The Great White Bear (24 page)

Donnie, who was in the workshop, heard her call over the radio to another driver as her windshield buckled outward.

"Paul, help me!"

In the event, she did not need any assistance, needed only to turn the key and fire up the engine, the sudden noise and vibration enough to jolt the bear into disengaging. The windshield held, Val continued with the tour, and the excited passengers unanimously agreed it was just about the coolest thing they ever had seen.

Donnie sighed.

"So, now I no longer use rubber to seal my windshields. From now on, I'm going to urethane them in."

He smiled a wry smile.

"That's how it is. You think your day's over and then you're up at three a.m. trying to fix a polar bear—damaged windshield."

Unlike Don Walkoski, Len Smith no longer builds and fixes his own machines—no longer lives in Churchill, in fact, or owns the company he started. He sold Tundra Buggy in 1999 and is now happily retired in Florida; but, he says, "I sure never was sorry about living in the Arctic."

"Welcome to Buggy One!" shouted Robert Buchanan above the growling engine as we lurched uncertainly over the tundra.

There was not, at that point, much to feel welcomed to. Smaller than the Tundra Buggies presently in tourist service, Buggy One had no fixed seating but did boast a pair of bunks nestled in an alcove on the starboard side across from the propane stove. There were a couple of places to balance laptops, but otherwise nothing except a few folding chairs, one of which had an uneasy relationship with my rear and an only occasional interest in the floor, neither of which was aided by the board of plywood that was balanced precariously between the chair and the buggy's side, and which treated every undulation in the terrain as an excuse to crash from one to the other.

"I first started coming up here about twenty years ago," said Buchanan, a white-bearded man whose outsized personality and seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm belie the fact that he is supposed to be enjoying his retirement and are expressed in a voice that might be described as well projected. "I was invited by a guy named Dan Guravich, who was one of the first photographers of polar bears. He would go out to Cape Churchill in November—early November, back then—and set up camp and photograph polar bears. And it was frontierlike. There was an old school bus for a diner, and it was kind of dragged along by a track vehicle, and you slept in the diner, and you basically had one sled of supplies, a sled shack is what it was.

"It was kind of rough, but we didn't really think anything about it, we just had sleeping bags and so on and so forth. We ate pretty good, we drank pretty good, we had a lot of fun.

"It was nothing for the bears to poke their heads through the window while you were sleeping. And it was nothing to have to push the bears back out of the window and out of your sleeping space. I remember waking up with their breath on my face, and it's quite a rude awakening, and the only thing you can do is to chop them on the nose with your fist as fast as you can and as hard as you can, and they will back off. Of course, if you miss the nose and get them in the mouth, you're in dead trouble and they'll yank you out of that window fast. It doesn't take much. You've got to be dead on target."

In 1999, Buchanan was asked to put together a business plan for Polar Bears Alive, an outfit that had been established by his recently deceased friend Guravich and which, to that point, Buchanan recalled, functioned as "essentially a fraternity" for Churchill regulars. One thorough overhaul later, Polar Bears Alive had become Polar Bears International, and Buchanan was its president. Buchanan describes PBI, which is staffed entirely by volunteers, as a "finance and educational arm for scientists in the field" and a "distributional mechanism" for ensuring that the findings of the scientists PBI supports don't gather dust but are disseminated as widely and swiftly as possible.

It is a task that Buchanan facilitates via a plate-spinning system of mutual benefits, as exemplified by the relationship between PBI and Frontiers North Adventures, which bought Tundra Buggy from Len Smith and operates the company still. Buchanan steers his membership to Tundra Buggy, working with zoos to put together tour groups each bear season; in return, Frontiers North blocks off several of its tour dates for PBI.

"We're doing three trips this year at our lodge in concert with Polar Bears International that we're branding as PBI zoological tours," John Gunter, whose parents, Merv and Lynda, founded Frontiers North, told me one morning in Churchill. "We've crafted an itinerary that we think will well showcase PBI's contributions to conservation awareness in Churchill during polar bear season and make those available to guests through zoological institutions. And in concert with PBI, we host PBI's leadership camp. For the first two weeks in October, we hosted forty students from all over the world who traveled up to Churchill and stayed in the lodge and learned about issues affecting polar bears and the north. The goal of the camp is for students to be able to go back to their communities and be Arctic ambassadors."

