54 worldtravellermagazine.com
Come summer, Canada’s polar bears get playful. Skip the
bus tour, sign up to walk with the white giants, and you’ll
get close enough to gatecrash, says James DravenCANADAworldtravellermagazine.com 55‘P
op,’ splutters the feeble report from guide
Andy MacPherson’s pistol. I was hoping
for something a little more dramatic:
we’re standing not 20m from a 250kg
polar bear (yes, 250kg). Her head down, eyes fixed
on mine, she’s in a predatory trance as she lifts
her muzzle and sniffs the air for my scent. Such a
scene may be what my mother feared, when I told
her I was going to subarctic Canada to walk with
polar bears. Family and friends kept repeating
the word ‘walk’ back at me with incredulity.
Andy pulls the trigger twice more with similarly
pitiful results: ‘Pop-pop.’ The minor commotion
is not enough to deter a curious bear, but at least
it’s drawn focus away from me: Andy has valiantly
put himself on the menu. It’s only now though,
as he regards his gun with a disdainful glower,
that I realise there’s something wrong with his
ammunition: he’s fired three duds in a row.
Terrible timing for a weapon to malfunction.
With remarkable sang-froid, he smoothly reloads
his gun from a fresh box of rounds, while our
taciturn, indigenous Cree guide, Albert ‘Butch’
Saunders, silently surveys the scene, the very
definition of composure. I calm myself with the
thought that Churchill Wild, my tour operator, has
been organising polar-bear walking safaris for 22
years without incident. This is the first time in more
than five years that Andy, veteran guide, has even
needed to fire a banger deterrent from his starter
pistol. Perhaps his ammo, having sat idle for so
long in his pocket, has passed its sell-by date...
It’s been a long journey to reach the shores of Lake
Hudson. Nanuk Lodge, our cosy wilderness retreat in
northern Manitoba, is remote. I’ve taken four flights,
going via Toronto and Winnipeg, stopping over at the
end of the third leg for a night in Churchill, Canada’s
famous polar-bear town, where the crack of special
shotgun shells, designed to scare off inquisitive
bears, can be heard in the streets at night. They’re
such frequent visitors to town that Churchill even
has a team of ‘bear cops’, the conservation officers
of the Polar Bear Alert Program, and the world’s
only polar-bear holding facility — locals call it ‘bear
jail’. For most tourists this is the end of the line, and
many flock here for vehicle-based polar bear tours
each winter. But my journey doesn’t end here. I’ve
gone one step further to meet these iconic animals
on their own turf: in the height of summer, the
green shores of Hudson Bay are so busy with the
giants, it’s known as ‘the polar-bear waiting room’.
So, on the fourth and final stage of my journey, I
fly out of Churchill and over Wapusk National Park
down to Nanuk Lodge, in one of the tiny tin-can
propeller planes that ply this route. The vast expanse
of grassland green and samphire reds below contrasts
with the blues and turquoise of Hudson Bay. Beluga
whales splash in the water, while caribous and wolves