CHAPTER 8

 

Moon Month of Ukiulirut (October–November), “Winter Starts”

The Polar Bear’s Picnic

CHURCHILL, MANITOBA

 

The party was in full swing, fueled by the success of an expedition exceeding anyone’s expectations and the understanding that this was our last night together. Five days of in-your-face, shoot ‘em until your memory cards are full encounters with polar bears had cemented our group with good feeling and friendship.

When the members of our photography tour had first convened, six days earlier, in the airport hotel in Winnipeg, it had been all about posturing and pecking order.

Who’d been where. Who’d been published. Who had the newest pixel-packed DSLR or the biggest and fastest-shooting lens. Now, it was all about shared experience and exchanging e-mail addresses and assurances that best images would soon be posted on Web sites for everyone’s viewing pleasure.

Without anyone noticing, I excused myself from the party. Took my plastic wineglass out of the dining car, through the adjoining sleeping cars, and onto the outside deck of our Tundra Buggy, docked, now, at a right angle to the famed Tundra Buggy Lodge.

For more than twenty years, visitors from all over the world have used this ingenious hotel on wheels as their jump-off point for what must rank as one of the greatest ecotourist adventures on the planet: the latitude to get up close and personal, in safety and comfort, with the largest land carnivore on the planet. Every year, in late October and early November, approximately thirteen thousand visitors are shuttled through Churchill, Manitoba’s tourism infrastructure and come, literally, face-to-face with the animal that is the poster child for one of the planet’s last, great unsullied and most threatened biomes.

That biome is the polar ice sheet. The land that is not. Circumscribing the entire northern portion of the earth. Crossing all time zones and embracing Asia, Europe, Greenland, and North America. Retreating in the northern summer, advancing beneath the dark Arctic winter, by early November, winter’s transforming touch reaches 58 degrees, 46 minutes north latitude, where the shipping port of Churchill and the southwestern shores of Hudson Bay lie. Stranded onshore, waiting for winter to turn seawater into navigable ice, are scores of polar bears—most of whom have been grounded for months.

The Tundra Buggy Lodge is parked right where the bay freezes first, and bears gang up waiting for the ice to form. Twenty-five miles (or an hour-and-a-half Tundra Buggy ride) east of Churchill, two hundred yards south of Hudson Bay, and right at the northern edge of the taiga forest, it’s an ecotourist extravaganza to humble all others at the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.”

Zipping my North Face jacket to my throat, leaning my elbows on the metal sides of the outside deck, I took a sip of wine (before it froze) and started searching the skies of the moon month of Ukiulirut, in the season Ukiaksaaq.

Ukiaksaaq, encompassing late October and early November, means “autumn” in the language of the Inuit. Ukiulirut means, literally, “winter starts.” One of the environmental markers signaling the onset of Ukiulirut is the initial formation of sea ice. Ukiaq, or “early winter,” is heralded by frozen seas and a resumption of seal hunting by sled dog teams on the ice.

The same ice and seals that the bears were waiting for.

Linda and I wouldn’t be here for Ukiaq. Neither would the bears. They would be out on the ice until late Upirngaaq, spring—the season that was waxing into summer when, many pages ago, you opened this book.

Overhead was the constellation Tukturjuit, “caribou,” although you may know it better as the Big Dipper. Also visible was Uqsuutaattiaq, the “seal oil lamp” in which westerners, looking at the W-shaped configuration, find the likeness of Cassiopeia, the long-dead Ethiopian queen.

Just visible in the western sky was the bright star Sivulliik, the “first one,” part of the three-star constellation that bears the same name. Sivulliik’s appearance in September signals the onset of real autumn, and it remains one of the brightest stars in the Arctic night during the winter months.

The legend that goes with the constellation involves an old man who killed his brother-in-law, the murderer’s nephew (whom the old man taunts), and a grandmother who comes to the boy’s rescue after the boy screws up his nerve and accuses his uncle of the crime. For his boldness, the lad finds the old man chasing him around the igloo with a knife. In the sky, as in the legend, the three stars of Sivulliik are chasing one another.

Westerners know the star as Arcturus, the fourth brightest star in the heavens. Muphrid, like Arcturus, is a star in the constellation known as the Herdsman. And Vega is the fifth brightest star in the heavens and part of the constellation known as the Lyre.

Human cultures project into the night sky what they know on Earth. Herdsmen and stringed instruments are alien to the Native people of the North, but violence and death are not. In fact, much of Inuit cosmogony may seem, by western standards, obsessively dark. Dark or not, it is reflective of a people nurtured by an environment in which death is never far away and mercy means a quick end, not surviving to die another day.

The Inuit legend behind the constellation Nanurjuk underscores this harsh reality. As this story goes, a woman who miscarried fled her husband and found shelter in the company of bears, who treated her kindly and caught seals for her to eat. Growing lonely, the woman asked to visit her family but was told not to mention the fact that she lived with bears or to disclose their location.

The woman made the promise but broke it, and when the adult bear saw the sleds of hunters approaching, the bear showed compassion for her young by biting them to death so that they would not fall under the power of men. Then she raced to the house of the woman and bit her to death (and not from compassion).

The bear tried to escape but was pursued by dogs, who surrounded her in a semicircle. Suddenly the bear and her attackers were lifted into the sky, where they appear today, as the star group known to westerners as the Pleiades in the constellation Taurus. The very brightest star in the cluster, Alcyone, is the bear. The encircling lesser stars, the dogs.