And then there was the vehicle in which we presently were lurching across the tundra, which had been built from scratch specifically for PBI's use. It might not have looked like much at that moment, but in a matter of days it would be equipped with video cameras and transmission equipment. These would enable Buchanan and B. J. Kirschhoffer, a young Montanan who was Buggy One's driver and custodian, to post online video of the bears and the scientists who study them, to patch those same researchers through in real time into videoconferences with schools and zoos, and to film interviews with media.

"The thing about these bears," Buchanan resumed, "is that they are incredibly smart and incredibly patient. What we learned over the years was that if they saw an opportunity, they were going to take advantage of that opportunity. Sometimes the storage unit and the old school bus would roll apart, so there'd be a foot gap, and there was a bear once that had watched me for days, and we would have conversations. But he was watching my routine and he knew that every morning I would step across and go into the school bus area for breakfast and then one morning he just reached up and grabbed my boot. Very quickly, in like a quarter of a second, he went ten yards in grabbing my boot, and I was very lucky that I had not tied my laces that day and my foot slipped right out of the boot as he grabbed it. I needless to say wet my pants, and it goes to show that these are really cute and furry animals but they'll kill you in a heartbeat if they get an opportunity, even if they're just playing."

At this point B. J. took pity on the fact that I was being pounded in the back by a piece of plywood from which I was apparently too dimwitted to escape and brought the buggy to a halt while he laid it flat on the floor. As he did so, Robert stood up, walked to one corner, and lifted up the floor to reveal a cage that hung underneath.

"We use that to take photographs of bears' faces, because scientists have found that each bear has a unique whisker pattern, like a fingerprint," he said. "Before we built the cage, we tried to take photographs with a camera that was on the end of a long pole that I'd lower down. And there was one bear, I took a couple of photos and the flash went off in his face, and that bear did not like being flashed. It knew exactly where the heartbeat of that camera was and put one claw right on it. Not anything more than that, he didn't try to hit it or anything, he just put that one claw on the lip of the lens—which, as you know, isn't that wide at all—but he just hooked that claw in there and was not going to let go of that camera. I let it down real fast and that paw just followed right along. I pulled it and yanked it and worked on it for fifteen minutes, and he just concentrated on that camera, and I'd just written off that camera, and then he looked up at me as if to smile and then took the paw off, as if he was saying, 'Just don't flash me.' And I said thank you very much, and that I understood. They're very smart. They're just incredibly smart."

Soon.

It would be time soon.

He had expected it to be sooner, had wondered briefly if the opportunity was in fact just around the corner, once the temperature dropped and the snow blanketed the ground. But experience, even the limited experience of his short life, had taught him that fall's start was often a false one. A few cold days might tease, a layer of snow might prompt excited rolling, but then the winds would change, the air would warm, the snow would disappear, the ground would again be revealed, and the prospect of a return to the ice would seem as far away as ever.

So it had been again this time, the emergence from the summer den coinciding with the temperature's steady fall and night's gradual encroachment, the journey toward the coast hastened by anticipation of an end to the fast. There would be a wait, of course, as there always was, but the crystalline appearance of the water, its cool touch against a tentatively dipped paw, had suggested that perhaps the wait might not be too long. Then the wind changed, delaying the day he yearned for, reminding him of the rumbling protests in his stomach. The wind was slicing and too warm; he had no interest in exposing himself to it. Having found a patch of willows, he shuffled as far into its protective embrace as he was able, the fiercest predator in the world covering his eyes with his front paws as if not seeing the outside world would negate its existence, leaving only his well-protected rear end exposed to the unpleasant elements. With only an occasional, investigative sortie, he had spent the past few days thus, patiently waiting. It came naturally to him now, patience; it was a most useful trait. It enabled him to wait for hours on end—when once, as a cub, he had not the disposition to do so—at a breathing hole, lying perfectly still until the precise moment when the seal emerged and he could strike. It allowed him to while away the summer months, even as his body ate away at the layer of fat he had so ravenously built up on the ice. And it granted him the ability to wait just a few days more, until the chill returned and the ice on the bay froze thickly enough for him to return.

