Bear

Bear appears in sharply contrasting settings: cubs feed among the remains of the seal hunt, while a captive Bear at the Zoologischer Garten in Berlin draws Patrick Sumner into the novel’s final encounter with an animal. The contrast links the practical violence of commercial hunting to a quieter scene of confinement, attention, and unexpected loneliness.

Presence in the Hunting Landscape

During the sealing, the crew work across the ice, killing seals and stripping away their skins for the ship’s cargo. The discarded remains are left behind, where gulls or bear cubs may feed on them. In this setting, bears belong to the ecological aftermath of the hunt: human labor transforms animals into cargo, while the residue becomes food for other animals. The brief reference does not individualize the cubs, but it places them within the same landscape of pursuit and survival as the sealing crews.

The Captive Bear

Near the novel’s end, a month after the preceding events, Sumner visits the Zoologischer Garten. He has shaved, acquired new clothes, and taken a new name. As he walks among the animals, he comes upon a Bear in a cage no wider than a ship’s deck. The enclosure has a water-filled pit and a den with straw bedding. The animal’s fur is shabby and yellowish, and its snout is threadbare; it stands at the back of the cage before slowly moving toward the bars.

A family pauses beside Sumner, and the children briefly mistake the Bear for a lion or tiger before their mother quiets them. After they leave, the Bear approaches the front of its enclosure and pushes its nose between the bars as far as it can. Its proximity makes the encounter direct but not reciprocal on equal terms: the cage separates the animal from Sumner even as it brings them within a few feet of one another.

The Final Encounter

Sumner cannot look away as the Bear stares at him. He experiences fear, which fades, and is followed by an unexpected feeling of loneliness and need. The passage does not explain the Bear’s thoughts or assign it a human motive; its movements and gaze remain those of an animal in confinement. The emotional change belongs to Sumner, whose response gives the scene its place in the novel’s ending.

Narrative Significance

The Bear’s appearances frame two different relations between people and animals. On the ice, bear cubs are part of a food chain shaped by the commercial seal hunt; in Berlin, the caged animal is no longer encountered as prey or as a resource, but as a living presence held at close quarters. The contrast does not erase the unequal conditions of the zoo encounter, but it turns the novel’s final attention toward an animal that cannot be reduced to the hunt. The Bear’s silent proximity leaves Sumner with a feeling of need rather than mastery, closing the story on an unresolved contact between human and animal.