At this latitude, Nanurjuk would not appear in the sky for several hours. It was, nevertheless, a beautiful night at the trailing end of autumn and the onset of the “great darkness.” Having oriented myself in time and space, I lifted the glass first to toast the stars, then to my lips. Raised my head, filling my mouth with Chardonnay slush. Lowered the glass and, looking down, found myself face-to-face with the business end of a polar bear whose snout was about two and a half feet from my own. The animal was standing on his hind paws, with his front paws pressed against the sides of the porch. He was looking up at me with polite intensity. Six to seven hundred pounds of bear as close as a front-seat passenger in a midsize sedan, and I hadn’t heard a thing.

I wonder how many ringed seals have enjoyed just this image for their last mortal sight, the cerebral part of my brain mused.

How could anything so big move so silently? a deeper, more basic portion of my brain more or less asked. But the formu lation of this thought was difficult insofar as it had to work its way past a cold, dark knot of fear that was squeezing the base of my brain.

“Once we board the Tundra Buggy,” our tour leader, Rob Day, had chanted the day we arrived in Churchill, “your feet won’t touch the ground until we’re back in Churchill.”

I was somewhat miffed by the restriction at the time. Found myself a good deal more philosophical about it now.

Nose to Snout

The bear wasn’t aggressive. He appeared, in fact, to be benignly curious—an adaptive trait that many predators in places where food is often scarce have in common. Something new or different might be something to exploit, and something to exploit might mean food.

And it wasn’t like the bear had never leaned up against a Tundra Buggy before. We, after all, had enjoyed five days of encounters like this one and the bear, a young male, probably three or more seasons’ worth.

It was the suddenness, not the intimacy, that was shocking; and the incredible stealth that has made the polar bear one of the most accomplished hunters on the planet. Able to hide in a landscape where there is no place to hide; stalking prey so wary that the mere sight of a human a quarter mile away sends sunning seals squirting into their air holes.

My first instinct . . . well, let’s forget my first instinct. My second instinct was to go back to the bar for Linda, so we could share our own private polar bear.

But like I said, we’d already had five successful days of shooting. There wasn’t a photographer in the lot who hadn’t filled their memory cards five times over (and some had probably maxed out the hard drives on their laptops, too).

So I decided to just keep this bear to myself. Enjoy a little intimacy with the poster child of the North. Linda and I had experienced a great many wonderful things since that first trip out to the edge of the winter ice sheet way back in June—about the time this male bear was coming ashore in Churchill. We were ending our adventure. He was just starting his. And I?

I was just trying to fit all the memories and encounters into some sort of cognitive framework (which is the gift, and curse, of humanity).

“Hi,” I said. “I’ll bet you’re hungry.”

At the beginning of summer, all the polar bears of Hudson Bay must come ashore. Being creatures of the ice, specialized to hunt seals, whose lives orbit between the ice above and the rich waters of the continental shelf below, when the ice melts, bears head inland and hole up in dens excavated in permafrost, where they, very literally, put themselves on ice.

In temperatures over fifty degrees Fahrenheit, polar bears overheat. So during the summer months they chill and fast. In other places, like the Chukchi Sea, bears retreat with the ice, remaining out on the permanent icecap all year (females even give birth to their young on the ice).

This young male bear, like the fifty or so bears in the area, was moving headlong into the coming season and habitat it was superbly suited for.

“You snuck up on me from under the bus, didn’t you?” I accused.

The bear lifted his longish nose a little higher in my direction but otherwise didn’t rise to the challenge. Not that it mattered. Bear had me dead to rights, fair and square. Used the cover of the lodge and my inattentiveness to advantage. Snuck up on me, another hunter. If I’d been on the ground, or if Tundra Buggies were built three feet lower, my spirit would be on the way to Quilak, Inuit Heaven, in time for scrimmage under the northern lights that were just beginning to shimmer.

Lucky for me polar bears aren’t high jumpers and the folks who convert old school buses into Tundra Buggies take into account both the reach of bears and the inattentiveness of ecotourists.

It’s unlikely the bear had been waiting under the bus—a technique they use to capture seals. Smelling a seal’s breathing hole from over a mile away, the bears maneuver into position and wait for the mammal to surface for a quick breath, dispatching it with a smashing blow of the paw or plunging jaws attached to a long, heavily muscled neck.

The long-snoutedness of polar bears is one of the anatomical refinements bequeathed to the animals when polar bears split off from brown bears some 250,000 years ago. Other refinements include size. Adult male polar bears weigh between 880 and 1,500 pounds (about twice the size of a Siberian tiger or your average grizzly bear); females average half the weight of males. Large body mass helps conserve heat in cold environments. Size is also an advantage when securing and leveraging prey.

Ringed seals, weighing about 140 pounds, constitute polar bears’ primary prey. But the bears have also been known to kill adult walrus weighing twice as much as an adult bear and even beluga whales. Augmenting the bear’s front-end strength and muscular neck are long, sharp canine teeth, sharp-edged “grinding teeth” specialized for a meat diet; short but very sharp claws; and the pads on their oversize feet are shod with small, soft papillae that provide suction-cup traction on ice.

