Apparently satisfied by the answers, he retreated to his room; his fellow passenger and I sat in silence, gazing out the windows of the observation car as the Manitoba wilderness rumbled past, before I began what I hoped was a gentler interrogation.
Doug Ross had until recently been director of the Winnipeg Zoo, which as we spoke that evening remained home to Debbie, now deceased but then, at age forty-two, the world's oldest known polar bear. The previous year, Doug had taken early retirement and begun a life in which, as he put it, he would work only when he needed to, doing only the things he wanted to. Having spent many years taking care of, among other charges, a polar bear in captivity, one of the things that he wanted to do was spend time with polar bears in the wild. So he had become a driver of a Tundra Buggy, a tourist vehicle that looks like a bus on monster truck wheels, from which visitors to Churchill can observe polar bears in relative comfort and safety.
I had spent plenty of time in northern communities, had lived in a cabin in Alaska, was perfectly accustomed to human communities living cheek by jowl with large wild mammals. But Churchill lies directly in the path of polar bears that migrate from summer shelter to the coast of Hudson Bay in anticipation of the bay's waters freezing; it was one thing to have experienced, as I had on several occasions, a moose lying in the driveway or walking down the street, but the prospect of a large and hungry carnivore lurking around the corner seemed to me an entirely different proposition.
"The thing is," Doug began, "a community like this, we might think it's a big deal to live with polar bears, but for them, it is what it is. I would see kids out in the playgrounds at seven or eight in the evening, and I'd think, 'Wow, is that safe?' But what else are they going to do? I imagine they're taught to be really careful."
We paused as we looked out the window at a brief sign of life, the streets and signposts of an anonymous hamlet past which the train slowly rumbled.
"There were times in the night," he continued, "when I would hear these big crackers going off—you know they fire cracker shells [12-gauge cartridges that explode in the air with a loud bang] from shotguns to scare the bears. Well, first you'd hear all the dogs in town going crazy, and then you'd hear the bangers going off. They tell you all these stories—I don't know if it's just to get us going or what, but they say that, especially if you're out at night, always be sure you know where the nearest car is. Because people leave the doors to their cars and trucks unlocked, just in case."
We headed down to the dining car, and after a light dinner of grilled cheese sandwich and soup, I retired to my accommodation. Officially called a roomette, it could charitably be described as snug. With the bed folded down from the wall, there was enough room for ... well, the bed. Lifting the bed back up again required stepping out into the hallway; completing the operation revealed a couch of sorts, a padded seat that covered a flush toilet, a fold-down washbasin, and an assortment of cubbyholes for assorted storage. In Manhattan, it probably would rent for about $2,000 a month.
I woke up a few times in the night, as was perhaps to be expected given that I was sleeping in a tiny cabin on a gently rocking train, and I looked out to see the tall prairie grass and, later, larch and spruce bathed in our transport's reflected glow. The sky was clear, and Orion was instantly recognizable, low on the horizon, as I peeked out my window.
When I slept, I dreamed. Disconcertingly, I dreamed that a polar bear had clambered aboard the train and was at this moment padding in a predatory fashion among the alleyways. The Dream Conductor's assurances that we were all safe did nothing to assuage the fears of Dream Kieran, as he cowered behind his closed and locked door.
The first people to arrive in the environs of what is now Churchill, ancestors of the Inuit who inhabit the region today, did so, as far as we know, approximately three and a half thousand years ago. They were ultimately joined by Chipewyan people from the north and Cree from the south, but a further millennium would elapse before Europeans penetrated the waters of Hudson Bay. The initial wave was English, led by the man after whom the bay is now named, but the first to step ashore and winter by the banks of the Churchill River were Dano-Norwegian.
