The Great White Bear (23 page)

In 2007, the year before my visit, 247 calls were made to the bear line, slightly higher than the ten-year average of 221. Of those, Manitoba Conservation staff had to handle (that is, physically capture and/ or take to the holding facility) only 49 bears, the fewest in over a decade and barely over half the average of 96. The year with the fewest number of calls prior to my visit was 2005, with just 132 calls—the result, explained Bobier, of ice patterns that year.

"In 2005, the last of the ice came ashore way east in Manitoba and Ontario. So it took the bears a long time to make it up this way, so we had a relatively quiet year," he said.

When we talked in his office in late October, 2008 also was proving to be relatively uneventful, partly because of the ice, although this time for different reasons. The ice had broken up three weeks later than the year before and had come ashore close to Churchill; as a consequence, the bears were fat and contented, in no particular hurry to move anywhere. Plus, it was warm: there was not a hint of snow, and the thermometer had yet to hit freezing.

Conditions would change soon enough, and when they did, said Bobier, so would the number of bears passing through town. Almost half of all calls to the bear line every year are in November, when temperatures start to fall and bears begin to stir in anticipation of being able to set out onto the sea ice; the peak is concentrated over just a few days, when the waters are freezing rapidly and the bears are anxious to begin hunting seals.

"Just prior to freeze-up we have a major spike in activity," Bobier said. "Depending on the season, as long as things stay cold, it'll last four or five days. If we get a sudden temperature rise it may extend it a little. We try not to capture polar bears in those last four or five days; we just try and chase them through."

Since the Polar Bear Alert program began, there has been just one fatality in Churchill, in 1983, and that was a consequence of a perfect storm of unfortunate occurrences. The victim, a resident by the name of Tommy Mutanen, had been rummaging through the freezer of a badly fire-damaged motel and was heading off triumphantly, meat stuffed in his pockets, when he rounded a corner and bumped into a bear. Unable to effect a rapid escape because he walked with crutches, he further exacerbated his plight by attempting to use those crutches in self-defense. Nearby residents heard his screams as he was attacked; despite their best efforts, they were unable to stop the assault and were forced to shoot the bear, by which time the man was dead.

Bobier and colleagues give annual talks on safety to the town's children, lessons that they hope will stay with them through adulthood. Those talks often take place shortly prior to Halloween, when Hudson Bay Helicopters flies patrols to confirm there are no potential problem bears on the community perimeter, and most available vehicles are deployed around the edge of town to keep guard while the town's youngsters (dressed in just about any fashion other than as seals) trick-or-treat from door to door.

But even the most educated, bear-savvy, cautious populace in the world can never operate completely free of risk, as long as it shares space with a predator that is smart, swift, and almost paranormally quiet. A couple of months before my arrival, Rene Preteau, an employee at the Northern Studies Center, a research and education complex east of town, was working outside when he turned around and there, beside him, was a female with two cubs. She raised her paw to swat at him; he yelled and instinctively struck her with the wrench he had in his hand.

"I talked to him afterward," said Mike Spence. "He said, 'I thought I was dead. The thing that saved me was, one of the cubs made a noise.' She turned, and she went to her cub, and so he ran for the door, and he said he couldn't remember in the rush of adrenaline whether to push the door or pull the door. He pulled the door and it opened, and he said, 'She was so close to me, it hit the bear as I was pulling it.'"

If some encounters are unavoidable, at least residents know enough to greatly limit the likelihood of stumbling into those that can be avoided.

"The community's quite educated on that. They know there's certain areas where you shouldn't be walking," says Spence. "It's generally our visitors who tend to not respect that."

Bobier has been known to refer to tourists as "walking snacks"; the (at least occasional) validity of the descriptor was highlighted by the case of the Man with the Walker, clicking forward deliberately, determinedly, and directly for the polar bear that peered at him from behind a rock with ever-increasing intensity.

Fortunately, Bobier arrived before there was bloodshed.

