ASIREN CUTS THROUGH the frozen air. I look over at Doug as we press through the sideways sleet. ‘The siren signals voluntary curfew,’ he says. ‘Mainly so kids know it’s time to come home.’ The air-raid-style alarm also indicates the start of dawn-todusk armed patrols scouring the streets for polar bears in the remote Canadian town of Churchill.
As with all apex predators, a polar bear’s presence is felt even when it’s not there. Humans gingerly step around the ghost of its shape, eyes cast over their shoulders, the ever-present chance of its appearance shaping day-to-day existence.
Boreal storms may have blown away the bears’ hubcap-sized pawprints on Churchill’s snowy shores, but hazard signs alert me to their preferred path along the beach. Unlocked cars on the streets point not only, I learn, to an enviable lack of crime, but also to the need for panic rooms for pedestrians in case of surprise charges from the biggest carnivore to walk the Earth.
‘Mostly, they don’t like town,’ says Doug, one of Churchill’s expert wildlife guides. ‘It’s noisy and smells funny.’ Still, some do, notably juveniles and, even though you can’t see inside the ‘polar bear jail’, a former aircraft hangar where strays are held before being transported by helicopter and released, it’s one of the first stops for the thousands of tourists who descend on Churchill in polar-bear season. A day spent bumping around Churchill’s boggy bay in an all-terrain Tundra Buggy is the best way to track them, albeit slowly, painfully, patiently. My fingers freeze, poised on my camera button, my eyes stream while trained through binoculars scanning the sleet-blasted horizon, eyelashes growing icicles in the Arctic gusts that lash the open viewing platform.
Minutes, hours tick by. Then a yelp goes up. Silence is golden in wildlifespotting, but the thrill has proven too intense. It’s distant - maybe 400m away - an average-sized female, thinks Doug. She’s curled up, nose in her paws, coal eyes closed against the wind. She lifts her head intermittently, quizzical, licking at the nutrients in the kelp bed. She yawns, then nestles her giant head back down. I could stare for hours at her endearing, boulder-like bulk, but the radio buzzes. Another buggy has a sighting.