The entire battle chassis is camouflaged in long, translucent fur that can appear white to yellowish. This outer layer of guard hairs covers a dense mat of fur and, beneath that, nearly four inches of blubber for bears in prime condition. So little heat is lost from this multilayered, insulating package that, even on ice, polar bears are difficult to detect with infrared sensors, and the animals quickly overheat, even in subzero temperatures, after running little more than a mile. The average cruising speed of a polar bear on land is between three and four miles per hour. At sea they can make six miles per hour and have been recorded more than 150 miles from ice or land.

If you have wondered why polar bears are classified by experts as marine mammals, this, and their near dependence upon marine prey, is why.

While they are almost wholly carnivorous, it is not, strictly speaking, accurate to call polar bears “meat eaters.” The preferred food of polar bears is fat. Adult bears eat little else. Cubs, who need protein for growth, and younger, inexperienced bears, who get muscled off kills by older larger bears, commonly or more commonly dine on seal meat.

Despite their predatory predilections, the faces of polar bears are hardly frightening. In fact, their button black eyes, black noses, and short, cubbed ears make them as winsome as pandas and almost as endearing as harp seal pups (whose snow-white fur is very probably a defensive adaptation against polar bears—seal pups in the bear-free Antarctic are dark).

Admittedly, older males, whose faces are scarred from battles with other males, score low on the oh-so-cute register. But the face of the animal in front of me was winsome enough to draw a petting hand. It looked, in fact, just like the big stuffed polar bear I once saw (and coveted) on the floor of an F.A.O. Schwarz toy store—right down to the price tag stuck in its ear.

A bright white numbered tag, denoting a bear that had been captured, measured, and subjected to assorted indignities by researchers striving to learn more about the health and stability of polar bear populations. What they are learning is that the populations of several bear groups are declining, that their average weight is dropping, and that the survival rate of cubs is plummeting. In sum, the future for polar bears looks bleak.

“I see you’ve met representatives from my species before,” I soothed. The bear drew back (perhaps surprised at my prescience) but continued to look me square in the face.

After a lifetime spent engaging the natural world, I’ve looked into the eyes of a lot of animals. I don’t think I’ve ever seen eyes so benignly intense. It was hard to believe I was staring into the face of an animal that could dispatch me with the flick of a paw. And if there was more justice in the universe, the creature could probably do so with immunity. Fact is, polar bears don’t have a great deal to thank our species for, and what good feelings they might harbor are shrinking fast.

Literally.

Where Species Collide

For tens of thousands of years, polar bears pretty much had the Arctic marine environment to themselves. Diverging from brown bears after a period of glacially enforced separation, polar bears took an evolutionary tack that converted them from land-based omnivores into icecap-dwelling carnivores.

This period, characterized by recurring intervals of warming and glaciation, also saw, and perhaps spawned, an evolution within our own hominid ranks. During this period, Neanderthal man evolved from Homo erectus, a protohuman whose origin was the temperate equatorial zone. Neanderthals, who ranged from western Asia across Europe to the British Isles, were, like polar bears, structurally modified to withstand cold. Their body and muscle mass were greater than those of our human species. Their brains, too, were on average larger than our own, serving not only to “drive” the flesh-and-bone machines but to aid Neanderthals in what must have been, in their glaciated habitat, nearly a full-time job: hunting for food.

Like polar bears, Neanderthals were meat eaters, and, like polar bears’, their favored prey often exceeded Neanderthals in size. Neanderthals’ countermeasure was an intellect that facilitated the manipulation of materials into tools that served as artificial claws and fangs and allowed groups of hunters to plan and coordinate attacks.

Despite their convergent traits and competitive behavior, there is no evidence that Neanderthals and polar bears ever met. That encounter was left to our species, Neanderthals’ successors, when, approximately eighteen thousand years ago, human hunters, presumed to have originated in Central Asia, emigrated to Siberia. These early aboriginal peoples then migrated east across the Bering land bridge and may have reached Alaska as early as twelve to fourteen thousand years ago.

Very little is known about these Paleo-Eskimo except that they did, in fact, have toolmaking technology and they very certainly met up with polar bears, as did subsequent waves of northern peoples, the Dorset and Inuit. Polar bears infused themselves into the lives and cultures of these people, and it has even been suggested that the Dorset seal-hunting techniques and igloo-building technology derived from the study of their bruin neighbors.

Eskimo peoples, as semimarine predators, competed directly with polar bears for seals. They may or may not have set out in a deliberate or systematic fashion to hunt polar bears, but they most certainly did have the tools and the techniques to confront and kill polar bears at opportunity or need. Hunting Nanook was nothing a true Eskimo hunter would shirk from. In fact, a man raised in a hunting culture who was presented with the challenge of besting the earth’s largest carnivore would relish the confrontation.

As mentioned, in Inuit culture, the Pleiades cluster represents a bear brought to bay by a semicircle of dogs. In some parts of the North, the three stars of Orion’s Belt are held to represent hunters racing to join the dogs and kill the bear.

Just as is represented in the sky, Eskimo hunters used dogs to distract the bears, who were then killed with arrows or lances. All parts of the animals were used (except the liver, which because of its high vitamin A content, is toxic). Nanook was not only a worthy adversary but an important part of Eskimo culture—considered a creature that was both spiritually powerful and closely related to humans. Other hunting cultures, having noted the anatomical similarities between humans and the skinned carcasses of bears, have drawn similar conclusions.