By the time the Unicorn and the Lamprey, sailing under the command of Jens Munk, arrived at the mouth of the river in September 1619, their crews were exhausted from a long and trying voyage, punctuated by a battering from severe fall storms. Spying an abundance of small plants—and, in particular, a riot of cranberries—on land, the men anchored their vessels and moved ashore, warming themselves by a fire they maintained day and night, and strengthening from the addition of fresh fruit to their diet.
There was fresh meat, too, to satisfy the men's hunger and improve their health—ptarmigan, caribou, reindeer, and, for reasons the sailors likely neither knew nor particularly dwelled upon, a high concentration of polar bears. But the beneficial bounty didn't last long.
With the onset of winter, the caribou retreated inland, where the snow was deep and soft and where the poorly equipped mariners could not follow. The crew's clothing was inadequate for the cold temperatures and angry winds that tore across the ice of Hudson Bay. By January of 1620, the men began, one by one, to die—not of the cold, but of some unknown disease that made them nauseous, rendered them weak, led to dysentery, and caused them to lose their appetite, further weakening them. By March, the hardened ground and the weakened men combined to make further burial of corpses impossible; the dead were either thrown overboard onto the ice or left on the ground where they had fallen.
In the middle of April, Munk recorded that just five men remained; shortly thereafter, that number had dwindled to three. It would dwindle no further. The return of spring heralded the reemergence of plant life, the juices of which Munk and his companions sucked desperately from their stems. As the ice broke up, the survivors set nets to catch fish; the men's teeth were too loose in their gums for them to chew, so they boiled the fish and drank the broth. When they regained sufficient strength to discharge their ammunition, they did the same with the migrating birds that had returned from the south. Remarkably, on June 16, the three men sailed the Lamprey out of Churchill River, into Hudson Bay, and on a successful voyage back to Norway.
For centuries, the prevailing assumption was that the crews' sickness was the result of scurvy; today, another theory holds sway, that the bounty of bear meat that must initially have brought great joy was ultimately the bearer, as it were, of disease and death. Polar bear meat is frequently infected with larvae of the Trichinella spiralis roundworm, the cause of trichinosis, a scourge of those unwise enough to eat undercooked game meat or pork. Munk suffered less because he roasted his personal supply more effectively than did his crew, who ate theirs parboiled in vinegar. But partly boiled bear meat is at best an acquired taste; the two men who chose to acquire as little of it as possible were the two who survived to sail the Lamprey back to Europe with their captain.
Munk had hoped to make contact with some of the natives he assumed lived in the area, and he rued the fact that his men shot a domesticated dog in the dark of night, thinking it to be a wolf. Had they captured rather than killed it, he reasoned, perhaps they could have tied some trade items around its neck and sent it back home, in the hope that its owners would want to barter food for goods.
In the event, Munk saw not one human denizen during his stay in the area. But it was to do business with those native inhabitants that the Hudson's Bay Company—which in 1670 had been granted a monopoly by England's King Charles II on the trading of furs in the region—established, in 1717, its northernmost outpost, a log fort named after the company's former governor, the first Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill.
In response to growing tensions between England and France over fur trade profits and North American territory, the Hudson's Bay Company in 1732 began construction of a massive stone structure, Fort Prince of Wales, to replace the original log outpost. Like many ambitious building projects before and since, it cost much more and took far longer to f
inish than initially estimated; not until 1771 was it considered completed. A little over a decade later, three French warships steamed into the harbor and the complement of twenty-two Englishmen manning the fort surrendered without a shot being fired.
Over time, the fur trade declined, and Churchill with it, although a settlement remained. In the late nineteenth century, the members of that settlement turned to whaling, targeting the belugas that populate the bay and profiting from their oil. Between the First and Second World Wars, Churchill bloomed; selected as the site for a new northern harbor, it was connected by rail to Winnipeg to the south and became the portal through which much of Canada's grain was exported. During World War II, the United States Army established a base, Fort Churchill, five miles to the settlement's east; in the years after the war, it functioned as a joint United States—Canadian center for training and experimentation, from which more than 3,500 rockets were launched to study the ionosphere and the aurora borealis that flickered overhead in the night sky.
