The Great White Bear (22 page)

In the event, Munk saw not one human denizen during his stay in the area. But it was to do business with those native inhabitants that the Hudson's Bay Company—which in 1670 had been granted a monopoly by England's King Charles II on the trading of furs in the region—established, in 1717, its northernmost outpost, a log fort named after the company's former governor, the first Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill.

In response to growing tensions between England and France over fur trade profits and North American territory, the Hudson's Bay Company in 1732 began construction of a massive stone structure, Fort Prince of Wales, to replace the original log outpost. Like many ambitious building projects before and since, it cost much more and took far longer to finish than initially estimated; not until 1771 was it considered completed. A little over a decade later, three French warships steamed into the harbor and the complement of twenty-two Englishmen manning the fort surrendered without a shot being fired.

Over time, the fur trade declined, and Churchill with it, although a settlement remained. In the late nineteenth century, the members of that settlement turned to whaling, targeting the belugas that populate the bay and profiting from their oil. Between the First and Second World Wars, Churchill bloomed; selected as the site for a new northern harbor, it was connected by rail to Winnipeg to the south and became the portal through which much of Canada's grain was exported. During World War II, the United States Army established a base, Fort Churchill, five miles to the settlement's east; in the years after the war, it functioned as a joint United States—Canadian center for training and experimentation, from which more than 3,500 rockets were launched to study the ionosphere and the aurora borealis that flickered overhead in the night sky.

These were Churchill's glory days, when more than 4,000 people lived at Fort Churchill and in town and the community (relatively speaking) pulsed with energy. But the U.S. Army left the base in 1970, it was used only sporadically in subsequent years, and by 1990 it had been abandoned completely. Today, Churchill's year-round population is approximately 800.

A few buildings still stand as evidence of the base's presence, as well as an airport that is serviced by a runway of a size wholly disproportionate to the population it serves. The port remains active; indeed, Churchill effectively functions as the gateway to Canada's Arctic communities. In fact, although the port is completely ice-free for only three months a year, it handles more than 500,000 tons of grain annually, as well as fuel oil and bulk cargo.

There is talk of revitalizing the community through mining—the town of Thomson to the south has exploded in size and wealth in recent years following development of a nickel mine. There is tourism, too, centered around the town's wildlife: more than 200 species of migratory birds in the spring, belugas in the summer. But it is for six to eight weeks in October and November that Churchill truly comes into its own, when the 800 regulars are joined by approximately 12,000 visitors and seasonal workers, the reason for their arrival evident in the names of the places they eat, sleep, and shop: the Bear Country Inn, the Lazy Bear Café, Great White Bear Tours Gift Shop.

This is bear season, when Churchill, Manitoba, turns the potential, very obvious, negatives of being in the path of the world's largest carnivore into a lucrative positive, when it revels in its status as the self-described but undisputed "Polar Bear Capital of the World."

"In Winnipeg, they say you can tell a person from Churchill because they always look carefully before walking around a corner," chuckled Tony Bembridge, a man quiet in both demeanor and locution who for a few months a year interrupts his retirement to help run Hudson Bay Helicopters for its owner, his son. The company is an important part of the community. It provides tourist trips of either an hour or half-hour duration to see polar bears and other wildlife; it assists in identifying polar bears that are either approaching or have already entered the town's perimeter; and it provides air transport for researchers who tag and study Hudson Bay's bears.

One of the company's pilots, twenty-two years old and boasting the perfect Hollywood pilot name of Jon Talon, sat next to me as Tony stood up to talk to some prospective customers, fellow refugees from the Winnipeg train, who smiled and nodded in recognition.

Like anybody who has lived for any time in Churchill, Jon has bear stories.

"My girlfriend was getting frustrated that after working in town for seven months she hadn't seen a bear," he began. "'Just be patient,' I told her. 'Wait till bear season, you'll see one.' Sure enough, we're in bed one night, when at like four a.m., she wakes up and says, 'What's that noise? What's what noise?' She throws open the drapes, and there it is, a bear right outside the window. She starts shouting, 'There's a bear! There's a bear!' And I start telling her to get dressed because if that bear comes through that window, we're going out this door."

