Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

  “Now, polar bears,” Martha Stewart said to the biologist, beginning a take. “Where do they come from?”

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  AMERICAN INCOGNITUM

  The first polar bear tourists started arriving in Churchill thirty years ago to see a bloodthirsty man-killer—an enigmatic Lord of the Arctic. Now we’d all come to see a delicate, drowning victim. It’s a baffling shift that I found written into the history of the town.

  Polar bears are generally not cooperative tourist attractions. They are elusive and solitary—it’s part of their allure—each a nomadic white blip, wandering thousands of miles of the Arctic independently, searching for prey at the fringes of human habitability. But Churchill’s roughly 950 bears constitute one of the southernmost polar bear populations in the world. They have been forced to evolve an atypical lifestyle in order to stick it out at the tip of their species’ range. Like all polar bears, they spend the winter and spring on sea ice, hunting seals. (When seals poke their heads out of the ice to breathe, the bears yank them up and peel them open like a banana. They eat only the fat.) But the ice on Hudson Bay melts every summer—the bay becomes open water. Though the bears stay on the ice as long as they can, they are eventually forced to decamp. They spend the next several months marooned on land, unable to hunt seals and living off reserves in a kind of walking hibernation. Then, in the fall, they gather near the coast outside Churchill, where the ice is usually first to re-form, anticipating freeze-up and their earliest opportunity to get back out and hunt again. They have been migrating this way since long before humans decided to build a town there, herding themselves together every fall to wait.

  So much about modern-day Churchill is explained by this quirk of ecology. It’s the only place where such a large-scale polar bear tourism industry is logistically possible—where so many polar bears not only congregate, but congregate predictably in the same place, at the same time every year. Also, they happen to congregate outside an actual town, with an airport, a train station, and a grocery store. Churchill, in short, is that rare place where large numbers of people and polar bears can comfortably commingle. And after the military pulled out, taking the town’s economic reason for being with it, it didn’t take locals long to figure out what this meant. It meant that Churchill’s polar bears, more easily than any other polar bears on Earth, could be monetized.

  The military was gone by the early seventies. Churchill’s population almost instantly dropped from five or six thousand people to about sixteen hundred. Fort Churchill had been a bustling, modern community, with a youth hockey league, and lobster flown in for New Year’s Eve. But the actual town of Churchill, home to the civilians who stayed behind, didn’t even have phones or sewers. In 1968, a government report described the “unparalleled squalor” of the town; in one year alone, more than twenty people were said to have either frozen to death in their homes or died in fires. Outdoor sandboxes served as toilets, and raw sewage ran through the streets during the spring thaw.

  The industriousness of those who stayed after the military pullout was impressive. There’s always been a committed culture of scavenging in Churchill. (Because no roads connect Churchill to the rest of civilization, shipping goods in, and waste out, is expensive.) Now the fort’s abandoned buildings were gradually dismantled and repurposed. I met one couple who ripped apart the military’s jail and reclaimed the wood to build a new house. The floor of the old bowling alley was pried up and installed in what was now the lobby of my hotel, and an old Nike missile adapter sat in the corner, holding a ficus. The military had left an ambulance, but there was no one to drive it. So the woman who drove the town’s taxi took that on, too.

  The military, locals told me, also left a tremendous amount of scrap: school buses, bombardiers, airport-grade snow blowers, fire trucks. It wasn’t uncommon for young guys with nothing to do to head to the scrap dump with a can of gas, a car battery, and some tools; in no time, they could get something up and running just for the pleasure of crashing it into something else. A garage owner named Len Smith started cobbling together primitive all-terrain vehicles and heading into the emptiness east of town. “He just liked it,” a friend of Smith’s told me. “He liked being out there.” There were no more military sentries shooting bears that came too close to the fort. There was no more fort. All the noise and lights were gone. The human presence had been winnowed down to an almost negligible little settlement. All kinds of wildlife were beginning to creep back into the area and rebound.

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  SMITH HIRED HIMSELF out to photographers who wanted to take pictures of polar bears at Cape Churchill, a crook of land about thirty miles east of town. Among them was an American photographer named Dan Guravich. The two men would camp on one of Smith’s vehicles for two weeks at a time, hefting balls of lard over the side to lure in, or position, the bears. (Feeding bears wasn’t explicitly illegal then.) In 1978, Guravich published a ten-page spread of his bear photos in Smithsonian magazine, attracting even more photographers to the area.