So great a respect did Eskimo hunters have for Nanook that they commonly believed the only way a hunter could kill a bear was for the bear to be a willing accomplice. The bear would have to allow itself to be killed, and such an honor was bequeathed only to a hunter who was worthy.

Eskimo hunters’ impact upon polar bear populations was negligible. Eskimo hunters were numerically few, their access to the Arctic environment limited, and, while their hunting skills were advanced, their weapons were primitive. It took a whole other culture to tip the balance and put polar bear numbers on a downhill slide. This would be western culture. In the fourteenth century, polar bears began being killed for their fur in Russia. As human populations grew, and firearm technology improved, the body count mounted until, by the beginning of the Victorian period, hundreds of animals per year were being killed in northern Europe alone.

But it was the twentieth century that saw the greatest slaughter. The ballistics breakthroughs that so effectively eliminated millions of humans in two world wars increasingly came to be trained on bears. Enhanced mobility through the use of aircraft, icebreakers, and, later, snow machines gave the easily winded animals no place to run or hide.

Following World War II, increased hunting pressure from now well-armed indigenous peoples, sports hunters, and military personnel living in Cold War-spawned bases on both sides of the Iron Curtain accelerated the slaughter. Churchill was home to one such outpost, a Strategic Air Command bomber base. As one bear biologist expressed it to me, “Everyone with a major’s rank and above went home with a bearskin rug.”

Polar bears, like all top predators, have a low reproductive capacity. Females breed every three years and give birth to an average of two cubs. Fewer than half of all cubs survive to celebrate a birthday. Recruitment into the polar bear ranks fell far short of the accelerated rate of hunting-based attrition.

By the early seventies, some estimates placed the total world population of polar bears as low as five to ten thousand animals. The alarm among scientists was so great, the outcry so loud, that it even forged scientific, then political, alliances that vaulted the Iron Curtain.

In 1973 a treaty was signed by five nations whose territories encompass the range of the polar bear—Canada, Denmark (Greenland), Norway, the USSR (Russia), and the United States (Alaska). The International Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears (known as the Oslo Agreement) banned the use of aircraft and icebreaking ships in the pursuit of bears and placed limits on commercial and sport hunting. The hunting of bears “by local people using traditional methods” was sanctioned by the treaty.

But isn’t this amazing: that among the first cooperative steps toward a peaceful, post–Cold War era (and away from nuclear war) was a human concern for the survival not of our species but of another! One year after SALT I, two years after Ping-Pong diplomacy, there was Oslo.

The controls worked. Bear populations rebounded across the Arctic, including Churchill. By the 1980s, bear numbers were believed to have risen to between twenty and forty thousand. About this time, Churchill’s bear-based tourist enterprise evolved. Initiated to meet the demands of professional and serious amateur photographers, it has flourished into a multi-million-dollar ecoindustry that sees thousands of eager tourists descend on this southernmost northern outpost every year.

Our group was one of these.

 

Band of Photographers

The bear continued to stare up at me with eyes as fathomless as they were benign. It was hard to believe that behind those eyes was the calculating mind of one of the planet’s finest hunters and that behind his evident curiosity was a mind that was evaluating possibilities and calculating advantage.

As any good predator who hasn’t eaten in four months would.

Me? Now that I was over my initial shock, and chagrin, I was captivated and thrilled. Since childhood I have been excited by, and sought out, wild things for no other reason than fascination. If getting up close and personal with a box turtle is fun, and watching deer from a tree stand exciting, try to imagine how exciting being within arm’s reach of a polar bear is.

Not that such intimacy is limited to human imagination. That’s what the worldwide ecotourist industry is all about.

We’d made our reservation for this polar bear expedition tour a year in advance. Demand is high. Competition for space in the Tundra Buggy Lodge, fierce.

Our group, numbering thirty-six participants, was divided into two subgroups: 78NS (naturalists) and 78NP (photographers). Linda and I were in the photography group because Linda is, after all, a photographer and because, since photographers tend to be very demanding, they usually get more than mere wildlife viewers. More time on station, better and less crowded conditions, closer proximity.

Even if we weren’t photographers, we still would have paid the extra money and signed on with a photography group.

Our group ranged in age from thirties to eighties, with a median age of about sixty-five and participants from Australia, Japan, England, Canada, and the United States. Americans dominated. Most were retirees or people in the final stages of their professional careers.

At $5,500 per person, you can bet that most participants hailed from society’s more affluent strata, as do those who are dedicated nature photographers.

With camera bodies costing between two and eight thousand dollars and lenses up to fifteen thousand, nature photography is not a poor man’s game (but, based on my experience, a very good way to drive otherwise financially stable individuals into the economic lower ranks).

And equipment is just the down payment. Then comes travel, fueled by a desire to go to the beautiful and remote corners of the planet before it is all used up.

Rob Day, our genial, enthusiastic, and fiftyish leader, makes his living from photography. Rob is an Illinois native who specializes in backyard bird images. Bird magazines and bird feed companies rank among his main clients. Several other members in the group vetted their photos through “houses” specializing in nature photography, and one, at least, was working on a book.

“Oh, I hope I get some decent shots,” Linda prayed, aloud, as our twin-engine prop started its descent into Churchill one cold, gray, snowy day in early November 2007—under the kinds of conditions photographers hate. Every photographer who is, or aspires to be, anyone ultimately comes to Churchill. Polar bears are almost rites of passage among nature photographers, must-haves in every photographer’s portfolio.

