In the second half of the ’70s a strange rumor began to run among the inhabitants of the autonomous region of Čukotka, the north-eastern end of Russia that looks beyond the Bering Strait to the United States. Nikolai Machulyak (Николай Мачуляк a man who worked in an Artel, a cooperative of the Soviet Union, had become friends with a huge polar bear and her puppies, and fed them with meat and condensed milk.