LIGHT ’EM UP

My last day out on the tundra began with a very early but very exciting wake-up call. “The northern lights are out!” cheered Shephard as she ran through the bunkhouse around 5 a.m. I went out on the deck and watched the swirling green bands flicker and fade and reappear in the dark, starspecked sky until the horizon ripened into vibrant tangerine and then softened into a fuchsia that made the snow—and the polar bears—glow pink. At other times, the bears had appeared icy white and creamy yellow, so I was fascinated to learn that polar-bear fur actually has no pigment. “It’s the colour of ambient light—it absorbs and reflects what is in the environment—and normal sunlight is white light,” explained Amstrup. We rushed out in our Tundra Buggy to try to capture shots of the bears in this perfect but fleeting light. “I’m not sure I got good pictures, but it doesn’t really matter,” Sam Robbins, a 28-year-old Australian who’d made a solo voyage here to see the bears, told me. A decade ago, her mother, a teacher, had connected her classroom with this place through a PBI webcast featuring scientists who showed off live shots of the bears. “I always remembered that, and I wanted to see it first-hand,” she said. n