If you ever purchased any of the calendars that are vended by the various conservation organizations, if you’ve ever seen one showing polar bears and willow thickets and spruce in the background, dollars to Klondike bars, you’ve seen a shot taken in Churchill.

Polar bears out on the open icecap? Without ear tags, radio collars, and vegetation? That’s polar bears the hard way. And while Linda and I did see polar bears on Baffin Island, way back in June, the distance was too great for calendar- (or book-) worthy shots.

Polar bears in a town that lies at the same latitude as Juneau, Alaska, and has regular train service from Winnipeg, that’s polar bears Churchill style. And while the polar bear express has made getting polar bear photos relatively easy, it still hasn’t made it cheap.

We were two hundred feet over the runway before we even saw the ground. Late-morning temperatures were in the teens, winds were whipping the season’s first snow into face-stinging fusillades. It might have been barely November, but winter was knocking on the door at Churchill.

In the plane, clad in avocationally sanctioned Arc’teryx, Mountain Hardwear, North Face, and Patagonia outerwear, we’d all nearly expired from the heat. Now on the ground, with many of us experiencing our first taste of winter temperatures, we were pleased to be loaded onto a waiting school bus. Hustled off to engage and be engaged by the many shops in Churchill that specialize in selling all things remotely related to polar bears.

Polar bear jewelry. Polar bear sweatshirts. Polar bear soapstone carvings.

“Tourism,” I was told by the proprietor of a store that was about 70 percent polar bear chachkas and 30 percent budget-busting (but nevertheless beautiful) carvings, “is the jewel of Churchill. The more you polish it, the more it glows.”

Most of the twelve to thirteen thousand–odd visitors that come to Churchill (more than ten times the town’s population) are here expressly for the polar bear experience. The vast majority stay in hotels and lodges in town, where they board often crowded Tundra Buggies in the morning. Get on site around 9:00 A.M. Head back to town at 3:00. Some visitors may take only a single trip out to Polar Bear Point to see the bears before getting back on planes and retreating to warmer climates. With their near-requisite campaign sweatshirts and “I ♥ Churchill” key rings.

After our shopping opportunity in town, we were ferried to the Tundra Buggy depot, where at 4:30 we were allowed to board our vehicle. I counted fifteen buggies in all. Ours was driven by a genial young man named Chris, dressed head to toe in Mountain Hardwear.

A Tundra Buggy is a plywood-shod school bus sitting on tires built for earthmoving equipment with an industrial-grade gas-burning stove in the back. It’s got school bus seats. (Need I say more?) It’s got school bus windows—complete with raise up–lower down levers that you pinch until your thumbs turn white and that come screaming down when you hit a bump.

Which, of course, driving out on a road churned by several weeks of Tundra Buggy traffic, now frozen, you frequently do. Everybody, including and maybe particularly Linda, guarded their equipment on the twenty-five-mile, one-and-a-half-hour drive out to the Tundra Buggy Lodge. We were within sight of the lodge, whose lights were beckoning us in the near darkness of 5:30 P.M., when Chris sang out, “There’s our first bear.”

The animal was lying just off the road, with his nose between his paws and ample hams projecting into the air. A big white wedge of fur with button black eyes and Snoopy’s nose.

We, of course, were ecstatic. The bear couldn’t have cared less.

First Contact

My bear was beginning to show small signs of restlessness—or maybe resignation. My failure to extend my arm or get down from my perch in the name of interspecific harmony evidenced a disappointing degree of survival instinct.

“Have we met before?” I invited, hoping the sound of my voice would reboot the bear’s interest. It did.

Craning his neck forward, nostrils flaring, the animal inhaled grandly, then exhaled a little puff of bear exhaust.

“Poooh,” he as good as said.

“You’re making that up, right?” I accused. “Well, I’m Christopher Robin. Pleased to meet you.”

The bear didn’t respond any more than to keep looking at me with those discerning and undisclosing eyes. The kind of eyes you see on age-darkened portraits. The kind of eyes that disarm you with detachment and neutrality.

The kind of eyes you can’t lie to.

“Okay,” I admitted. “Name’s Pete. Pleased to meet you.”

“Poooh,” the bear said again.

What the heck. If I’d wanted conversation, I could have just stayed in the bar. But after six days, most of the stories worth telling and hearing had already been told and heard. The better and most recent ones were well known to me.

When we’d set out on our first morning of photography, nobody knew anything more about anybody than first names. After that extraordinary adventure, we knew everything down to how many frames per second their cameras were shooting and what expletives they favored.

Breakfast at 7:00, pancakes and eggs. Coffee, fair. Syrup, store-bought. Ketchup, in squeeze bottles, waiting on the table.

Outside temperature was about twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Skies, moribund gray. Bears, luke-active. A couple of small males roaming around in the glow of dining car lights, a mother with two disarmingly young cubs keeping her butt against the lodge and her eye on the male bears.

By the time we clambered aboard the buggy, staking out strategic seats, Linda was as nervous as a frosh pledge at her first sorority mixer.

“Oh, I wish I’d brought Bertha,” she moaned, cursing the “pack light” mentality instilled in her back in the days when carting stuff into the wilderness meant putting it on your back. Most ecotourists aren’t burdened by this discipline, and most of the photographers onboard had one or more 500- to 600-millimeter lenses in their arsenals.