Bundled up against the buffeting wind that hurled itself across the bay, Tony and I made our way across the street to Gypsy's Café, a Churchill institution and gathering place and purveyor of a surprisingly hearty and flavorful French onion soup. We sat at the table nearest the counter, reserved for residents to sit and exchange stories that in any other locale would seem outlandish and even here sometimes stretch credulity sufficiently to earn the table its own epithet: the Bullshit Table.

Next to us sat Bill Callahan, American by birth but a resident of Churchill for twenty-eight years.

He, too, had a bear story.

Evidently, a community of 800 people is, for Bill, somewhat suffocating, so he lives in a cabin outside of town. It makes for plenty of peace and quiet; but, he says, "I sometimes get some interesting visitors."

One night the previous year, a sow with cubs had pushed through his front door and entered his kitchen while he slept. Placing her paw on the stove in an apparent attempt to reach a loaf of bread that was above it, the sow pressed the button that lit the burner, singed her paw, recoiled, banged into the wall, and crashed out through the now-open doorway, cubs in tow. Having somehow dozed through the breaking down of his door and the presence of three polar bears in his kitchen, Bill was awakened by the sound of the sow thumping into the kitchen wall. Fully naked but half-conscious, he stood in the kitchen doorway, the chaos not yet fully apparent to him, the scene lit only by the glow from the stove, prompting Bill initially to wonder how he could have gone to bed and left the gas flame burning.

Another bear story.

Also from the previous year, this story was told to me in the warmth of a basement room at the south end of town.

As all should, the basement had a glowing fire, a big-screen TV, a wet bar, and a hyperactive dachshund called Monty. Here, too, sat my hosts, Lance and Irene Duncan, proprietors of a bed-and-breakfast in which, Lance advised me sternly after he and Irene had collected me from the railway station, guests are expected to obey two rules: "Please leave a note in our guest book before you leave, and treat our house as your house."
I needed little encouragement to do either, warming myself externally by the fire and internally with the glass of rye I cradled in my hand, as Lance related his close encounter twelve months previously. Both Lance and Irene work full-time jobs in addition to taking care of their guests, Irene at the Seaport Hotel on Kelsey Boulevard (the town's main thoroughfare), Lance, at the time of my visit, at the Churchill Marine Tank Farm by the harbor. It was at the latter, while kicking through the snow in search of a dropped tool at the rail loading area, that Lance rounded a rail car and came face-to-face with a polar bear.

The encounter appeared to startle each equally, the yell that Lance instinctively let out causing the bear to momentarily retreat and buying Lance the time he needed. He leaped into his nearby truck, the door unlocked as always (yes, he said, it is true that Churchill residents leave not just car and truck doors but also house doors open for just such an occasion), and promptly ran the bear out of town, all the way to Cape Merry several miles to the northwest, the site of Jens Munk's enforced overwintering in 1619 and of the fort that the French had captured so effortlessly the following century.

Once he recovered from the initial shock—or, as he jokes now, "once I cleaned out my drawers"—he was, he recalled, mad.

"I was mad at that bear for being there, for giving me a fright, and for costing me part of a morning's work," he explained. "And I was mad at myself for not paying attention and for putting myself in that position."

For Churchill residents, particularly those who, like Lance, grew up in the community, bear awareness is both ingrained and a matter of pride; appropriately safe behaviors are second-nature. The approach is one of neither blustering bravado nor crippling caution; common sense prevails, as does a collective desire to avoid placing human or bear life at unnecessary risk.

"Gone are those days when, if you were a bear that walked into the community, you were a dead bear," mayor Mike Spence told me over coffee at the Seaport Hotel as the wind howled outside. "It was common to shoot twenty-five bears in a bear season."

