By Laura Read

My bed shakes, jostling me awake. The bunkhouse is roaring. Out the barred window by my head, I discern through the inky blackness eight milky forms seeming to glide around like Martha Graham dancers. Polar Bears. When I’d gone to sleep hours earlier, they’d been milling around the bunkhouse – enjoying the structure’s warmth, or hoping for bits of food they smelled cooking inside. The bears are still there. Suddenly, another roar.

The temporary tundra buggy lodge sprawls over a wind-beaten, snow-flattened landscaped straight out of Star Wars or Nova. Twenty miles east of Churchill, Manitoba on the western shore of Hudson Bay, the lodge is here for just a few weeks every fall. That window of time is considered polar bear season in Churchill, when the north wind signals the arrival of winter, the Hudson Bay waters freeze thick and hard, and polar bears trundle out of their summer caves onto the endless ice to hunt their favorite food, the fat, nutritious, slippery animal called the ringed seal.

The bears are starving; they haven’t eaten since spring. When the ice melts in June or July every year, they are forced ashore to pass the next four months in “walking hibernation” – fasting and resting until the temperatures turn cold again. Their lives are thus a dramatic cycle of warmth and cold, feast and starvation. Our goal is to get close to the bears, but not too close. I shiver as the tundra buggy bunkhouse shudders again. This time, I recognize the villain: it’s the wind. I pull the quilt over my head.

It is because of the Hudson Bay bears’ unique pattern of life that an interesting event occurs here every fall. In October, the normally solitary bears gather together in a social clan – as many as 1,000 of them – to wait for the coast to freeze up. An interesting convergence of species takes place, then, as travelers arrive by the thousands to observe.

I am not one of those bear-crazed types. I never wanted to see live polar bears. If animals can be cliché’s, polar bears take the prize. Squeezing their fluffy counterparts on toy store shelves was enough for me. This was Mom’s idea. I wanted to travel somewhere with her, and she wanted so see bears. Grudgingly, I agreed. Bossy as she can be sometimes, she’s delightful to travel with. She’s a blaze of curiosity, and always up for adventure. I decided I would be, too.

In the morning over wild-blueberry pancakes, I cup my familiar mug of coffee in both palms, calculating when to ask the lodge hosts if the wind has ever flipped one of these multi-ton quarters. Mom isn’t fretting at all about the wind. Her brow is pressed to the icy window, her pancakes hardly touched. She whispers, “There’s Dancer!”

Yesterday we’d been shocked to see the 1,300-pound bear – who is nicknamed “Dancer” affectionately by the staff – rearing up 12 feet tall on his hind legs to poke his nose through an open window. Inside was Dennis Smith, a bear camera operator who’s done the job for years. He knows Dancer well, and Dancer knows when Dennis is nibbling on breakfast or brewing fresh coffee. (Dennis assures us he never feeds the bear; but you can’t tell the bear that.) Now, as if just for Mom’s enjoyment, Dancer was doing polar aerobics, pawing the air, wiggling on his back, stretching his massive neck, and bobbing his anvil head.

The -15 degree temps don’t bother him. There are good reasons for that. Coating Dancer’s massive shoulders and flanks are two layers of insulating fur that keep him warm in temperatures below -50 degrees Fahrenheit. Although polar bears appear white, their fur is transparent, each strand a hollow core. When Dancer and the other bears move about, they lumber slowly, as if their bones are made of concrete. Part of that slowness is intentional. They are conserving energy, waiting to eat the ringed seal, the food that fuels them best with its tasty fat rich with omega-3 fatty acids. But the bears’ behavior is also restricted by their massive weight, as much as 1,800 pounds for the most formidable males. Incredibly, their remarkable weight and insulating hides are matched by mental powers help them navigate on constantly drifting ice with no landmarks. 

Watching Dancer stretch, I am excited to get near him in the roving tundra buggy we’ve been using for our daily bear-watching excursions. Most days the sun has been stuck behind a gray shield of clouds, but on this morning it is streaming. Our driver, Saskatchewan native Chris Hendrickson, stocks the vehicle with lunch, snacks and warm drinks, then hands one travel-mate a broom. “I need to check something from the ground,” he says. “If a polar bear gets close, whack him.”

A tundra buggy isn’t cute like a VW Bug, as its name implies. Instead, it looks like an ice box made for the jolly green giant –dropped on its side, punched with windows and hoisted eight feet off the ground on giant tires made for farm tractors. On the horizon it resembles a spooky creature from “Star Wars. Tundra buggies have propane heaters, double seats and big windows. “No arms or hands hanging out the windows please,” Hendrickson warns. Years ago, when an excited photographer rested his elbow on a sill, a bear snacked on his arm.

The tundra buggy lodges are made of individual buggies converted into kitchen, dining, and bunkrooms and linked together, Amtrak-style. Bands of iron-barred windows give constant, safe, visual access to the bears. Only two companies have permits to run tundra buggy lodges in the area. Our tour operator, Tundra Buggy Adventures, was the first buggy concessionaire and still has its original No. 1 tundra buggy in operation, not for tours but to carry Dennis and his mounted video camera that streams images to www.polarbearcam.com.

Every day it takes an hour or so to organize our cold-weather gear and camera equipment. We were all amateur photographers, some (not me) hauling along lenses big enough to spot bruises at a Super Bowl. When the bears move, the whir-click of camera shutters followed. The only other sounds are our own giggles; the wild white clichés are just too cute.