“The two-hundred-to-four-hundred is perfect,” I assured her. “Much better for composing shots.”

“Did you see the stuff some of the other people are using?” she pleaded, shaking her head in jealous disbelief. “There must be half a dozen Mark Twos and D Threes in this crowd.”

For once, Nikon shooters outnumbered Canon users. The D3, Nikon’s latest and greatest, is capable of shooting fifteen frames per second. Linda’s D200, by comparison, is capable of only a measly, confidence-dampening five frames per second.

“Equipment’s only as good as the person behind the viewfinder,” I soothed. While this is true, based on the level of commitment it takes to get you and your stuff to Churchill (not to mention the very focused and practiced way everyone was setting up), it seemed that there were a lot of very accomplished photographers onboard.

At 8:05 Chris got us rolling. We rolled fifty yards (about the polar-bear-embracing range of a 600-millimeter lens) and stopped right next to the two males we’d seen at breakfast.

In about .00451 seconds every window went down (except the two that jammed). Sixteen cameras (soon to be joined by two more) were trained on the semi-indifferent bears, and while it was still too dark to shoot, everyone began shooting anyway.

It sounded like the crackle of electronic musketry.

clickclickclickclickclick; clickclickclickclickclick . . .

And this was only Linda.

Rob Day, marching up and down our ranks like a reincarnation of Wellington, was imparting wisdom and discipline to our ranks. Checking settings. Suggesting ISOs. Advising everyone to “take a couple of shots and then let me look at your histogram.”

Linda was tense, firing in short bursts, biting her lips.

Linda never bites her lip, I thought.

clickclickclickclickclick; clickclick . . . clickclickclick . . . clickikikikik; clickkikikikik . . .

There were multiframe volleys to the left. Volleys to the right. And this was just the warm-up. Suddenly the two bears stood and began sparring. A photographer’s dream. A National Geographic cover shot on the paw!

KAH-CLICKCLICKCLICKK’K’K’K’K’KKKKKKK. . .

“Watch your focus,” Field Marshal Day warned. “Make sure you’re getting eyes and heads.”

“The bears weren’t doing any of this last week,” he confided to me after dressing the line. Satisfied that his troops had the situation well in hand. “It’s the colder temperatures that make them more active.”

After ten memory-card-filling minutes, the bears backed off, succumbing to bruin ennui, overheated in the twenty-degree air.

The photographers, nearly shell-shocked with elation, regrouped. Replaced memory cards. Changed lenses. Compared settings. Changed settings. Bemoaned the shitty light.

“Do you want to get in here?” Linda invited, nodding toward the vacant window, motioning toward her backup system waiting on the seat.

“No. And don’t look now, but you’re missing a shot,” I counseled, nodding toward one of the bears, who was sitting up, sweeping his snout in the air, sniffing at a sudden, sanctifying burst of sunlight.

Linda spun. Said something expressively colorful. Started shooting.

The sound of her camera started a stampede for the windows, setting off a megapixel fusillade that would have rivaled a presidential press conference.

At 9:15 the first buggy in the stay-in-town tourist fleet arrived, pursued by nine more. The vehicles were crowded, two to a seat, the windows framed with eager faces hidden behind camcorders and pocket cameras.

“That other buggy is going to be right in our frame,” one of our group growled.

“Buggy number nine,” Chris called over on his radio, “you are going to be right behind our bears.”

“Our bears!”

Damn tourists.

Suddenly the mother bear and her two cubs walked by, drawing all cameras. Then two new males showed up and began sparring. Virgin bears. Without ear tags! Everyone seemed paralyzed, torn between two once-in-a-photographer’s lifetime shots.

I did a quick scan. There were now eleven bears around us. Seven shootably close.

And we were still only 150 yards from the lodge!

It was cold inside the buggy now. Exposed fingers clumsy with cold. Feet feeling the chilling effect of Arctic air that sinks to the floor while the heat of the stove rises to the ceiling.

“Anybody want to move and set up some shots?” Rob asked.

“YeahYeahYeahYeah . . .”

The panic was over. Everyone had shots to put on their Web sites and show the members of the photo clubs back home. Now it was time to concentrate on quality shots.

Bears on ice. Bears without willow branches in the background.

We traveled fifty yards before being forced to stop by photo ops just too good to ignore.

“There are so many damn bears here,” someone said, expressing the problem.

A large male bear came up on Linda’s window. Stood. She had to raise her lens hood to keep from hitting the animal’s nose.

Her eyes were shiny and not from the cold.

The light and opportunities were so good now that even Chris, the driver, was driven to grab his camera and start filling cards. Rob had already surrendered to temptation.

At 11:45 we tried moving again. Not to find bears. But to get a better angle on the sun (which had, unaccountably, begun to shine brightly). To accomplish this, we had to leave two sparring bears, two bears sleeping in the snow together, and the mother with cubs rushing at male bears.

Now we were parked south of the lodge, and Chris began ladling cups of butternut squash soup and handing out wraps. A tried and true strategy designed to guarantee a great shot. Sure enough, just when everyone had their sandwiches up and cameras down, mom and the cubs wandered over and started playing in the snow.

Tundra Buggies are big, their suspensions heavy duty. Still, in response to the human wave that rushed to the windows, our vehicle listed noticeably.

