She weighed scarcely more than a pound, roughly the size of a squirrel. Her only sense of the world around her came from smell, and her nose led her in one direction: towards the gravity and heat of her mother, a 600lb polar bear named Aurora. Their den was made of cinder block, painted white and illuminated by a single red bulb in the ceiling. The air, heavy with captive musk and kept artificially cool to mimic the Arctic, was pierced periodically by the cries of Nora, a pink-and-white wriggling ball of polar bear, tucked into the folds of her mother’s fur. SponsoredAround 9am on Nora’s sixth day, Aurora rose, stretched

Source: The Times March 21, 2021 00:00 UTC