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I chose the title of this story from an old joke about Sourdough initiations. It is said that you are not a sourdough unless you have kissed an Eskimo girl, pissed in the Yukon River, and wrestled with a Polar Bear and killed it. In the joke some fool comes back looking all beat up from kissing a polar bear and then asks, "Now where is the Eskimo girl that I'm supposed to wrestle and kill?" In the wild, polar bears wrestle with one another for mating privileges and they often look like they are dancing as they rise up to claw and hug one another. I saw a rebroadcast of a National Geographic special on polar bears recently. An Eskimo couple was interviewed because they had quite the story to tell. The man was attacked by a polar bear and he used a trick his grandfather had taught him. The grandfather had told the man that a polar bear won't turn its head sideways to bite. So if you hold your arm up to the polar bear, keep it straight up and down instead of sideways. It is too big for the bear to bite if the arm is held this way and that will keep the bear from taking hold of your arm. The man did this and it worked. No matter how the bear tried to get at the man he kept his arm in front of him and the bear wouldn't bite it. Finally the man got under one of the front paws of the bear as it was standing up and he pushed upward on the bear's arm. The bear fell back on its rearend and that startled it. When it got up it started to come at the man, but he stood his ground with his arm in position and the bear gave up and left. I was amazed by this story and so were the tellers. During my fishing days I was on a boat that delivered to a floating processor which had anchored up by St. Mathew Island. To get an idea of where this is at, the Pribiloff Islands are in the center of the Bering Sea, and St. Mathew Island is a day's travel north going toward St. Lawrence Island, which is up by Nome, Alaska. After that it is a short trip to the Bering Straight and you are in the Polar Sea. In January you can't travel very far north of the Pribiloffs. The ice comes down from the Polar Sea, pouring through the straight like cubes out of an ice maker. When the winds blow it south it surrounds St. Paul and sometimes packs in so tight around the island that ships can't get into the harbor. As the year progresses the ice recedes north again, opening up the northern fishing grounds. But there are still ice flows around St. Matthew up until late May. We delivered to St. Mathew all through April and May. During this time there was still a lot of ice but it wasn't so bad that a ship couldn't push through it, and when the winds were right it receded to just north of the island. The captain of the processor said they had trouble with polar bears earlier in the year when the ice sometimes moved so far south that it trapped the processor and isolated it from sea travel. During that time it was easy for the polar bears to migrate across the ice and they were attracted by the smell of the cooker boiling crab. The processors liked to go out on the ice and walk around when it was around the boat. During one of these excursions one of them got carried off by a polar bear. Since then none of the crew was allowed of the boat and the skipper warned us to keep to our vessel as well. It would have been a handy thing to know how to dance with a polar bear back then, just in case such a situation arose as occured with the unfortunate processor. Someone once asked me if I was a sourdough? I told them I wouldn't kiss an Eskimo girl because I am not a lesbian. I had never pissed in the Yukon River but I had pissed in water that came from the Yukon. I didn't believe in killing or wrestling with bears because they had a right to live their lives undisturbed. But I had fished the Bering Sea and survived several situations where we nearly sank our vessel. And there had been an Aleut man or two who had exchanged a New Year's kiss with me. I asked the man if that was close enough, and he said I was definitely a sourdough. Since then I have learned that the true meaning of sourdough is someone who has gone sour on the land but doesn't have the cash to leave. After 13 years in Alaska I still love it here, and I could leave any time but I choose to stay. So I guess I am not really a sourdough after all. But after hearing that story about the Eskimo, I can't help but wonder what it would be like to dance with a polar bear?
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