“I don’t know how we’re going to top this,” a smiling Rob Day said to his sandwich (after filling close to a memory card of his own).

I don’t know whether we ever did top the experience of that first day. But we matched it—every day that we went out. In fact, each successive day saw more snow, more and bigger bears, and better light. On the last day, so satiated were all onboard with their polar bear shots that we went off in search of willow ptarmigan.

Found them, too. Couple of flocks. White birds against white snow. Point-blank range.

There wasn’t a photographer among us who wasn’t happy to give the trip two thumbs up and sing the praises of the “Polar Bear Capital of North America.”

And just like Rob said, we never even left the bus. Spent five days in an Arctic theme park. Enjoyed an intimacy with bears you could hardly match in an aquarium or a zoo, except that the animals were wild and free.

It was we who were caged. And while the intimacy was great, the disconnect was, too.

What we’d experienced was nature on our terms, not hers. It’s not natural, but it is reflective of the growing disconnect between our species and the rest of the world. And I think, to a large degree, it explains why I’d elected to leave the group and find what I assumed would be solitude on the deck of the buggy.

What I found wasn’t exactly communion. But at least it was disconnect from the disconnect.

The World According to Pooh!

Animals don’t commonly stand and stare into human faces unless they are intensely motivated. I’ve had deer pin me under their soul-piercing gazes for twenty minutes, wanting to know whether I constituted the threat they thought me to be. Our dog, Raven, can sustain an imploring look longer than any creature I’ve ever met, maybe indefinitely, but at least as long as it takes me to stop whatever it is I’m doing. Get up. Go to the closet. Get her the 4:00 P.M. dog biscuit.

But the bear, whose gaze was unwavering, was neither suspicious nor imploring nor any number of other attributes that we ascribe to, or divine from, other animals’ expressions.

Not angry or fearful or nervous. Certainly not reproachful, or remorseful, or accusatory, or despairing, or vengeful, as a human might be, in the bear’s situation, facing, as the species is, the ecological collapse of its world and possible extinction because of global warming. Projections are that the Arctic icecap will completely disappear in summer by 2050. Recent and more pessimistic estimates say sometime in the next decade.

One hundred years from now, a vestigial population of polar bears may still survive in the northernmost islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, where they will live an ecologically partitioned existence similar to that of the polar bears of Churchill. Able to hunt the northern icecap that will still form in winter. Retreat landward when the ice melts in summer.

Those populations now living a totally marine existence will disappear. The bears whose range once bridged continents and time zones will be closeted in a corner of their former northern domain.

But the bear’s eyes, like his mind, reflected none of this. He would, in his natural lifetime, certainly face the hardships imposed by global warming: the diminishment of resources, increased competition, possible starvation, maybe even drowning. But it was not the animal’s problem to be burdened with this understanding. Understanding is a human affliction.

And maybe it was because the bear’s gaze was so benign. Or maybe it was because, increasingly, I am seeing the world one way but still wanting it to be another. And it might have been just the wine.

But I suddenly found myself trying to explain things to the bear. Speaking to him, spirit to spirit, as the Inuit shamans do.

“It’s like this,” I said to the eyes. “It’s not that we’re a bad species, or a stupid species, or even an uncaring species. We’re not.”

The eyes didn’t change expression. But my assertion didn’t stop the bear from passing judgment.

“Poooh,” he breathed.

“Okay,” I admitted. “Maybe some of us are bad, and stupid, and uncaring. But they’re in the minority, and in America we believe in majority rule.”

“We do care,” I insisted. “Project the scope of our concern to include the earth and everything on it. Wrap whole not-for-profit organizations and government agencies around environmental protection. Limit ourselves with regulations and treaties to put a brake on human ambition. It’s just that for a long time we didn’t get the idea that we’ve been given this eco-tipping advantage, the capacity to manipulate whole environments.

“We’re just beginning to understand that, when it comes to the earth’s environment, we can dish it out faster than the rest of the planet can take it; that when we push something here, something unforeseen falls off an ice floe over there and . . .”

“Poooh,” the bear observed, again.

Don’t you just hate it when you are really trying to communicate and some adolescent bear calls your card like that?

“Okay, bear, I’ll give it to you straight. The reason your world is collapsing and your species is toast is that, smart as we are, and caring as we are, when the chips are down, people don’t care enough to be inconvenienced about something happening way up here, on the end of the earth, that doesn’t have any obvious and immediate bearing on their lives.

“It’s the same reason the rain forest is being leveled. Same reason 90 percent of the ocean’s food fish have been depleted. Same reason aquifers are running on empty, the food column is riddled with toxins, and creatures as innocuous as frogs and as grand as tigers are being elbowed into extinction on my generation’s watch.

“Sure, lots of people are sympathetic. But even people who spend a couple of weeks a year traveling to fabulous eco-des-tinations regard the natural world more as a playground than as the playing field that supports life on Earth.

“Most of the members of my species are too distracted and estranged to recognize, much less care about, the natural endowment that supports them, and the interconnectedness that binds them. Polar bears in the Arctic are far less pertinent than getting the car through inspection, making the monthly mortgage payment, or deciding what color to paint the kitchen—and, frankly, in this regard our species isn’t much different from any other, big brain or no.

“We focus on what we have to do in order to advance and survive. Immediate needs trump long-term consequences, and let’s not forget that the big brain evolved in order for individual protohumans to reach high-hanging fruit, not for all humans collectively to prevent deforestation or to keep the Arctic icecap from melting.

