Polar Bear Attack, Krosspynten near Svalbard, .44 magnum, 1988

 Image from wikimedia naturepics online, 2010

At 6 a.m., on September 12, 1988, a trapper and his friend were staying at a cabin at Krosspynten, part of the Svalbard archipelago, which is under the jurisdiction of Norway. They were woken by a polar bear boar which had gained entrance to the cabin hallway (probably the air or weather lock to the cabin). The trapper had a .44 magnum revolver. Krosspynten is about a hundred and fifty  miles north and eighty miles east of Longyearbyen. Mushamna is about one hundred miles north of Longyearbyen.

Map of Svalbard, public domain

The incident report was uncovered with a Freedom of information Act (FOIA) request by AmmoLand. Individual names have been redacted. The report was translated to English, so it has been lightly edited for readability, and a fictitious name substituted. From the FOIA account, incident 142.

Oscar and a friend were staying at the cabin at Krosspynten. At 6AM a bear had entered the hallway of the cabin and woke them up. The bear had been rummaging in there for a few seconds before they knocked on the wall to drive it away. The bear went outside. A few seconds later it came around to the front of cabin and smashed the window of the room where they were. The bear backed up then accelerated  and threw itself at the window. It destroyed the window bar and made the wall of the cabin bulge dangerously inwards. At that moment Oscar thought the wall would collapse. The bear was halfway inside the cabin, its front paws, head and a part of the upper body were through the window.

Oscar thought the wall would collapse if he didn't do anything. He had no choice but to shoot the bear. He had his revolver by the bed, and fired one shot in the throat of the bear. The bear tumbled out of the window. Oscar got up and fired one more shot with the revolver.  The bear retreated. Oscar accessed his rifle. The bear managed to get about 100m from the cabin before Oscar was able to kill it with the rifle. The revolver was a .44 caliber magnum.

Oscar  skinned the bear and hung the meat up at Krosspynten. He took the skin back to Mushamna, where he called up the Governor of Svalbard and reported what had happened. Oscar is an experienced trapper. His experience with polar bears began before polar bears were a protected species.  Last winter he had over 140 polar bear visits at his trapping station near Mushamna. The last polar bear he shot was in 1973.  He believes he has significant experience in dealing with polar bears. This bear was skinny. Everything indicates the bear was coming inside to get food no matter what. Oscar did not like to have to kill a protected animal, but the choice, at that point, was the bear or Oscar and his friend.

Opinion:

This was almost certainly a predatory attack. The bear knew there were people in the cabin. It was hungry. It directed its assault on the structure toward a way to get at the humans inside.  This shows the advantage of having a pistol close by. Oscar was able to access the revolver and shoot the bear in the throat without having to fumble with a rifle at close quarters, or perhaps to chamber a round. Revolvers are normally kept loaded. The bear was probably mortally wounded with the pistol shots, but remained ambulatory until Oscar was able to access his rifle and kill the bear from a hundred meters away. Oscar was able to avoid killing a polar bear since 1973, the year polar bears became a protected species by international law.

Polar bear and human conflicts have increased since 1973, exactly what would be expected with increasing polar bear populations (recovering from unregulated hunting) and increasing tourism in the area.

 

 

©2022 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

Gun Watch