Now, the wind had dropped and a chill had returned to the air. Soon, once more, it would be snowing, and surely more heavily this time than before. He emerged from the bushes, stretched, sniffed the air.

That smell again.

He recognized it instantly, as he always did now. Those two-legged creatures were in the vicinity. There were a great many of them not far from where he stood, living in an immense herd along the coast. In times past, he would skirt the edges of their dwellings in search of food; for his trouble, he had once been chased away with flashing lights and loud explosions, and as he had grown older he had decided that discretion and avoidance were wiser options.

Not that the creatures seemed in any way harmful. Some of them spent time here, too, on the tundra, as if also waiting for the water to freeze. They traveled on what appeared to be noisy icebergs and uttered strange, hushed, and slightly excited noises—noises that seemed to be all the more hushed, yet all the more excited, whenever he drew near.

He could see one of the icebergs up ahead now. He might as well investigate. It could do no harm.

As he drew closer, though, he realized that this one was not especially interesting. He could smell several of the creatures, but only one was in clear view, staring at him as he walked past. He paused briefly, looked up at it, and continued on his way. There were better things to do. He walked on in hopeful search of a snowdrift, a cool patch in which he could lie and wait for the ice to return.

The gently rising sun cast just enough light and shadow to create confusion. Two nights previously, the first snowfall of the season had blanketed Churchill and environs in a thick, soft white shroud; one night later, fierce winds had blown much of that away, leaving only patches off which the low light ricocheted, confusing the scene. We edged along, the scientists on board joking with each other as they sought to differentiate between sheltering bears and snowy, shadowy background.

"What's that over there? A bear or a rock?"

"Geoff, what do I have to do to get you to spot a bear for me?"

"We're going too slow and too low. Get me an A Star and fly me fifty feet above the deck, and I'll find you some."

"The wind blew away all our nice snow."

"I'd be amazed if there aren't some bears hiding in those willows, maybe covered over with some snow. I wouldn't want to get out and walk there, I know that."

"Is that a bear over there, by the beach? It seems to me every morning there's been a bear wandering along the beach."

"Little Bunny Foo-Foo was hanging out at the lodge earlier. Is that her? No, that's a rock."

"You're getting real good at spotting those rocks."

I gazed absent-mindedly out the window, half-listening to the back-and-forth. A fiat-screen monitor in the corner displayed the schoolchildren who had gathered to speak with the assembled scientists, whose banter petered out as they sat abreast on Buggy One looking into a camera, the snowy tundra behind them rolling toward the shores of Hudson Bay.

How far can polar bears swim? How do they hold on to the ice? How long do they live? How big do they get? Are they endangered?

It was one thing to ask those questions of a teacher or even a bear expert visiting the school. It was another to be able to ask them of a gathering of such experts while those experts spoke to them, via the miracle of wireless Internet technology, from amid a gathering of wild polar bears.

"Perhaps we'll see one walk past," one of the researchers had suggested, somewhat optimistically, at the beginning of the teleconference, but although B. J. had driven us away from the camp in search of a suitable backdrop, he had been forced to call off the hunt and park us off the trail in order to set up the camera and establish a link by the appointed time. So there was no polar bear in the shot; but off to the side, among the willows, a movement resolved into a bear ambling, ever so slowly, in our direction.

It was moving as polar bears do: seemingly aimlessly, languorously, its head and neck occasionally swaying loosely and slowly from side to side. I put my camera to my eye, but even at the fullest extent of its telephoto lens, the bear was little more than a small white blob barely large enough to occupy the very center of my picture frame. Whispering to myself, I urged it forward as it padded, inch by agonizing inch, toward us.