“So when we have mediocre leaders who tell us that the problem is exaggerated, the data inconclusive, we’re willing to accept their assurance over our misgivings. It’s what we want to hear. It’s why we elected them in the first place and why candidates who espouse inconvenient truths come in second.

“When we get home after a hard day of reaching for high-hanging fruit and turn on the TV—and hear about sea levels rising faster than projected or famine spreading across sub-Saharan Africa—we solve the problem by changing the channel, switching to a network that assures us that climate change is part of a long-term natural cycle that’s got nothing to do with us or the burning of fossil fuels.

“Now here’s a word from our sponsor. The Fossil Fuel Coalition.

“And climate change is just too big a challenge to be solved by individuals alone. That’s why we’ve got this system that brings collective wisdom to bear on problems that affect everyone. It is based on the premise that everyone is vested and that whatever a majority of the people want will be right. It works pretty well most of the time, but . . .

“But what happens when what the majority wants is to not be bothered?

“And if everyone is vested, doesn’t that just make it easier for individuals to duck their personal responsibility and point the finger at everybody else?

“It begins with estrangement. It leads to denial and inaction. It’s going to end with wholesale ecological changes and extinctions. So, bear, I guess what I’m telling you is that, unless you’ve got a fallback plan or can figure out how to de-evolve yourself into a brown bear in a couple of generations, it looks like an evolutionary dead end for bears that live on ice.”

It was a long speech, probably the longest the young bear had ever heard. But the bear’s equanimity was equal to his patience, and as a species that can wait next to a seal’s breathing hole for hours, polar bears’ patience is formidable.

The bear continued to regard me. But at least this time he didn’t say “pooh.”

I looked back at the sky. It was clear, still. The stars were shimmering brightly. Cassiopeia, the “seal oil lamp.” The Big Dipper, “the caribou.” The North Star, Nuuttuittuq, “never moves.”

Never is a long time, but time and the heavens are never still. Because of the shifting movement of our solar system within the galaxy, in approximately twelve thousand years, Vega, the old woman coming to the rescue of the boy being chased by his knife-wielding uncle, is projected to replace the North Star as the polestar—the star directly in line with the axis of the earth. The new star that never moves.

Twelve thousand years. About as far ahead in time as the history of human habitation in the North American Arctic goes back. A long time to wait for a rescue.

Satisfied that my monologue was completed, the bear eased himself to the ground, a movement so quiet I had to look twice to be sure he wasn’t still standing there. On noiseless feet he began moving into the night, a white phantom heading in the direction of the bay, which was, now, quickly freezing and would, until the end of June, constitute the center of the universe for polar bears.

“Hey, Pooh,” I shouted, not at all sure why, except I didn’t want to see the moment end; afraid, I guess, that this might be the last time I would see a polar bear in this life. Surprisingly, the bear turned, ambled back, and, as soundlessly as before, raised himself on his hind legs, pressed his paws against the steel side of the deck, bringing his face, again, close to mine.

“Good luck,” I said. “I mean that. Stay away from the big guys until you gain a little more muscle mass, hear?”

I didn’t say more, didn’t try to put a better spin on the pronouncements I’d made. If polar bears are going to survive in this world of our making, then people, individually and collectively, are going to have to change. It is as simple and as difficult as that.

The bear, for his part, didn’t linger. Once again, he dropped to all fours, turned, and headed in the direction of the bay, heading home. I watched until he was indistinguishable from the ice, until I heard footsteps and knew it was Linda coming to find me.

“Whatcha doin’ out here, silly?”

“Thinking of some way to end the book. This will be the last chapter.”

“Come up within anything?”

“Maybe. We’ll see what it looks like when it goes down on paper. Dinner ready?”

We retreated to the dining room, two humans, a mated pair, who were, like the planet that supported them, moving from one season into another, moving toward winter.

Pooh? A strictly honest man would find it difficult to say. But being one of those animals equipped with the big brain and the power to conceive of possibilities beyond reason, I can tell you what I think and believe happened to the bear. The legend goes like this.

Pooh remembered the words of the tourist with the grapey breath. He bided his time, and, as the years passed, he grew large and strong, became a wily hunter and a fierce combatant. Females loved him. Seals surrendered their lives to him. No hunter ever got him in their sights. He vanished like a breath in the parched polar air.

“Poohf!”

He lived many years, outliving all of his kind, and when one day he discovered that the ice was almost gone, just as the tourist had predicted, he did not waste his strength searching needlessly but instead swam straight for the horizon.

Along the way he met the last ringed seal, who was searching for the ice and almost exhausted, and the bear said, “Come with me and live. There is no ice. The humans have been stupid. They used their intelligence to delude themselves. They stuck their opposable thumbs up their asses. We must survive until they are gone and the ice returns.”

“Where are we going?” asked the seal.

“Into the sky,” said the bear. “To live with the stars that bear our names.”

So they swam to the edge of the sea and into the sky, the two animals whose lives are as close as life and death. The seal curled up in the lamp, near the center of the sky, where it could keep a watchful eye, and the bear joined Alcyone (who just happened to be female), where they amused themselves by sparring with the dogs and outwitting the hunters, waiting for the day when humans have outlived their stay, the ice returns, and they and all the creatures of the ice with it.

It is only a matter of time.