  Until then, the average person’s only exposure to polar bears would have been at zoos or the circus. (The year Guravich’s photos ran in Smithsonian, a tiny East German woman in a fur-lined miniskirt named Ursula Böttcher was touring America with her troupe of ten performing polar bears as part of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, closing her performances by shouting, “Once again, they don’t eat me!”) The pictures emerging from Churchill in the late seventies were, at the time, some of the best-ever shots of the animals in the wild, and the first many Americans saw. It was a simple issue of access: Before Churchill, photographing wild polar bears meant mounting an expedition into the infrastructureless white wasteland of the rest of the species’ range. But here the land brimmed with the animals every fall, like clockwork. One of the first scientists to study polar bears in Churchill, the Canadian government biologist Ian Stirling, has described his astonishment at sighting 239 bears over the course of four hours in 1970. At first, he mistook three dozen males staggering around an area the size of a football field for a herd of caribou. For anyone wanting access to wild polar bears—photographers, scientists—Churchill was an unimaginable El Dorado.

  In 1980, Len Smith got a call from a National Geographic Society crew that wanted to shoot a television special about the town and its polar bears. Smith built a new tanklike vehicle to guide the men around in. He called it the Tundra Bus, but would settle eventually on Tundra Buggy. Before the film crew arrived, he invited friends in town on a celebratory test run. Folks were having a great time, eating hors d’oeuvres and drinking champagne, when, a few miles east of town, they heard a foreboding thunk and saw one of the buggy’s wheels roll freely past the vehicle.

  National Geographic’s film aired on public television in early 1982. It set ratings records, putting Churchill and its bears on the map. When I asked people around town about the history of tourism in Churchill, they usually started their story with that broadcast. The show was called Polar Bear Alert and opened on a young couple, walking through town with a stroller. The man slung a rifle over his shoulder while the narrator, the actor Jason Robards, described Churchill as the “one place in the world where the great white bears roam the streets, dangerously immune to the presence of their only enemy: man.” A good deal of time was spent rehashing bear attacks in town. A man who lost an arm was interviewed, and a mother in pajamas was shown running out of her front door in the dark, waving a shotgun and screaming: a bear had approached her house in the middle of the night and had to be shot by a wildlife officer. For the film’s most memorable scene, one of the show’s producers, James Lipscomb, was placed inside a rebar cage with a camera and left on the tundra. “No one knows how the bears will react to a man in a cage,” the narrator says. Next comes a harrowing point-of-view sequence of polar bears rattling, pummeling, and chewing the thing.

  “I sort of lost respect for the Geographic after doing that with them,” a local named Paul Ratson, who worked bear security for th
e crew, told me one afternoon. Ratson is fifty-five, a hefty, forthcoming guy in a tweed cap who moves around town with multiple walkie-talkies crammed in the waistline of his overalls. He runs one of the smallest tour companies in town, Nature 1st, and is constantly clicking into one walkie-talkie or another to reschedule an airport pickup or redirect a school bus. (The entire tourism industry relies on a fleet of old school buses, some of which are said to date to the military days. Given the expense of shipping new vehicles in, they are perpetually jury-rigged to last another season.)

  Ratson, like a lot of people in town I met, resented how sensationalized Polar Bear Alert turned out. The town sees itself as coexisting with its polar bears, with caution and respect. Ratson felt the show painted people in Churchill as being hunkered down in fear. And, worse, it made the bears look like monsters, twisting the animals to fit the stereotype that viewers would already know. “The guy in the cage, he’s going, ‘Oh no, the bear really wants to eat me!’” Ratson said. “But these bears are bored stupid. You put a guy in a cage and it smells like food, what’s the bear going to do? A lot of film crews want to portray the bear as this reckless, violent, bloodthirsty man-eating creature,” he told me, grimacing. “It’s like the way they do sharks.”

  In fact, it’s exactly how they do sharks. Before filming Polar Bear Alert, James Lipscomb had codirected a feature documentary called Blue Water, White Death. That film chronicled an obsessive six-month expedition to South Africa, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and Australia led by the department-store heir and serial adventurer Peter Gimbel, to film some of the first footage of great white sharks in the wild. Gimbel’s idea was to follow commercial whaling vessels around. After a kill, as the vessels tied up the whale and waited for the larger ship that would process it, Gimbel lowered his cameramen into the water in specially built cages to film the sharks ripping bits from the carcass. Blue Water, White Death begins with plumes of blood slowly expanding in water, and in its violent finale, a great white batters one of the cages, denting and warping the bars as it thrashes. The film was a hit—a New York Times reviewer called the action “as poetic as anything I’ve seen on the screen in a long, long time.” It inspired the author Peter Benchley to write Jaws.

