Arctic Solitaire. Paul Souders

over what had been a private HBC fiefdom across the Northwest Territories. Developing rail and shipping links farther south rendered York Factory largely irrelevant, its once central location now increasingly remote from the new markets and distribution centers. It struggled on, a shadow of its former glory, until 1929 when a new narrow-gauge railroad connected Churchill to the outside world. The facility fell into disuse and the last of the big ships sailed in 1931. The fort closed for good in 1957 and the few surviving buildings were handed over to Parks Canada. The whitewashed three-story Depot Building still stands, surrounded by acres of roughly mown grass. The crumbling banks of the Hayes River edge a little closer with each passing year.

      As I walked around York Factory, I shouted out loud hellos, hoping to find a park ranger or anyone at all to chat with. Even though the doors of a maintenance toolshed stood wide open, there seemed to be nobody home.

      A boardwalk led toward the old graveyard. Weathered wooden fences and teetering crosses still surrounded a few of the graves, but the surrounding forest was slowly reclaiming the site. Out of the wind, I was beset by clouds of mosquitoes and gnats. As much as I wanted to photograph the quiet grace of these century-old monuments, I found it hard to concentrate with bugs flying up my nose.

      By the time I made it back to C-Sick, an enormous dark cloud loomed over the southern horizon. The storm soon blotted out the sky, spitting lightning, and sending down great bursts of rain and lashing wind. Thunder rolled across the water. I might have been bound for the Arctic, but it felt like I was in a floating trailer park and the tornado sirens had begun to wail.

      In the wake of the afternoon’s thunderstorm, T-shirt temperatures returned. Hundreds of miles back in Thompson, I had crammed C-Sick’s tiny cooler with ice and frozen meat and produce. I now tossed what remained of my long-thawed and increasingly dubious-smelling bacon and sausage into a jambalaya mix. The pot, filled with rice and garlic, peppers, and spice, was nothing if not pungent. Not long after I sat down to shovel the gluey mess down my gullet, I looked up and there, mid-swallow, I spied the summer’s first polar bear. The bear was slowly making its way across the exposed river flats, sniffing the wind, and clearly on the trail of something tasty.

      If I had to guess, I’d say it was the bacon.

      With his size, bulk, and thick neck, he looked to be a big male. Telling male from female polar bears remains, for me at least, an inexact art. There is the matter of size, of course. A big adult male, standing upright, can reach ten feet in height, nearly half again as tall as a fully grown female. The weight differences are even more striking. Females range from 350 to 650 pounds, while the heaviest males can roll in at 1,700 pounds, and the record trophy bear topped 2,200 pounds. There are other, more subtle physical differences, as well. Males, if you know how to look, have necks broader than their heads. Female bears’ heads are larger, which is why they are the only bears to wear radio collars. I suppose the old “lift-the-tail-and-have-a-look” method might work, but I’ll leave that to the trained professionals.

      Lord, the bear in front of me was filthy, covered in slop after wading across the muddy tidal flats. Abandoning dinner, I hurriedly snatched up some cameras and hopped into the Zodiac, undid the lines, and began to drift downriver on the current. Just as quickly, the bear lost all interest in dinner—his or mine—and slowly paddled across the broad river, then waded out on the far shore. I consoled myself by muttering abuse at his retreating backside. “Didn’t want to take a picture of your ugly polar bear butt anyway . . . ”

      Overnight the wind backed north, pinning C-Sick down where I had anchored her near the river mouth. As formidable as my wilderness boat trips in Alaska had felt at the time, they were child’s play compared to this. Here, I had no shelter but this wretched and muddy river. I had shit for charts and I was left to rely on my wife’s often creative interpretations of the incoming weather forecast. Small wonder no one in their right mind came out this way. There was nothing to do but sit in the rain, stare out at the brown water and gray sky, and listen to the wind.

      For two long days, I waited for that wind to ease. I napped and read. I ate leftovers unimproved by time. Finally, I imagined a sip of whiskey might help, and then another, and pretty soon I was singing along with every one of the sad country songs I’d thought to bring. Contentedly miserable, I eventually curled up on my bunk and drifted off upon bourbon clouds.

      CHAPTER 8

      BIG WATER

      I was up before the sun. Halfway through July at this northern latitude, that meant crawling out of a perfectly warm sleeping bag somewhere shy of four in the morning. The sky was flawless and beautiful: pink to the northeast, deep blue overhead, with a line of dark indigo, the last shadow of night, falling away toward the western horizon.

      Forty-five miles and eight hours later, I arrived back at Cape Tatnam, already starting to worry about my fuel situation. I was still more than 150 miles from the nearest gas station in Churchill. Leaving only the slimmest margin of safety, I needed forty gallons to get there. That left only eight, maybe ten, gallons to spare as I headed east on the hunt for ice and bears. If I used my light Zodiac and its small outboard motor, I could cover a lot more ground while burning far less fuel.

      The sun felt warm, and the last few days’ rains had discouraged the forest fires that were raging beyond the Cape.

      I let the anchor out in thirty feet of water and again packed my cameras and survival gear into the small dinghy. I bounded off across the open water, trying not to dwell on the emptiness that surrounded me. I found ice after an hour of steady motoring, and made a mental note to haul some of it back to C-Sick to keep my dwindling beer supply properly chilled.

      From the dinghy, I glassed all the different shapes and contours of the melting sea ice looking for any sign of polar bears, but from down at sea level I could see next to nothing. I gunned the engine and popped the dinghy’s nose up onto a large, flat iceberg, then gingerly stepped off and climbed a low hummock. I slowly, methodically scanned the horizon again with the advantage of ten feet of elevation. Nada.

      I wish I could say I was the Bear Whisperer, that I possessed a secret communion with polar bears—some Zen mastery that allowed me to see the bear even before I saw the bear. Or that I could send a whisper out upon the wind, carried from my chapped lips to fuzzy ursine ears. If there is a secret to finding a white bear in an infinite field of white ice, nobody has shared it with me. Out here, it was simply a matter of grim determination: scanning every stinking piece of ice for hour after hour with weighty, overpriced Teutonic binoculars glued to my eye sockets. And still, nothing.

      I’m apparently not the only one to have trouble finding and tracking these bears. Studying polar bear numbers and population trends has always been a difficult, expensive, and inexact proposition. Biologists have spent decades trying to accurately count these well-camouflaged and nomadic animals across hundreds of thousands of square miles of ice, but the numbers still sound more like vague guesses than hard scientific fact. A 2011 aerial survey put the number of bears along the western Hudson Bay’s shores at just over one thousand, and there may be as many as two thousand more living farther north, in the Foxe Basin beyond the Arctic Circle. Though the population numbers appear more or less stable, studies have measured a direct correlation between dwindling sea ice conditions and lower body weights for female polar bears, along with poorer survival rates among their young cubs.

      When the sun finally dipped below the horizon, the air chilled, and I pointed the Zodiac back toward C-Sick. As I reached forward to drain the last drops of hot cocoa out of my thermos, I leaned too far and accidentally pulled out the safety lanyard. It was there to stop the engine should I happen to fall overboard and prevent the unhappy prospect of finding myself bobbing cold and alone in the icy waters as my dinghy motored on toward distant shores without me. The kill switch did its job admirably. So much so that the engine could not be persuaded to start again, no matter how hard I yanked on the rope. I was still ten miles out from C-Sick. Pull. Mutter. Wait. Pull. Worry. Wait. Pull. PULL PULL PULL PULL! Oh fucking hell.

      Fireweed