Such a trigger-happy approach did not translate into greater human safety. In the late sixties, four maulings, one of them fatal, prompted the Manitoba Department of Conservation to post a wildlife officer in town on a permanent basis, but the approach to problem bears remained the same: chase them away if possible; if not possible or if they return, shoot them. The International Fund for Animal Welfare provided funding for some bears to be transported by helicopter to a spot about thirty miles northwest, but beyond that there were simply no other obvious practical alternatives.

That changed with the opening in 1982 of the holding facility, popularly referred to as the Polar Bear Jail. The departure of the military led to a quieter community, which in turn prompted more bears to approach town, thus increasing the likelihood of future encounters. At the same time, a nascent tourist industry was beginning to put greater value on live polar bears, and there were some concerns that the level of shooting might be impacting bear numbers. The holding facility, fashioned from an old hangar at Fort Churchill, provided an alternative that today is an important element of the Polar Bear Alert Program, which seeks to keep bears and humans apart for their mutual benefit.

Signs all over town, on restaurant and shop doors and on lampposts, remind visitors and residents alike of Polar Bear Alert, of the need to exercise caution and awareness, and of the twenty-four-hour "bearline"—675-BEAR—to report bear sightings.

First line of defense is a series of culvert traps, baited with seal meat, around the perimeter of the community, along the coastline of Hudson Bay and the banks of the Churchill River, the areas along which bears that might pass through town will most commonly traverse. If a bear is caught in a trap, it is taken by truck to the facility, where it will be held for thirty days, drugged, and lifted by Hudson Bay Helicopters to a spot thirty miles or so out of town—or, if it is sufficiently late in the season, onto the sea ice. The facility's purpose is not to punish or deter, but merely to remove an offending bear from the population, to ensure that for the better part of the six-week season it is either in confinement or far enough away from the community that its return is unlikely.

Not all intruders are subjected to a spell in the pokey. Should a bear not be tempted by the culvert traps and manage to make its way into town, said Shaun Bobier, the Manitoba Conservation official in charge of the Polar Bear Alert program at the time of my visit, "we just want to get it off the streets."

To that end, Bobier and his staff employ cracker shells to scare a bear away and then follow it in vehicles to ensure that the interloper leaves town. If, on the other hand, a bear is on the outskirts of the community, or if it returns after being shooed away, the jail beckons.

"We had bears in the back of the Northern Nights Restaurant," said Bobier. "There's huge big willow bushes in the back of there. At some point we might get a bear, he'll come into town, we'll chase it and it goes into those willows, it comes back a couple of hours later that same night. Then we get a couple of reports during the night about the same bear. So what happens is the next morning we'll go to Hudson Bay Helicopters, jump in a helicopter, go to that part of town, dart the bear, and take it to the holding facility."

The polar bears that wander through Churchill are mostly trying to get from A to B, wanting to reach the ice rather than looking for a free lunch. Those that are tempted to tarry by the smell of food (indeed, the majority of all bears that pass through town) tend to be immature bears, subadults that have yet to learn that life is generally easier if Churchill is avoided completely, and for which the pursuit of food, even after the bay freezes and seals are available, remains a sufficiently uncertain endeavor that any supplementary nutrition is eagerly and willingly consumed.

Accordingly, the Polar Bear Patrol was far busier in the days when the town's garbage was piled up and burned in an open-air dump.

"The dump operated up to 2005, and obviously the scents and smells of a garbage dump are going to be a major bear attractant, so what we did, any time there was a buildup of bears, we always had traps at the dump," said Bobier. "We didn't want the bears to become habituated to human food, so we would have to go in and actively remove the bears. Since the dump has closed, we've probably eliminated 60 percent of our bear encounters. Huge, huge drop in the number of bears we've had to handle. And also a huge cost reduction for us, if you think that's an extra fifty, sixty bears we don't have to handle.

"In 2003, the guys handled 173 bears, and at that time we only had 27 holding cells in the facility. But since the dump closed, we've been handling on average sixty or so bears a year. But whether that's a number that's going to remain stable or whether we've just had a couple of nice slow years, I don't know. Next year could be totally different."