations, no minimum distance was in place, and people only needed to avoid disturbing polar bears.

As far away as we were, it was thrilling to watch a polar bear trundle after three short-legged reindeer, who cantered ahead. Since 2000, polar bears have been known to hunt reindeer on Svalbard. There are much earlier indications of polar bears hunting terrestrial species elsewhere across the Arctic like muskox, as conveyed in the 1923 novel about an Inuit hunter by Clarence Hawkes called The White Czar: A Story of a Polar Bear.

Yet the growing reliance of polar bear diets on terrestrial food sources is likely an adaptation to climate change. As sea ice, the typical hunting platform for seal-snatching polar bears, thins and shrinks, more polar bears are looking for food on land. This bear, however, didn’t seem in much haste.

We watched the bear for about half an hour until it became a tiny dot following three other dots into a valley. Our guide was worried that the animal was headed for an area frequented by snowmobilers. A team of scientists at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) led by Professor Børge Damsgård estimate that the number of encounters between people and polar bears on Svalbard is likely to increase as climate change and diminishing sea ice forces the animals to spend more of their time on land.

I snapped a few photos through the guide’s binoculars, but lacking a proper zoom lens, they hardly do justice to the spectacle. Still, I was thrilled to see a polar bear in its natural environment. Several times, the bear appeared to just be enjoying the beautiful day. At one point, he (our guide thought the bear was a male) laid down in the snow and started frolicking, a fuzzy, surprisingly yellow ball of fur rolling around in the snow. While young bears are white, their seal-oil heavy diet turns their fur yellow as they age.

Human encounters with polar bears on Svalbard may be on the rise. They’re also going viral, as the video of a Russian hotel employee chased by a polar bear in Pyramiden earlier this year demonstrated. (He only escaped an otherwise near-certain mauling because his snowmobile was on and ready to go, for when he shot his rifle, the sound didn’t seem to deter the bear.)

Still, the chance of even seeing a polar bear, let alone having a nasty encounter, remains rare. In the study mentioned above, over 18,000 human-days and 2,000 days spent in the field over two years, the chance of seeing a polar bear on any given day was about 4%. Given that I’d only been in Svalbard for four days on this trip, I counted myself pretty lucky.

For some people, seeing a polar bear ticks off a bucket list. But I feel like it’s just the beginning. While browsing at La Librairie Voyageurs (The Travelers’ Bookstore) the other day in Paris, I came across two books written in French about polar bears – perhaps even more than in English. One was La Mélancolie de l’ours polaire (The Melancholy of the Polar Bear) by French crime writer Mo Malø, while the other was L’ours polaire: Vagabonde des glaces (Polar Bear: Wanderer of the Ice) by Rémy Marion, one of France’s leading bear experts. I bought the second one, which should make for some appropriately wintry reading.

Holiday windows to polar worlds

Despite the abundance of French polar bear books, in Paris, I came across two Christmas window displays that put polar bear and penguins side by side – a juxtaposition that makes all polar researchers grumble. Polar bears live in the Arctic, while penguins live in the Antarctic.

Public education on polar fauna clearly has a ways to go in France. Perhaps the country’s hosting of the first-ever One Planet – Polar Summit in 2023, devoted to preserving the world’s glaciers and poles, did too good a job of bringing the polar regions together.

Regardless of this boreal blunder, France is persisting in the century-old tradition of placing polar bears in shop windows. Around the turn of the century, as consumerism and electrification were becoming more widespread, shops began turning the start of the holiday season into an extravaganza.

In winter 1902 – still four years before Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen successfully navigated the Northwest Passage for the first time – the New York Times reported that merchants who featured a stuffed polar bear in their window were likely to generate extra revenues.

A taxidermist from William Street in Manhattan explained, “People whose business requires them to use stuffed animals and birds as an advertisement generally want an extra duck or dog or bear added to their stock for a month or two preceding and following Christmas.” Increased demand for polar bears in winter boosted the rental prices that taxidermists could command.

Nowadays, most of the polar bears in store windows are the cute, polyester kind rather than the fearsome, lifelike version. This depiction reflects and perpetuates the contemporary perception of polar bears as playful rather than formidable.

Polar bears, though, aren’t the only northern creature gazing out through the glass at wide-eyed children this year. Fortnum and Mason in London, the 330-year-old department store famous for their Christmas displays, have plunged further into the polar depths by featuring narwhals. The store also, however, placed a Highland cow in a frosty valley of the kind likely not seen in Scotland since the Ice Age.

As I enjoyed the British department store’s holiday decorations, freshly baked scone in hand, I thought back to the polar bear I’d spotted on Svalbard and felt grateful for the hyperborean year I’ve had. From skiing to work in Tromsø to snowmobiling to the Isfjord Radio Hotel, exploring Nuuk’s built environment, kayaking around Ilulissat’s icebergs, and publishing my first book with Klaus Dodds, I’m grateful to everyone (animals included) in and beyond the Arctic for all the friendship, support, and joy they’ve provided along the way.

Wishing everyone a very happy holidays!