"You do know that bear will kill you?" spluttered the bemused officer.

"If it gets me, it gets me," grumbled the old man.

Another example.

The main town of Churchill is but a handful of blocks north to south, bordered on the west by the river, the railway, and Kelsey Boulevard. The last street before heading out of town is Button Street; it is on this street that Lance and Irene Duncan live, and it was from this street that Lance was about to turn right one evening when he looked to his left and saw three pedestrians heading south, "passing under the last streetlight." Yanking the wheel to the left, he pulled up alongside them and asked what they were doing.

"They said they were heading out of town, away from the streetlights, to get a better view of the northern lights," he recalled. "And I said, well, that's very dangerous, you should stay on the main roads where it is well lit. And at that moment, not forty, fifty feet away, boom, a cracker shell went off. I said, 'Get in the truck,' and they go, 'What's going on?' and I said, 'There's a bear. Just get in the truck.'"

One evening we, too, sought to evade the lights of Churchill—such as they are—to better appreciate the lights in the sky. They were flickering gently as we returned from drinks and dinner at the Seaport Lounge, and Lance steered the truck up the hill and away from Kelsey Boulevard as we sought a better vantage point. We stopped by the cemetery, near the edge of Hudson Bay, the engine running as we peered through the windows that we had cracked open to facilitate our view of the shimmering curtains spreading across the starry night. When we had had our fill and turned to leave, the truck's headlights illuminated a ghostly apparition staring skyward at the cemetery's edge.

We pulled up to the man, standing by his bicycle and drinking in the spectacle, the hood on his overcoat pulled up to protect him from the cold and simultaneously sheltering most of his face from our view.

"Good evening," Lance began. "Are you visiting us?"

Yes, confirmed the man, he was indeed a visitor.

"You know, this is extremely unwise."

The man looked blank, uncertain of the words' meaning.

"This is prime polar bear habitat, and this is peak bear season. We are right by the coast."

The warning did not appear to register.

"You should have seen the lights about a half-hour ago," said the man. "They were incredible."

"That may very well be so," Lance responded, "but it is really incredibly dangerous to stand out here at night. Bears come right by here all the time."

The man turned away wordlessly and slowly walked away, bike at his side, into the darkness.

Before the bears, they came for the birds.

Today, perhaps 500 or so of the 12,000 tourists who descend on Churchill come to gaze at its ornithological attractions in the spring, a number dwarfed by those attracted by the prospect of glimpsing
Ursus maritimus.
But polar bear tourism wasn't even in its infancy, hadn't even been conceived of as a profit-making venture, when some visitors from Texas, in town for the bird watching, asked Len Smith about the polar bears.

Smith, who rented out vehicles to the birders who passed through the community in spring and summer, had often contemplated heading out onto the tundra to watch the bears. But there was a problem: there was no commercially available vehicle that could easily navigate the undulating, treacherous terrain. So Smith decided to build one.

He took the chassis of a Ford F-750 truck, added four big wheels from a crop sprayer, built his own body, and set out. He chuckles now at the memory of some of the things he did in those early days, how on his first couple of trips he didn't even think to take a radio, so when the axle broke, he had no option but to walk back into town to get some help.

At first, he went out there by himself. Then along came a photographer called Dan Guravich, who approached Smith about using his vehicle to make longer trips.

"We would spend two weeks with [the bears] at a time," he recalled. "We would get to know them, and we would name them, and you sure could tell the different personalities."

At first, unused to the intrusion, many bears were uncertain how to react.

"They were skittish, but you took your time," said Smith. "You saw the bear and you let the bear come to you, you didn't go chasing after it. We'd stop there and we'd eat some lunch—once we'd got upwind from them—and slowly, slowly, they would come to you, and as years went on they got to the point where they were comfortable with you. But you got to know them, and it's like with dogs—some dogs you trust, and some you don't. It was the same with bears. But there was never a time when they were aggressive, or when they charged a buggy or anything like that.

