Polar Bear Hunt Evokes Inuits’ Ancient Way of Life

Brush the snow off your caribou-skin parka quickly, she warns, and don’t push yourself too fast or hard. Excessive sweat or a glaze of ice caused by body heat, almost any kind of moisture, can be deadly in this Arctic cold.

And Meeka Mike has other essential advice: The pack ice must be strong enough out near the water to support dogsleds or snowmobiles. Polar bears are at home there -- but dunking means death for polar bear hunters.

These are lessons passed down by her Inuit ancestors over centuries of surviving the harshest of environments. Now times are changing and the Inuit, known as Eskimos down south, are adapting.

Their barren homeland became a Canadian territory, Nunavut, in 1999 to give them more say in their affairs. Although they run the government and slowly assume a bigger role in the developing economy, many blend modern life with traditional ways, as does Mike.

That means hunting seal and caribou for food and skins, and going out in the dead of winter in search of nanuq, the polar bear.

A successful hunt links them to their heritage of conquering the elements and the world’s largest land carnivore, an ivory beast weighing up to 1,500 pounds.

They do it for the meat, which goes to their families and friends and elders, and for the hide, which makes pants or parkas.

Mostly, though, they do it because that’s what the Inuit have always done.

Long before dawn on a February day that is the first of this year’s bear hunt -- or nanniaq -- Mike and fellow hunters Joshua Kango and Lew Philip pack their wooden sleds, called qamutiks, with traditional and modern gear.

Instead of dog teams, they drive snowmobiles, with plastic tarps securing wooden food boxes, synthetic equipment bags, caribou-hide blankets, ropes and tuuq, a spear-like ice chisel. Rather than the bear harpoon of old, each has a high-caliber rifle.

They head out on frozen Frobisher Bay, with the lights of Iqaluit, the Nunavut capital, disappearing behind them. Hours later, the sun will reach its apex just over the horizon and start to descend behind mountains and glaciers.

Mike sips hot tea in the cold that reaches 31 degrees below zero as she gazes across the turquoise tundra ice.

“I feel like I’m home,” she says.

*

Kango and Philip, both in their 50s, have hunted bear together for more than a decade, using skills learned from an uncle when they were children.

For Mike, 36, this is the first nanniaq, though she has had a lifetime of seal and caribou hunting. She won’t kill a bear this trip because she wants that to happen when she hunts by dogsled, as her grandfather did, and his father, and his father.

In their fur-lined, insulated parkas and pants, with sealskin or modern boots up to their knees and gloves of wolf or beaver, they look much like their ancestors.

The men have thick torsos with strong, work-worn hands and muscular forearms. Their faces are broad and round, and each has a mustache but no beard. Mike is smaller, with the same copper skin and dark hair.

On the second afternoon, a rifle shot echoes across the tundra. Another follows, cutting through the motor’s whine and the incessant wind. Now Philip comes scurrying back toward the others, snowmobile careening like a water bug on ice.

A smile curls Kango’s mustache as he declares: “Lew Philip just shot a polar bear.”

The sudden success was unexpected. Polar bears generally roam for food at night or daybreak and sleep in the afternoon. Hunting them involves scanning a wide expanse of ice for bears or their tracks, then working in teams to trap them on the ice between the open water and the shore.

This time, Philip came across a sleeping female, about 5 years old, along the shore ice near Tonglait, a smattering of cabins 120 miles southeast of Iqaluit.

The bear slept so deeply that his snowmobile initially failed to wake it, he says. When he restarted the motor to go alert the others, the bear got up and ran for about 50 yards before bounding up a 25-foot wall of jade-tinged ice.

He missed once with his 25.06-caliber rifle and fired again, piercing the bear’s heart. It stumbled a little farther along the ice ledge before tumbling into a crevasse to die.

Putting a rope around the bear’s neck, the three hunters struggle with the 350-pound carcass, slipping as they drag it 70 yards to the shore.

A setting sun casts golden beams across the ice, creating a rainbow refraction above the horizon, as the hunters pause for chunks of bannock -- Mike’s homemade bread -- and tea boiled on a Coleman stove.

Then the knives come out. The hunters slit the bear’s paws, jaw and chest to start the skinning process, and work off the thick, furry hide. Next, they butcher the meat. They are done in 70 minutes.

