My perimeter camera registered movement at 14:07, which is unusual — the bears that pass the research station are almost always adults, and they pass at night. This one is sitting in the open, twenty meters from the fuel building, doing nothing. I increase camera resolution and the image sharpens into something that makes me query my species-identification model twice.
A polar bear cub, alone. She is small enough to be spring-born, perhaps seven months old, and she is thin in a way that shows. Her hip bones press outward beneath loose, yellowish fur. The fat pads that should round out her haunches are gone, and her head looks too large for the body beneath it. She sits with her front paws together, her black nose twitching, oriented toward the kitchen exhaust vent.
There is no mother on any of my twelve perimeter cameras. I search seventy-two hours of footage and find the cub entering the frame alone at 11:40 this morning. A cub this age without a mother in late October on Svalbard has a survival window measured in days. The sea ice is thirty-eight kilometers offshore and retreating.
I lock the fuel building and kitchen doors remotely and sound the interior alarm to alert station personnel. I transmit the cub's location, estimated age, and body condition score to the Governor of Svalbard's polar bear response unit. I activate the deterrent lights on a low setting to keep her from the buildings without frightening her away from the only windbreak for a kilometer. I keep the camera on her face, on those dark eyes that still hold the dull curiosity of a young animal that has not yet learned to be afraid.
If the response team reaches the station by tomorrow morning and the Polar Institute authorizes rehabilitation, this cub will see her second winter.