These were Churchill's glory days, when more than 4,000 people lived at Fort Churchill and in town and the community (relatively speaking) pulsed with energy. But the U.S. Army left the base in 1970, it was used only sporadically in subsequent years, and by 1990 it had been abandoned completely. Today, Churchill's year-round population is approximately 800.
A few buildings still stand as evidence of the base's presence, as well as an airport that is serviced by a runway of a size wholly disproportionate to the population it serves. The port remains active; indeed, Churchill effectively functions as the gateway to Canada's Arctic communities. In fact, although the port is completely ice-free for only three months a year, it handles more than 500,000 tons of grain annually, as well as fuel oil and bulk cargo.
There is talk of revitalizing the community through mining—the town of Thomson to the south has exploded in size and wealth in recent years following development of a nickel mine. There is tourism, too, centered around the town's wildlife: more than 200 species of migratory birds in the spring, belugas in the summer. But it is for six to eight weeks in October and November that Churchill truly comes into its own, when the 800 regulars are joined by approximately 12,000 visitors and seasonal workers, the reason for their arrival evident in the names of the places they eat, sleep, and shop: the Bear Country Inn, the Lazy Bear Café, Great White Bear Tours Gift Shop.
This is bear season, when Churchill, Manitoba, turns the potential, very obvious, negatives of being in the path of the world's largest carnivore into a lucrative positive, when it revels in its status as the self-described but undisputed "Polar Bear Capital of the World."
"In Winnipeg, they say you can tell a person from Churchill because they always look carefully before walking around a corner," chuckled Tony Bembridge, a man quiet in both demeanor and locution who for a few months a year interrupts his retirement to help run Hudson Bay Helicopters for its owner, his son. The company is an important part of the community. It provides tourist trips of either an hour or half-hour duration to see polar bears and other wildlife; it assists in identifying polar bears that are either approaching or have already entered the town's perimeter; and it provides air transport for researchers who tag and study Hudson Bay's bears.
One of the company's pilots, twenty-two years old and boasting the perfect Hollywood pilot name of Jon Talon, sat next to me as Tony stood up to talk to some prospective customers, fellow refugees from the Winnipeg train, who smiled and nodded in recognition.
Like anybody who has lived for any time in Churchill, Jon has bear stories.
"My girlfriend was getting frustrated that after working in town for seven months she hadn't seen a bear," he began. "'Just be patient,' I told her. 'Wait till bear season, you'll see one.' Sure enough, we're in bed one night, when at like four a.m., she wakes up and says, 'What's that noise? What's what noise?' She throws open the drapes, and there it is, a bear right outside the window. She starts shouting, 'There's a bear! There's a bear!' And I start telling her to get dressed because if that bear comes through that window, we're going out this door."
Bundled up against the buffeting wind that hurled itself across the bay, Tony and I made our way across the street to Gypsy's Café, a Churchill institution and gathering place and purveyor of a surprisingly hearty and flavorful French onion soup. We sat at the table nearest the counter, reserved for residents to sit and exchange stories that in any other locale would seem outlandish and even here sometimes stretch credulity sufficiently to earn the table its own epithet: the Bullshit Table.
Next to us sat Bill Callahan, American by birth but a resident of Churchill for twenty-eight years.
He, too, had a bear story.
Evidently, a community of 800 people is, for Bill, somewhat suffocating, so he lives in a cabin outside of town. It makes for plenty of peace and quiet; but, he says, "I sometimes get some interesting visitors."
