BEAR NECESSITIES

I felt like a naughty schoolboy when the gruff tour guide hastily grabbed me and yanked me away from the tail end of the helicopter. Admittedly it was just five minutes since she’d issued the warning about approaching the rear of the chopper. But, in my defence, the excitement raised by the prospect of the ride far outweighed such mundane matters as my personal safety. To be more accurate, the prospect of what we might see from the helicopter was what provoked my haste to clamber aboard.

I was in Churchill, on the southwestern shore of the enormous Hudson Bay in the central Canadian province of Manitoba – a town perhaps more famously known by its strapline: ‘polar bear capital of the world’.

Ever since I’d first seen footage of these mighty mammals on a BBC wildlife documentary I had longed to see them in the wild. I had imagined an encounter in rather different circumstances: I’d assumed, for example, that it might be a touch on the chilly side, and that there might be a flake or two of snow falling. In reality, I was in shorts and a T-shirt, and wondering if I should have applied some sun cream. This was Churchill in mid-July and, at a latitude roughly the same as Birmingham, sunshine is not an unknown quantity.

The balmy weather was also the reason for the helicopter – without snow and ice covering the ground, the bears don’t venture near the town very often, so you need to travel a fair distance to spot them. This doesn’t stop a few hardy interlopers, though – every summer a handful of bears have to be removed from town, via Churchill’s ‘Polar Bear Jail’.

As the helicopter rose into the air I marvelled at the seemingly endless flat expanse of Arctic tundra on one side – more barren than any desert I had seen – while on the other lay the oceanic-sized body of water that was Hudson Bay. The shore of the Bay was illdefined, with pools of water stretching far inland and small islands dotted around the edge.

I was so busy admiring the unmarred wilderness that I almost didn’t notice her at first. Then I saw something, blinking hard as a movement caught my eye on one of the islands. There she was: a fully grown female, nose in the air as she gazed curiously at our airborne form. I gazed back, unable to take my eyes off her, thrilled by the sight. As she turned and bounded in the other direction, what struck me most was the almost contradictory blend of the grace of her movement against her immense bulk.

As we returned to the sleepy frontier town, I had a lump in my throat. Aesthetically one of the most pleasing of large mammals, I realised that all the images I had seen paled into nothing compared with witnessing the polar bear’s elegant power with my own eyes.