Arctic Solitaire. Paul Souders

myself remained an open question.

      I set off in my overloaded SUV, speeding east across half a continent’s worth of interstate highways. After four days’ travel I arrived at the pavement’s end, looking not unlike a homeless, survivalist hoarder. There, in Thompson, Manitoba, I swatted at black flies while piling everything onto the train heading north across the wilderness. When I finally decamped in Churchill, the calendar said it was late June, but all the same I was greeted with the cold, hard slap of rain whipping in off the pack ice. It was just me and that mountain of gear piled up on the platform as the train pulled slowly south.

      A late thaw had left the shoreline jumbled with ice, great pans of it heaved up against the shore, a solid line of white disappearing into the fog. I had imagined myself camping in the Arctic wilderness, listening to the call of loons from my toasty sleeping bag. Here in the real world, I booked a room at the Polar Inn and overloaded a taxi to haul my crap the three blocks from train station to hotel front door. The management greeted me, my gear, and the trail of mud I tracked through the lobby with an air of bemused disbelief. Still, they lent me a pickup truck to carry the heaviest bits down to shore and I quickly set to work inflating my laughably puny boat with a too-small hand pump, puffing and muttering darkly against the chill wind. In the absence of a proper small boat harbor, I tied my dinghy to a big chunk of metal sticking out of the gravel beach and hoped for the best.

      The truth was that I had no idea how any of this could end well. Small boat, big water, and aggrieved polar bears; it sounded like the recipe for grisly headline news. Other than a few local operators running tourists out for a cold swim with the beluga whales, there wasn’t much boat traffic on this stretch of Hudson Bay. The coastline was utterly flat and offered no protection from the storms that howled in off the land. The Bay itself might be better described as a vast inland sea, six hundred miles long and up to four hundred miles across. When the wind blew, there wasn’t a tree or hill in half a thousand miles to stop it.

      I quickly discovered that Hudson Bay wielded a monstrous range of tides, the water dropping as much as thirty feet from high tide to low ebb. A quagmire of mudflats and slime-slick rocks circled the shore when the tide went out, creating a half-mile slog over which I had to haul my eighty-pound motor, then the seventy-five-pound boat, and all of those cases of heavy gear.

      As soon as the wind dropped that first evening, I ventured out onto the water, nervously picking my way through the ice, scouring the horizon for some hint of a polar bear. It turned out to be really hard to find a solitary polar bear in an ocean full of ice—who knew? I spent hours staring at the floes, days motoring hundreds of miles through the melting pack. As I wound my way through the shifting maze, I stopped frequently, climbed up onto any high spot I could find on the ice, then slowly scanned the horizon with binoculars for the white-on-white outline of a bear. Venturing farther and farther from shore, I would stay out until the midnight sun dipped below the horizon, leaving me to navigate home by GPS and the distant, twinkling lights of town.

      After two weeks of toe-numbing cold, summer suddenly arrived on the heels of a dark line of thunderstorms. Clouds of biting black flies and mosquitoes descended as temperatures spiked into the nineties. At least I had something new to complain about. A strange haze—smoke from distant forest fires—filled the sky, drifting in with the record heat. Once the storms blew through, I set out from shore again, and spent an hour motoring hard to reach the melting ice. In the orange half-light, every lump and hummock looked like a bear. Hours passed. From a crumbled snow-covered ridge, I looked, and then looked again, and—to my astonishment—saw movement. A half mile away, a young bear woke and quickly shambled from the ice off toward water.

      Polar bears are creatures of the sea. Classified as marine mammals, they spend most of their lives on the ice or in the ocean. It’s only during the lengthening summer thaw that they spend appreciable time on land. When surprised, a bear’s first reaction is often to head to the safety of water. Sliding ass-first off my own iceberg, I hopped into my boat and set off, struggling to keep the bear in sight.

      Though possessed of a fearsome reputation, most bears will often as not avoid human contact when they can. Bears near town are hazed with noisemakers and beanbag shotgun shells. The overcurious are darted with tranquilizers and may spend months caged by local wildlife officials until freeze-up. Repeat offenders are not infrequently shot dead. Of course, should you find yourself alone in the wilderness, your attention wandering, and you stumble upon a polar bear feeling particularly unfastidious, you may find yourself among the hunted. Most bears will steer a wide berth, but this one, a young female judging by her size and build, gradually calmed and began to grow curious as I slowly trailed her. We were soon moving through the water in tandem, separated by a hundred yards, then fifty, then—holy shit, that bear was really close.

      I dumped my camera gear out of its waterproof cases and shot her with the works. Telephoto lens. Wide-angle lens. Underwater pictures with a housing and fisheye lens. I held the outboard’s throttle and steered the boat with one hand while shooting with the other. I even mounted one camera onto a six-foot boom and then awkwardly tried to swing it closer to her, but succeeded only in dunking the contraption into salt water, killing the camera, lens, and trigger.

      Undeterred, I dug out a spare camera and began chewing the insulation off a copper wire to jury-rig a replacement shutter cord. As the bear swam beneath an iceberg, I managed to drift the boat in closer and hang the boom beside a hole in the ice. She rose to breathe and I began shooting, blindly pressing the shutter cable and hoping that something, anything, might be in focus. She submerged for a moment, then surfaced again for one more breath before disappearing beneath the ice.

      The midnight sun hung like a dying star in the hazy orange sky. The bear reappeared and paddled slowly toward the sunset on a sea glowing like molten metal. I followed at a distance, utterly transfixed, listening to her steady breathing and watching as her powerful front paws stroked through cold ocean. Stillness fell upon the water. There was no land in sight. I was alone at sea with a polar bear. The moment felt like I had been given a perfect jewel, something precious to hold onto for the rest of my days. I could have followed that bear for hours through the short half-lit summer dusk. But I cut the engine and let the boat drift. I watched in silence as she swam away, a slow vanishing.

      I sat for a long while, the scene burning into memory. But I was still more than thirty miles from shore, and darkness was gathering. I pulled the outboard’s starter cord, felt the motor catch, and steered my boat toward shore.

      On the southbound train a week later, I sorted through the photographs on my laptop. There was my bear, walking across the ice, swimming and diving. Suddenly, there it was: one magical image that I’d never seen before, nor imagined, not even in dreams. In it, the polar bear floats beneath the surface, staring back up at my camera, surrounded by ice and empty sea, lit by the burnished, hazy sun. I laughed out loud, then started parading up and down through the passenger cars like some lunatic, showing the picture to a trainload of complete strangers.

      I was hooked. I knew I had to come back and tell the story of this wild, lonesome, and dangerous place. More than anything, I was obsessed with finding more photographs that might again capture and illuminate and somehow hold on to the spirit of the ice bear.

      Submerged polar bear beneath melting sea ice, thirty miles north of Churchill, Manitoba

      Irma Zug and Zembo Shrine Masonic Lodge tour group, Honolulu Airport, circa 1964 (photo by Paul D. Zug)

      Paul Souders at age six, Pennsylvania, 1967 (photo by Irma R. Zug)

      CHAPTER 2

      BEGINNINGS

      My people were not, by nature, an adventurous lot. If it weren’t for some religious unpleasantness back in the old country, my Mennonite forebears might have happily stayed put in the rolling