Tales from the bush
It’s the last day of a week long rafting trip I’m guiding on the Canning River, which snakes from northern Alaska’s Brooks Range into the Arctic Coastal Plain. Sipping coffee in the quiet of the morning, and looking south from the top of the bluff where we have pitched our tents, I notice a white lump on a cutbank a quarter mile away, muscling toward camp.
I cannot believe my eyes – polar bear! I alert our clients, who immediately pop out of their nylon cocoons, one clad in just boxer shorts and a down jacket. Some 50km from the Beaufort Sea, radiant against the willow and heather, the bear looks out of place. The previous year, sea ice – where seals haul-out and polar bears hunt – shrunk to the third-lowest extent on record, so hunger or curiosity could have driven the bear far inland. It appears healthy and fat, but if the spring ice has broken up early again, it will be in for a long fast.
My co-guide Cyn insists on getting the shotgun from its waterproof sleeve by my tent – a hungry polar bear is just about the most dangerous animal you could meet out here. But through my binoculars, I can see the bear is lying down for a nap on a terrace halfway up the bluff’s slope. It seems without a care in the world, we don’t appear to have anything to fear.
The clients are ecstatic, as are we – none of us has ever seen this creature in the wild before. Its eyesight is as good as ours, so we crouch down, keeping our profiles low. Occasionally, the bear lifts its head to sample the air. Polar bears can smell as well as dogs, and we’re pretty ripe at this point in the trip. Luckily, we’re downwind and it remains unaware of our presence.
Because the bear is not moving and poses no immediate threat, I have breakfast and break down my tent. Then I act as lookout while the rest of our group does the same and we load up the rafts.
While I contemplate sleep, a raft bearing two camouflaged figures comes floating around the bend. Velvety caribou antlers in the bow attest to the couple’s prowess as hunters – they drift by with their bloody cargo, the carnivore out of their field of vision. They are too far from us to see any signals, and shouting might alert the bear.
Two hours after the initial sighting, we shove the rafts into the current – not a moment too soon. The bear is up now and moving gradually towards where we camped, sniffing and pawing at hummocks and bushes on the tundra bench.
At a gravel strip where our bush plane will pick us up the following morning, we speak to the hunters, and we find out they were indeed completely ignorant of the polar bear.
I shudder to think how often I’ve courted disaster, unknowingly, like this. The episode drives home a stark truth: out here, who detects the other first can determine who survives. Alert, we become fully, if at times frightfully, alive.
“THEY ARE TOO FAR FROM US TO SEE ANY SIGNALS, AND SHOUTING MIGHT ALERT THE POLAR BEAR TO OUR PRESENCE.”