POLAR BEAR SNOW JOB

The job would be monitoring a threatened polar bear population. Most of us new recruits were well-educated and comfortable out of doors and in harsh conditions but only a few of us had actually spent any time in the Arctic. Our employer, a fantastic Boston-based environmental organization, provided us with three weeks of training and acclimation to prepare us for six-month tour of eco-duty.

Our first week of training was spent in a provincial park in northern Quebec. There we played in the snow, built survival shelters, and ate seal meat. I came away from the experience feeling like I’d made twenty new friends. Our second week of training took place aboard a Canadian Coast Guard ship, helping a team doing climate research related to ice flows, seal populations, and changing killer whale feeding patterns. The researchers were welcoming and their research interesting, but the evenings were where the real action happened. After dinner we were split into teams to discuss the specifics of our coming job. The first revelation was that they expected us to feed the bears. My sense was that everyone was concerned about how feeding wild bear populations fit with the organization’s mandate and the desires of locals. But we didn’t really get into any of those details. Instead, it was explained that we were expected to kayak out into the sea to, in effect, bait the sea ice. Of course, the thinning ice flows were dangerous for the bears and ourselves but we were assured that nothing was more natural for polar bears than hunting out at sea just like this. The conversation got weirder, though. While an entire cohort just like ourselves conducted the same monitoring, data collection, and nutritional supplementation at this same location last year (all of whom got to know all the bears, the locals, and the nuances of the local climate and geography), no members of that crew would be returning with us. All of them would, instead, be off in different locations. Before we could talk about any of that, someone from last year’s group thought they should speak up and explain some things about this particular community we’d be rusticating among. They divulged that, unlike every other community in the region this place was entirely composed of non-Inuit folks from other parts of Canada. Curious. More than that, we were told these folks were there as part of a rehabilitation experiment for young offenders and folks with substance abuse issues. There were also no community organizers, counsellors, or psych nurses around. And that was the whole point: all of them were there to take responsibility for themselves and one another, absent any authority or outside intervention or assistance. They’d named themselves the “Independent Self-Improvement Society.” And, once again, before we were able discuss any of that, Carlos, from last year, felt he needed to admit that there have been “issues” in the past. “Yes,” he assured us, “drugs and guns are both requisite features of the community and also a huge problem for you as researchers as well as the bears you are there to attend to.” Everyone seemed fine with that. “Just so you know that anything can happen and you have to be present at all times. That’s just part of the job.” Right.

Week three of our training was spent on site. We flew to Toronto and then Winnipeg and eventually on to Rankin Inlet, where we travelled two days by boat and snow mobile to the cove that would become our temporary home. The site was a former radar station operated by NORAD. A small concrete bunker and pair of dilapidated brick out-buildings perched atop the highest point. Though these provided ideal shelter, they were not to be used; though, we were told the smallest of the buildings, once a kitchen and tool shed, had just been commandeered for use as food storage and pen for the seals we were meant to catch and feed to the bears. This was the first time we were hearing that it wasn’t seal meat but live seals we were providing. Some thoughtful person asked how we were meant to catch, house, transport, and eventually tie down an adult seal? (You know, some of the pertinent details.) To settle our minds, they explained that nobody was expected to wrestle an adult seal; instead, these were seal pups (the bears' preference) and it was perfectly simple to tie and tether them (with lines, made from reclaimed fishing nets, to steel pegs, formed from rebar recycled from construction waste.) Some of the crew appeared shocked by all of this, but, you know, “...that's nature.” And who could argue with that? Much of the rest of our time was spent touring the region to get our bearings, sampling narwal and kiviak (a fermented delicacy from Greenland, made by packing dozens of small seabirds into a seal skin and left to rot under a pile of rocks for a year), as well as making excursions to observe some polar bears. Eventually it became clear that these bears were not the ones we'd be spending our coming months with. Our bears, we were told, weren’t out on the snow and ice like these ones but preferred the large garbage pile immediately behind the community we’d heard so much about. This, of course, wasn’t the story we were told before we arrived, but it also made sense. Where else would you be in such a seemingly harsh and barren setting but at the source of such smelly and easy calories? Right. By the end of our time, all of us still seemed to have loads of questions. Where was the emergency kit and sat phone? Was everyone required to have their appendix removed? When would resupply arrive or how could we arrange that? As well, we still hadn’t met half the people we were expected to work with. That felt odd. Where the hell were they? So many questions.

With some spare time at the very end of the trip, while everyone else was still packing up and sitting around chatting, a group of us decided to pay a visit to our neighbouring autonomous community. We walked up over the hill opposite the radar station and down along the rocky beach below a low cliff. Rounding the corner we saw and heard no men, though their presence was loud and clear. What we found most closely resembled an unhoused encampment in downtown L.A. or San Francisco. There was nothing resembling permanent or even substantial lodging. It wasn't obvious how people were surviving out there like that. Really, it just felt like a human and ecological catastrophe. And all of it was being overseen by a resident infestation of apex predators. We counted twenty-one of them. These were our bears and who we were to coax out onto the sea ice, away from all the spent peanut butter jars and government-issued oral opioids and CBD gummies, with crying seal pups tied to garbage. This was great.