A few hours later, the aroma of fresh bear meat and chunks of fat bubbling on the stove fills a small cabin as the wind whistles outside and the Northern Lights form emerald streaks across the stars.

“We’re not looking for a big bear. We’re not hunting for the money,” Philip says after gorging himself on what tastes like the richest of pot roasts.

*

To the Inuit, polar bears have special significance. This archetypal symbol of the majesty and threat of the Arctic graces the government logo and license plates of Nunavut.

Nanuq can outrun, outclimb and outswim a man, prompting an Inuit saying that “the only thing they can’t do is fly.”

Most of Canada’s polar bears are in the territory three times the size of Texas that stretches from Greenland to the Arctic Ocean.

Once hunted year-round, they now are a “species of special concern” because of past over-harvesting, which rose with the introduction of snowmobiles, and environmental threats such as global warming.

The Nunavut Wildlife Management Board sets a yearly hunting quota; it was 408 last season, though just 385 bears were reported killed. Most went to subsistence hunters, but 69 were shot by foreign sport hunters who paid at least $20,000 apiece.

Violators of the regulations face up to six months in jail and a $650 fine.

The restrictions are working, say Nunavut officials, who question warnings that the polar bear could face extinction because of global warming’s reduction of the shelf ice where they hunt.

One study of a small polar bear population in the western Hudson Bay region far to the southwest found the animals were smaller with less fat, but it’s premature to extrapolate those findings to Arctic populations, says Markus Dyck, a polar bear technician with the Nunavut Department of Sustainable Development.

“To raise an awareness to the public, that’s OK, but to suggest that polar bears face extinction without knowing and understanding the complexities of long-term climate change and ecosystem dynamics is somewhat misleading ,” he said.

Inuit hunters believe nanuq is alive and well, its numbers increasing.

“Today, you can come across tracks a lot more than you would when I was a child,” Kango says in Inuktitut. “They’re a lot more in number. They’re not in danger at all.”

Mike, who sits on the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, calls the quota a concession to environmental groups that have pressured Western governments to protect the species.

The best regulator, she says, is the traditional Inuit philosophy of taking only what is needed.

Philip recalls learning that lesson a half-century ago when he shot a small bird and his father told him, “You kill it, you eat it.”

“I thought I would be sick,” he says, laughing. “The only time we kill is for what we need.”

That attitude is not universal, however. Today’s economic reality in the Arctic includes sky-high costs for equipment and fuel and pelt prices just starting to recover from the international anti-fur lobby of the 1970s. Tough times make it difficult for some Inuit to follow the old ways, rather than hunt commercially.

“That is something a lot of Inuit struggle with -- should I not sell and see my family go hungry, or should I sell?” Mike says.

Out on the ice, the hunters find evidence of that struggle: the bloody, frozen, skinned body of a huge male bear shot the day before. The head and claws are gone, along with the hide, but all the meat remains on the carcass.

The hunters shake their heads, then go to work. It takes an hour to complete the rough butchering. The meat goes on the qamutiks, to be distributed to elders and friends.

They know who did it -- an Iqaluit man who opposes the quotas and advocates profiting on hunting -- but they refuse to divulge his name.

*

Mike sits cross-legged in her Arctic boots, using a needle and thick thread to repair holes in her moccasins. A propane lantern hisses in the corner of the cabin warmed by a diesel stove and Coleman burners kept on long after dinner has ended.

She talks about the changes the hunters see each year, such as robins appearing for the first time in the summer and how her sled dogs are getting their new fur in February, months later than usual. Winter storms are harder to predict.

What does all this mean? Down south, they call it global warming, but the Inuit don’t know the cause.

“We think it’s just part of the cycle, the 1,000-year cycle,” Mike says.

The Inuit know other things, such as how the caribou herd for which her home village was named went away for decades and only recently returned, just as her mother had predicted.

She wonders why the scientists and environmentalists from the south -- she labels them all “white people” -- won’t accept that knowledge, instead spending millions on studies of polar bears.

“How many in the population, how many do you have?” she says, quoting the researchers. “And we always say we do not have the figures, but we know the pattern. For many thousands of years we’ve known the patterns. No number, but we know.

“They always want the number.”

Thick frost coats the window as she hunches over her sewing, compressing the sole between her fingers and piercing it with the needle. Outside, the Northern Lights gleam down on the endless tundra ice.