Chapter 2
WESTON
“I don’t understand why no one cares.” I grabbed my polar bear stuffie, Bear-Bear, the one I’d begged my grandfather for the time I went to the zoo and saw a real one for the first time.
That was the beginning of a lifetime of what people called my “special interest,” or my “obsession,” or in some cases, “my unhealthy attachment” to polar bears.
But it was none of those things. It was empathy and care.
Seeing those bears in that small enclosure, swimming in water with fake icebergs, being gawked at and fed at regular intervals so people could gape at them through huge windows that showed them both above and below the surface… it had broken my young heart.
I’d needed that bear to remind me they deserved love too.
Of course, at the time, I hadn’t figured that out.
I thought I was saving Bear-Bear from the zoo and that would somehow save them all.
It didn’t, no matter what four-year-old me believed.
All these years later, they were still there.
And when one of them passed, they quickly replaced it with another.
They couldn’t not have their star attractions.
It was fair to say that that single trip was the most influential outing of my life. Watching them in captivity that day had never left me. I still pictured Luan, the youngest bear at the time, trying to hide behind the fake iceberg when I closed my eyes after a long day of work.
Back in elementary school, I read all the kids’ books about bears, fiction and nonfiction.
When we had to pick an animal for a project or do a diorama of a habitat, there were polar bears there.
Anytime a kid talked about Santa living with the penguins and polar bears, I had to set them straight.
Polar bears and penguins did not live together anywhere but in zoos.
I was a pain in the butt, I’m sure, but I couldn’t help myself.
When it came time for college, I majored in zoology.
And once again, every time we were given a choice, I geared my work toward polar bears.
While I understood all the reasons why zoos were important and how studying animals in captivity could help them in the long run, something about it still felt very unsettling and wrong.
As I went from my master’s to my doctorate, I tried to find ways to do it better.
We had computers that could help with analysis.
Drones to help with observation. We had tag-and-release programs that were better than some of the alternatives but still came with its own set of problems. There were so many things we could do, but one thing was for sure, we couldn’t ignore them completely.
Not with the way the weather had been so erratic and the way humans had been behaving.
If nothing else, we needed to protect them, to keep them from becoming the next to join the extinction list.
That was one of the reasons why I was so focused on Bramble Woods.
It was a small town, nowhere near where polar bears should be living, but there had been polar bear sightings there for generations.
At first, I thought it was like the Abominable Snowman, where there were sightings but no actual proof.
Only, the more I dug, the more I’d found the pictures, some of them from long before AI was a possibility, long before there was computer manipulation software, back before cameras had flex film.
The documented sightings went from one a decade to a handful a generation to now, when there were multiple each year.
By all the data I’d been able to collect, there were more polar bears there now than ever before, and they shouldn’t have been there at all.
It wasn’t their natural habitat. Or was it, and we’d been wrong about polar bears this entire time?
One thing I knew was that I’d never feel at ease until I at least tried to figure this puzzle out.
And that was why I wrote my first grant proposal three years ago.
I wanted to study the reasons they were there in the most ethical and non-invasive way I could.
It was only a matter of time before they would hunt a dog or hurt some livestock and the humans resorted to hunting them down, or a video clip went viral on social media and some do-gooder group decided to “save” them by relocating them to places they’d never lived before, or they became a tourist attraction and a human got hurt, which would bring us right back to them being hunted.
I opened up my work email, still holding Bear-Bear.
Talk about being a mature, responsible adult.
I couldn’t help it. I’d been opening up disappointing emails since I started writing grant proposals, and there was only one left still pending, one that was to be announced today. Everything was riding on this email.
Just as I thought, there was a notification from the final grant waiting for me.
They loved my proposal, but it was something they wouldn’t be investing in at this time.
It read like every other rejection I’d received.
At least they sent one; many I found out only after reading a press release stating who did get the grant.
Tears started to flow. I hated it. I hated that I couldn’t do anything, that this was something that would require more money than I’d earn in my lifetime, that I was out of options.
My phone rang. It was Stevenson. He’d been my best friend since undergrad, and my roommate all of those years.
His grad school had taken him to California, unlike mine.
We were still good friends who talked often, but we didn’t see each other nearly as much as I wanted to.
He had a way of knowing that I needed to talk, just like now.
“Hey, were your ears ringing?” I asked.
“You sound like my uncle Frank.” He chuckled. “Did you turn 70 or something?”
“How is your uncle 70?”
“Because he refuses to be called ‘great.’ He thinks it… you know, makes him sound old.”
“Because he is?”
“Yeah, well, don’t tell him that when he sees you.”
“Why would he see me?” I’d heard about his uncle over the years, but had always pictured him as our parents' age. Not older than my grandparents.
“Because he wants to talk to you about your research project.”
I was sure I’d misheard him. From what I remembered, his grandfather was a businessman. But then again, I hadn’t known he was more of a grandparent than a fun uncle, so what did I know.
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he’s loaded and needs something to do with his money.”
Stevenson and I had shared a dorm on campus, but his family had always wanted him to move out and offered to buy him a house. He said no because he was staying with me. It made sense he came from more money than I realized, but funding my project was a lot of money.
“And how does he know about my research project?”
“Because I may have mentioned I didn’t know what to get you for your birthday, and he asked what you wanted.
And I told him for one of your grant proposals to be accepted.
” Stevenson understood me well enough to know I’d have asked him not to share, but also that I wouldn’t be mad if he did. A heads-up would’ve been nice, though.
“I don’t want charity. You know that.” Even if it was for the polar bears. This was legit scientific research and should be treated as such. If not, no one would take the results seriously.
“It’s not charity.”
“How isn’t it charity if he gives me the money as a way to give you something to gift me for my birthday?” And also, how much money do you need for that to be a reasonable response over suggesting a watch or a new set of headphones?
“Because he cares about animals too.”
“And how does he think that I can make a difference, that my proposal is any good?”
“I supposed he doesn’t, but I do, and he trusts me.”
It didn’t make sense that he would give me the money, especially without talking to me or hearing my pitch.
But when the three of us got on a Zoom together the next day, I quickly found out he knew exactly what my study proposal was thanks to Stevenson.
When I’d given my grant proposal to him to proofread, he’d sent a copy to his uncle.
This wasn’t an all-of-a-sudden decision, which had me not completely comfortable with the entire scenario.
He could love his great-nephew, but this wasn’t typical “I’ll do you a favor” money. It didn’t matter how rich he was, he was going to feel the amount I asked for.
“I promise I won’t get in the way,” his uncle insisted, when I started to waver, unsure if I should take it or not. I wanted it so badly I could taste it, but also, I couldn’t risk the project by taking the wrong money, money with strings attached that I hadn’t seen when accepting it.
“Good, because I won’t cross my boundaries. I want to do this research, but I need to do it in a way that will 100% benefit the polar bears, not humans. There is no patent at the end of this. There’s no money-making end in sight.”
“If I wanted to make money, I wouldn’t be investing in animals. I’d be investing in pharmaceuticals or technology,” he insisted.
We went back and forth, with Stevenson basically on the other camera as my support buddy. In the end, it came down to being able to do the research now by accepting, or hoping that next year my grant writing would go better, which was highly unlikely given my track record.
Ultimately, I accepted and closed out the Zoom.
“I promise you, I’m going to protect them,” I vowed to Bear-Bear.
I didn’t know how that would look or what I might uncover there, but that was a vow I intended to keep.