One night the previous year, a sow with cubs had pushed through his front door and entered his kitchen while he slept. Placing her paw on the stove in an apparent attempt to reach a loaf of bread that was above it, the sow pressed the button that lit the burner, singed her paw, recoiled, banged into the wall, and crashed out through the now-open doorway, cubs in tow. Having somehow dozed through the breaking down of his door and the presence of three polar bears in his kitchen, Bill was awakened by the sound of the sow thumping into the kitchen wall. Fully naked but half-conscious, he stood in the kitchen doorway, the chaos not yet fully apparent to him, the scene lit only by the glow from the stove, prompting Bill initially to wonder how he could have gone to bed and left the gas flame burning.
Another bear story.
Also from the previous year, this story was told to me in the warmth of a basement room at the south end of town.
As all should, the basement had a glowing fire, a big-screen TV, a wet bar, and a hyperactive dachshund called Monty. Here, too, sat my hosts, Lance and Irene Duncan, proprietors of a bed-and-breakfast in which, Lance advised me sternly after he and Irene had collected me from the railway station, guests are expected to obey two rules: "Please leave a note in our guest book before you leave, and treat our house as your house." I needed little encouragement to do either, warming myself externally by the fire and internally with the glass of rye I cradled in my hand, as Lance related his close encounter twelve months previously. Both Lance and Irene work full-time jobs in addition to taking care of their guests, Irene at the Seaport Hotel on Kelsey Boulevard (the town's main thoroughfare), Lance, at the time of my visit, at the Churchill Marine Tank Farm by the harbor. It was at the latter, while kicking through the snow in search of a dropped tool at the rail loading area, that Lance rounded a rail car and came face-to-face with a polar bear.
The encounter appeared to startle each equally, the yell that Lance instinctively let out causing the bear to momentarily retreat and buying Lance the time he needed. He leaped into his nearby truck, the door unlocked as always (yes, he said, it is true that Churchill residents leave not just car and truck doors but also house doors open for just such an occasion), and promptly ran the bear out of town, all the way to Cape Merry several miles to the northwest, the site of Jens Munk's enforced overwintering in 1619 and of the fort that the French had captured so effortlessly the following century.
Once he recovered from the initial shock—or, as he jokes now, "once I cleaned out my drawers"—he was, he recalled, mad.
"I was mad at that bear for being there, for giving me a fright, and for costing me part of a morning's work," he explained. "And I was mad at myself for not paying attention and for putting myself in that position."
For Churchill residents, particularly those who, like Lance, grew up in the community, bear awareness is both ingrained and a matter of pride; appropriately safe behaviors are second-nature. The approach is one of neither blustering bravado nor crippling caution; common sense prevails, as does a collective desire to avoid placing human or bear life at unnecessary risk.
"Gone are those days when, if you were a bear that walked into the community, you were a dead bear," mayor Mike Spence told me over coffee at the Seaport Hotel as the wind howled outside. "It was common to shoot twenty-five bears in a bear season."
Such a trigger-happy approach did not translate into greater human safety. In the late sixties, four maulings, one of them fatal, prompted the Manitoba Department of Conservation to post a wildlife officer in town on a permanent basis, but the approach to problem bears remained the same: chase them away if possible; if not possible or if they return, shoot them. The International Fund for Animal Welfare provided funding for some bears to be transported by helicopter to a spot about thirty miles northwest, but beyond that there were simply no other obvious practical alternatives.
That changed with the opening in 1982 of the holding facility, popularly referred to as the Polar Bear Jail. The departure of the military led to a quieter community, which in turn prompted more bears to approach town, thus increasing the likelihood of future encounters. At the same time, a nascent tourist industry was beginning to put greater value on live polar bears, and there were some concerns that the level of shooting might be impacting bear numbers. The holding facility, fashioned from an old hangar at Fort Churchill, provided an alternative that today is an important element of the Polar Bear Alert Program, which seeks to keep bears and humans apart for their mutual benefit.
Signs all over town, on restaurant and shop doors and on lampposts, remind visitors and residents alike of Polar Bear Alert, of the need to exercise caution and awareness, and of the twenty-four-hour "bearline"—675-BEAR—to report bear sightings.
The Great White Bear Page 16