Our photographer guide, Jenny Ross, has photographed every bear species in the world. She recently spent two years on assignment capturing photos for her traveling exhibition, “Bears! Icons of the Wild.” A former Harvard-trained attorney who chucked the legal life for a more creative pursuit, Ross doesn’t conceal her childlike affection for the bears. She says things like, “This magnificent animal is an evolutionary masterpiece,” and she talks easily about why some people love the bears so much. “We tend to think they are like us. They inspire emotion, they’re playful, they appear to be affectionate toward one another, and they are good mothers.” They also survive by their wits, contemplate challenges, sleep eight hours, and break ice in frustration when they miss a meal, she says.

Our group doesn’t have to travel far from the lodge for action; bears are everywhere. Polar bears congregate near Cape Churchill because ice usually forms there first along the 30-mile coastline extending eastward from the town of Churchill. While the bears wait for the freeze-up, the 780 Churchill inhabitants adjust their habits. Rule No. 1 is, don’t leave town on foot. A “polar-bear promenade” nearby is a death walk for humans. At night, “polar bear police” scare interloping bears with rubber bullets and flares. In the mornings, patrol members ensure children get safely onto school buses, and on Halloween the patrol members are out in force, making sure bears don’t nab some little devils for appetizers. Bears have more trouble adjusting. Those who just can’t stay away from the town dump either end up confined in holding cells, in an unfriendly structure that locals call the “polar bear jail,” or are tranquilized and transported away by helicopter.

Remarkably, deaths by bears in Churchill have been few. The last was in 1983. One night a man scavenged meat from the refrigerator of a burned-down hotel, stuffed the food in his pockets, and then rounded the corner smack into a bear. A bear followed his raw scent, and that was the end of him.

Bears normally run from helicopters, but last year one didn’t. It hid in a depression, and when a researcher jumped out of the helicopter, the bear knocked her down. Other people were able to scare the animal away before he hurt her badly. One night last year two Italians broke down in a rental car. They walked the five miles to town with all senses alert. They made it to bed without trouble and saw amazing Northern Lights on the way.

Inside the buggies, I’m not worried; the vehicles are like rolling fortresses. Our only discomfort is the cold. With windows open, I sometimes shiver in my knee-length down coat. On the open-air viewing balcony, my nose freezes. Mom smartly wears thumb-sized fur nose cap.

The days tooing around among the bears are luxuriously timeless. We see three young adults having a standoff, mothers trailed by twins, bears curled under crusts of snow, bears spread-eagled on their bellies to cool down, two young bears rolling together in a shallow snow pit. We spot almost every activity bear lovers yearn for, including a ritualized sparring between males called play fighting. Ross explains that play fighting develops the motor and coordination skills bears need on the ice. She adds with a mischievous grin, “Scientists try to avoid anthropomorphizing, but the play-fighting polar bears in the western Hudson Bay do seem to be enjoying themselves immensely.”

Bears mate in April and May. Instead of returning to ice in the fall, pregnant females enter dens where they typically have two cubs. Newborns weigh less than 1.5 pounds, according to Ross, who once crawled into a den to photograph tiny twins. Mothers nurse them with milk that contains 35 percent fat. When the new families emerge in the summer, the mother hasn’t eaten for eight months. Mothers and cubs are fun to watch and hard to spot, but we located several groups.

Around all these massively big, incredibly efficient animals, I’m feeling puny. In this subarctic world hostile to humans, if it weren’t for buildings, heat, cars, trains, and guns, we couldn’t survive. Without our tools, the bears would be the smart players. They would be top dogs. Sadly, because of the way human activities are affecting the climate, according to scientists, the polar bears’ ice-bound habitat is shrinking. Scientific modeling predicts that if the warming trend continues, polar bears may be trying to survive in a nearly ice-free Arctic by the summer of 2080.

Last June, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature announced the Hudson Bay population has declined recently from 1,200 to 1,000. The decline is related to an early break-up and later freeze-up of the ice, the group said. Also this year, the Center for Biological Diversity has asked the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. It’s sad to realize that for all of the pleasure the bears give us, we are poisoning their world in return.

As the tour ends, I end up agreeing with Mom that the polar bears of Churchill are not clichés; they are amazing animals worth studying, worth flying all the way to Winnipeg and then 1,000 miles up to Churchill to see. The night before we go home, in Churchill I scoop up bear souvenirs by the bagful. The chatty locals are as quirky and interesting as the bears. Mom and I lament that the only thing we missed seeing on this trip are the Northern Lights. They’re supposed to be so brilliant up here. In the airport, I snatch up some postcards of them. At least I’ll have those. On the Calm Air flight to Winnipeg, Mom has her forehead to the icy window again. This time, she startles me with a whisper: “My god!” I look out my window across the aisle to see all across the blackened sky a dance of lights. Strange arcs of green, blue and pink lights leap and shimmer, connected to each other what looks like veils of golden dust. A woman can’t see from her seat, so I offer her mine. Mom gets an aisle seat after she switches with her seatmate. As I stand waiting for the woman in my seat to get a good look, I hunch awkwardly in the tiny aisle. Mom pats her lap. “Sit here, honey.” I pause, thinking I’m not longer a kid, but only briefly.