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A user of a different stack exchange site recently mentioned a supposed polar bear killing technique devised by Inuit hunters. I found it quite difficult to find any other source for the story, but eventually managed to track down a reference to a book from 1919, Ethnography; a partial and preliminary description of the races of man by Loomis Havemeyer and Albert Galloway Keller, and turned up the following quote from page 151 of the original (or page 163 from this online copy):

In hunting the polar bear one method is to freeze a coiled spring made of bone into a piece of meat and leave it on the ice. The bear swallows it, the heat of the stomach melts the meat, the spring flies out and tears the stomach of the bear so that it dies shortly.

Engineering a reliable trap out of bone and raw meat and keeping it tightly compressed during freezing seems like quite a challenge, to say the least. But even aside from that, I'm not sure that the authors of the book could have seen such a thing first hand or even spoken to someone who'd done it themselves, and they didn't cite any sources.

Have there been any other plausible reports of this hunting technique?

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    Presumably, this also relies on keeping the meat-encased spring trap small enough that the bear can swallow it whole.
    – KillingTime
    Commented Mar 28 at 19:46

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Yes.

Looking for 19th century sources this comes up in the Bulletin of the United States National Museum, Volume 27, 1884:

21 SPRING TRAPS-

ANIMAL TRAPS

BEAR TRAPS Made of whalebone strips bent and tied Prepared by the Anderson River Eskimo Mackenzie River District 7,442 Collected by Robert MacFarlane A bent piece of whalebone is placed in a piece of frozen fat which when swallowed melts allowing the bone to spring

A web page INUVIALUIT LIVING HISTORY , has a short bio on McFarlane, and a picture of what a variety the spring traps looked like, though they have them labelled as wolf killers.

enter image description here

(image copyright info here)

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    My two pence: I definitely read about this method somewhere when I was a kid and, yes, it was frozen fat (of a seal or walrus), not meat. The gut feeling is this was in one of Jules Verne's books but a quick search didn't bring any results so far.
    – tum_
    Commented Mar 29 at 9:08
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    And 'whalebone', not just bone (which is rigid). Baleen is flexible.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Mar 29 at 9:25
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    Typically the 'trapped' animal would leave a trail that the hunters could then follow, at a safe distance and time (which might take a while). This method would allow engagement with a dangerous opponent with little danger to tribe members. It would take extreme measures/technology to be able to keep a 'trapped' animal the size of a bear in one place, which might not be feasible in open ice or frozen tundra situations. Even modern trapping makes allowances for such situations, with trapping 'drags'(check google) being an alternative when staking a trap down was not a reliable option.
    – justCal
    Commented Mar 29 at 16:59
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    @tum_: it's 1904's "Keesh, The Bear Hunter" by Jack London
    – Quassnoi
    Commented Mar 29 at 21:45
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    @tum_: didn't they tell you never to trust "Voice of America"? In every other edition it's blubber: americanliterature.com/author/jack-london/short-story/…
    – Quassnoi
    Commented Mar 30 at 13:20

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