"Each bear is different. Sometimes, you might make a little move and the bear will just take off running, and another time you might get right up to it, and it'll be watching you, watching you, but it wouldn't run away."

Then the National Geographic Society came to town, to film a one-hour television documentary about the uneasy relationship between the community's people and its polar bears. The filmmakers included a sequence of Smith and his buggy; once the documentary aired in 1982, the secret was out, and it seemed as if everyone wanted in—first the group from Texas, and then photographers from just about everywhere, so many, in fact, that Smith's initial buggy proved inadequate.

"The first year, I took a group out for five days, and then the next year they doubled it and another guy came in for a week, and from there it just started getting bigger and bigger and I couldn't build buggies fast enough," he remembered.

"Because then once it got out, just about every photographer came up to take pictures that ended up in magazines, then CBC came up to do a one-hour special; it just went crazy. The in-flight magazine for American Airlines, they never even flew into Canada, and I asked, 'What are you guys doing up here?' and they said, 'It's a good story.' Then the Japanese started coming; they wanted to rent buggies for the whole season and bring planeloads of people in and I said, 'No, I can't do that; everyone who started out with me, they get first choice.' Plus, you didn't want to put all your eggs in one basket anyway."

Smith was no longer building buggies around pickup trucks; now he had graduated to larger goods truck frames, to which he added the wider axles of airport fire trucks. Much larger tires not only enabled the vehicles to traverse the terrain but also, at up to five feet high, helped keep curious polar bears at paw's length. The basic design of the body, though tweaked over the years, remains the same: a fiat front with a large windshield, buslike windows along the sides and buslike seating inside, and a viewing deck on the back.

The sudden popularity of polar bear tourism threatened to overwhelm the tiny town.

"We had a hard time finding rooms," Smith remembered. "The nice thing about it was the town kind of grew with the business, so as I built more buggies, there'd be another hotel. There were a lot of private homes that would take people in."

On the tundra, meanwhile, the situation was becoming, as Smith puts it, a "zoo." Others followed his lead, and at one point four different companies were making vehicles like Smith's original buggies, all of them crawling over the tundra in search of polar bears. As Smith concedes, they also baited the bears, throwing out blocks of lard as food to entice the fat-loving predators within camera range.

That no longer happens. The operators agreed among themselves to bring the practice to an end, and today feeding a bear, or even tempting one with the aroma of food on the back deck, is strictly forbidden. More than one buggy driver has stated that they either have turned their vehicle around after catching someone violating the rule, or that they unhesitatingly would do so. Vehicles now are licensed, the numbers strictly capped and divided between the two remaining companies. No more than eighteen are allowed to travel—along preexisting trails, carved out in years past by military traffic—in the tundra area close to shore in what is now the Churchill Wildlife Management Area east of town. Twelve of those licenses are assigned to Tundra Buggy, Len Smith's original operation, which also has exclusive access to Cape Churchill, the area in which mature polar bears gather en masse as they await the freezing of the waters.

The other six spots are taken by Great White Bear Tours, whose vehicles, based on airport fire truck frames, are six-wheelers (all except one of the Tundra Buggies have four wheels), larger than those of their rivals, and dubbed Polar Rovers. The company was founded by Don and Marilyn Walkoski in 1994; Don still builds the machines himself with the assistance of a small team of mechanics. He prides himself on the small, civilizing touches that separate his vehicles from the others: the viewing grate in the floor of the back deck; the comfortable coach seats with fold-down lunch trays; and, most frequently commented upon, flush toilets rather than honey buckets.

One day, as evening drew in and the first snow of the season began to fall outside, Donnie—as he is known to friends—looked at one of his machines and showed a visitor the rubber framing around its windshield.

Standing next to the visitor was Donnie's sister, Val, who works for her brother as one of Great White Bear's drivers; on a recent day, she had stopped her vehicle so that her passengers could watch a polar bear that was ambling past, when that bear stood up, dug its claws into the rubber, and tugged.