Arctic Solitaire - Paul Souders

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the absence of any training in the biology or behavior of wild animals, I relied instead upon my own limited observations, and I make no claim to expert knowledge now. While there were days when I must have tried their patience, I made every attempt to avoid stressing polar bears or other animals that already lived in a challenging environment.

      My descriptions of the small Inuit communities along Hudson Bay’s western coast are those of a preoccupied traveler passing through far too quickly. In these pages, I have tried to hold onto the flavor of my brief visits and those first, sometimes gritty or unfair impressions. I arrived unannounced and uninvited in these towns and was greeted, with only rare exception, with kindness and hospitality.

      A note on distances: I use American statute miles when describing distances on land. Out on the water, however, I refer to nautical miles: 1 nautical mile is equal to 1.15 statute miles or 1.85 kilometers. It sounds arbitrary, but in fact it makes for an elegant way of seeing the world. You begin by dividing the earth’s globe north to south into the 180 degrees of a semicircle. Each of those degrees of latitude is divided again into 60 minutes, and each of those minutes, ¹/⁶⁰ of a degree, equals one nautical mile, or roughly 6,000 feet.

      Confused? That makes two of us. The upshot was that when I looked at the lines of latitude on my nautical charts, I could quickly see that it was 60 nautical miles, or a long day’s travel, to move across one degree of latitude south to north and back again.

      Anyone reading these words with a working knowledge of seamanship or boat mechanics will laugh or wince, as I do now, at my foolishness and ineptitude. Think of this not as a how-to manual so much as a cautionary tale.

      CHAPTER 1

      THE ICE BEAR

      All the easy pictures have been taken. But I’m here to tell you there are still some stupid and crazy ones left out there.

      I was heading north with at least one of them in mind; I was looking for the polar bear of my dreams. Not a zoo bear, not some hanging-around-the-towndump bear, and certainly not a Tundra Buggy tourist bear. I was searching for a polar bear living unafraid and standing unchallenged at the very top of the food chain. I planned to photograph that bear living, hunting, and swimming among the melting Arctic sea ice.

      My plan to accomplish this was, to put it charitably, a little vague. I imagined that if I gathered up enough survival and camera gear, found a way to haul it halfway across the continent to the end of the road in Canada’s north woods, and loaded it all onto a train bound for the shores of Hudson Bay . . . then somehow or other I would be able to go out and find that polar bear. I’m not always big on details.

      Working as a professional wildlife photographer, I have always liked doing things the hard way, slapping together my own solo expeditions and then figuring it all out along the way. Is it because I’m difficult and stubborn and cheap? Well, yes. But I’ve also found that the lessons learned through painful experience are the ones that tend to stick. Spend twenty-seven hours digging a Land Cruiser out of swamp muck with nothing but your bare hands and a small cooking pot and I wager you, too, will remember a shovel next time.

      For years, I had been making noise about going to Canada’s Hudson Bay to photograph the polar bears there. Churchill, Manitoba, is a tumbledown slice of small-town Canada inexplicably plopped down along the Bay’s shore where the vast northern forests give way to Arctic tundra. It lies smack in the middle of approximately nowhere, and no road connects it to the outside world. There’s just a long, narrow-gauge railroad leading to the smash-mouth hockey capital of Winnipeg, some six hundred miles south. If you continue a mere 220 miles farther, you can warm your frostbitten toes on the tropical shores of Fargo, North Dakota.

      It takes less than two hours to reach Churchill by jet from Winnipeg. It’s that or devote two long days going by slow train, if it’s running. Churchill has grown world famous for its polar bears. Each autumn, hundreds of them, grown lean and hungry during the long summer months, gather along the Bay’s western coast and wait for the freezing ice to thicken sufficiently to allow their return to the business of tracking, hunting, and eating seals. Visitors can step off the plane and, with the application of several thousand dollars, hop onto the nearest oversized, overstuffed, and overpriced Tundra Buggy, where they’ll join a gaggle of other photographers and tourists, and trundle off to see dozens of polar bears in an afternoon.

      But where’s the fun in that?

      Try to imagine crossing the Serengeti Plains of East Africa one hundred or even fifty years ago. To have been among the first to visit and photograph penguin-filled islands off Antarctica. To have stood alone among grizzly bears feasting upon Alaska’s spawning salmon runs. As I look around the world, it seems we’re left with nothing but ghosts, faded remnants of the wild lands and creatures that once defined our planet. I have spent the last two decades chasing shadows, caught up in a frantic scramble to create a record of those last remnants of wildness before they, too, vanish.

      Sure, you can still go to some of these places, but you’d best be ready for plenty of human companionship and adult supervision. Remote wilderness destinations that once required committed professional expeditions to see and film now beckon invitingly from the pages of glossy vacation catalogs, promising gourmet cooking, free Wi-Fi, and a hot stone massage at dusty day’s end. All to join two dozen other enthusiasts who will, often as not, stand shoulder to shoulder with tripod legs entwined and shoot the same perfectly lovely, utterly identical photographs.

      Making great pictures once required years of training and practice and, I liked to tell myself, no small measure of genius. New digital technology and modern autofocus lenses have rendered technically flawless images routine, ubiquitous, even kind of boring. Now, it feels like each day brings a new and seemingly endless stream of pretty pictures. But how many of them actually have anything new to say?

      I’m no fan of any of this. I never saw much point in venturing out into the wilderness to be alternately bossed around and cosseted by guides who were younger, smarter, and better looking than me. I still fancy myself tough enough to travel hard across most any wilderness. Besides, sleeping in the dirt and eating dismal camp food makes good practice for the day my wife, Janet, grows weary of these antics and changes the locks.

      I have long dreamed of finding my own private Arctic bastion, unpeopled but well-stocked with polar bears. Since Northern winters are long and dark and bracingly cold, and what reading I’d done promised death by frostbite, scurvy, or starvation, I reckoned that a summer visit might be a more prudent starting point. I’d dip my toes into the shallow end of the survival pool. Polar bears winter on the Arctic icefields. Come summer, the midnight sun returns and nearly all of that ice melts away. Shouldn’t it be possible to take a small boat and visit the bears during those months as the ice disappears and the bears head for shore?

      In the end, I found myself reluctantly following that well-worn tourist trail leading to Churchill after all. I couldn’t afford my own private Tundra Buggy, so if I wanted to go it alone some creativity was required. I decided to go BYOB—Bring Your Own Boat.

      Starting with the purchase of an inflatable boat barely ten feet long and a small ten-horsepower outboard motor, I assembled a mountain of gear in my garage. I packed up layer upon layer of long underwear and weatherproof sailing gear, goggles and gloves, hats and boots. I stuffed cases with photographic and underwater equipment. I gathered camping and survival gear, a stove and weeks’ worth of dried camp food, satellite phones and beacons, and enough bear-banger noisemaking shells to hold my own Fourth of July fireworks show. Tree-hugging, liberal pretensions notwithstanding, I took a drive from my quiet Seattle neighborhood out past the Silver Dollar Casino and the adjacent Moneytree Payday Loans storefront, to Discount Gun Sales. There, after a scant background check and no training at all, I procured a Remington Model 870 Special Purpose Marine Magnum pump-action shotgun. I gingerly cradled the gleaming stainless steel twelve-gauge in my hands like it might explode at any moment. The gun, together with a box of matching twelve-gauge slugs, wicked thumb-sized pieces of lead, was to be my last desperate line of defense in case it all went terribly wrong. And if I did wake one night to discover my leg clamped in some polar bear’s jaws, whether I

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