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matter of weeks, greater precision is impossible and there are no warning signs, no indicators of imminent appearance. One moment there is a snowdrift, the next a black nose, curious eyes blinking into the sunlight, a polar bear mother seeing the world anew and her cubs taking it in for the first time. With just the slightest loss of concentration, the briefest aversion of gaze, the moment can easily be missed.
    In 1982, filmmakers Hugh Miles and Mike Salisbury endured a tortuous month attempting to film a den opening on Svalbard, for a BBC documentary series entitled
Kingdom of the Ice Bear.
Setting out from the archipelago's capital on March 4, they endured several days of storms, an overturned snowmobile, the extreme discomfort of camping on the sea ice and trying to distinguish between cracking floes and approaching bears and wondering which was worse, and the frustration of two false alarms—setting up to film what turned out to be a temporary den, and recording cubs that on review appeared to be suspiciously large and ultimately proved not to be newborns at all.
    On March 29, the filmmakers and their guides stood in the remnants of a temporary snow shelter they had built that had been ruined when, in their absence, it had been visited by a bear that "rather inconsiderately re-emerged straight out through the front wall." Suddenly, Miles "became aware we were being watched." They looked up at a nearby snowbank and saw, poking out of the snow, "a bear's face blinking at us in the bright sun."
    The face retreated into the snow, and Miles and Salisbury set up their cameras in readiness for the bear's reemergence; but not until midafternoon did the head again appear, and then only briefly. By then the sun had disappeared and the wind sliced into them; Miles recognized that—not altogether unexpectedly, given that he had spent several hours sitting still in a half-standing ice hide at 35 degrees below zero—he was shivering almost uncontrollably. The team retreated to their base camp, where Miles clambered into a snug sleeping bag with a warm drink until, after a couple of hours, warmth returned to all but his extremities.
    After a sound night's sleep, Salisbury and the now-recovered Miles returned to the ice house, but the bear poked her head out of the snow just twice in ten hours of observation. Finally, on April 1, they saw what they had come so far, and endured so much, to see. At around eight thirty that morning, as their cameras rolled, the bear's head poked out of the den's entrance, followed by those of three cubs, one slightly smaller than the others and all three paler in color than the yellowish white of their mother. The cubs' first sight of the outside "was greeted with terrified squeaks, and they looked down the steep mountainside with trepidation," Miles and Salisbury wrote later. "The female fussed over them, then walked a few confident paces down, whilst two of the cubs followed gingerly, sliding backwards, with claws clutching the snow. The other stayed in the den entrance and cried so loudly that the female returned, and suckled all three in the sun."
    After the effort they had gone through to make it this far, the filmmakers hoped that the bears would tarry a day or two before leaving the den behind, but that afternoon, "the female emerged purposefully, and started down towards the sea ice, followed protestingly by the little cubs." Although disappointed, Salisbury and Miles followed the mother and cubs at a discreet distance as they headed out onto the sea ice and away from shore, "in the realm of the seal, and within sight of her first meal for four months. We bade them a fond farewell and watched their departure into a white haze, feeling very sad it was all over."
    Miles and Salisbury confessed to feeling quite emotional at being able to conclude their traumatic odyssey by witnessing, unnoticed by the bears they observed and far from any other humanity, the sight of a mother bear and her