  By re-creating the cage sequence with polar bears, Lipscomb was one-upping himself—getting as close as possible to a dangerous animal in order to deliver the most innovative and thrilling footage. (Blue Water, White Death and Polar Bear Alert are now looked back on as cutting-edge films, and the cameraman-in-the-cage has become a well-worn stunt in wildlife filmmaking. In 2008, for example, Animal Planet broadcast a three-part series in which a male model got in a Plexiglas cube amid grizzlies, lions, and crocodiles.) The effect of Polar Bear Alert was twofold: it announced to the world that there was a relatively accessible place to see these vicious animals, and it reinforced that one-dimensional, terrifying image of them. And, as it happens, Churchill’s bears quickly made good on that reputation.

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  THE YEAR AFTER Polar Bear Alert was broadcast, freeze-up of Hudson Bay was extremely late. The bears were hungry, and, still unable to hunt seals, they were emboldened to lurch into town. One night in late November, shortly after midnight, a down-on-his-luck local character named Tommy Mutanen slipped into the burned-down remains of the Churchill Motel. The motel had sat there for days after a fire, untouched, while the town waited for a fire inspector to fly up and determine it wasn’t arson. (“Who cares if it was arson?” one man told me. “That place needed to go.”) Mutanen made for the motel kitchen, looking for something worth scavenging. Everything inside the meat locker had been protected from the blaze. So he stuffed his parka’s pockets full of raw meat and skedaddled.

  “Old Tom Mutanen walked with a gimp leg and a crutch,” a man who’d been a pallbearer at Mutanen’s funeral told me. There was nothing resembling a chase. Either the polar bear was waiting for Mutanen outside the motel, or it had been in the kitchen alongside him the whole time, biding its time in the dark. The bear seized Mutanen by his skull, and dragged him over a snowbank to the doorstep of the shop across the street. All the bars in town were just letting out, and a crowd of people began yelling at the bear, throwing ice and tools at it—whatever they could find. This only antagonized the animal; it was fixed on its meal. Finally, a young tour guide named Mike Reimer came sprinting barefoot from his apartment with a rifle. He shot the bear right where it stood, on top of Mutanen’s broken frame.

  A young television reporter had arrived in Churchill that night to do a story on the hotel fire. After her piece on the Mutanen incident aired, more reporters descended on Churchill. Six days earlier, a man had been photographing a rare ivory gull out the window of a Tundra Buggy when a bear, which had been sitting under the chassis, sprang to its hind legs and locked its mouth around his arm, tearing it open with two bites. The press stories about the Mutanen attack mentioned this incident, too. The two together gave the impression of a trend: a coordinated spree.

  There was concern that the Mutanen mauling, the town’s first lethal bear attack since the sixties, would scare away tourists and crush the industry’s new momentum, leaving Churchill to founder again without any obvious economic opportunities. But the news had just the opposite effect. The danger was the attraction. As one veteran tour operator told me, “If there was a chance that you could be ripped to pieces by a polar bear, people were into it. If anything, more people started coming.” Two hundred and fifty-four tourists were booked on a charter from New York the following year.

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  “WE COMPETE IN THE LONG-HAUL, high-yield market,” John Gunter told me one afternoon. Gunter is in his early thirties and slight, with a styled wave of hair that pours over his forehead. He lives in Winnipeg, but has been spending every fall in Churchill running Frontiers North Adventures, the company his parents founded in the nineties. It’s now the largest and most visible outfit in the town’s roughly $7-million-a-year tourism industry. We were eating a couple of bowls of minestrone soup, in a restaurant the Gunter family recently bought half of.

  The Gunters first came to Churchill in the eighties, when John’s father was sent to manage the Royal Canadian Bank branch in town. At that time, the tourism industry consisted of a few hardscrabble one-man operations—locals who, like Len Smith, hauled people out to the tundra on vehicles they built themselves, operated little hotels, or rented rooms in their homes. Hard-core wildlife photographers were willing to go through the trouble of cobbling together travel arrangements from all these entrepreneurs, individually, by mail. The Gunters’ innovation was to package these proprietors together and market all-inclusive vacations. They made the process of booking a trip to Churchill more like booking a stay at a Caribbean resort, and eventually bought the Tundra Buggy business from Len Smith when Smith retired to Florida. They began advertising through mainstream outlets like automobile clubs and the AARP. They were opening Churchill’s frontier to a wider spectrum of tourists—namely, Gunter told me, what the industry calls “classic tourists.”

  I’d been in Churchill for a couple of days at that point. The gaggles of classic tourists were impossible to miss. They were older—the average age of travelers to Churchill is sixty-one, according to one study—and moved between scheduled activities in chaperoned cohorts. The classic tourists seemed to delight in everything, wherever they went. It was always uplifting to hear the swishing of their snow-proof pants as they rose smiling, en masse, from their breakfast table at Gypsy’s Bakery and filed onto a school bus waiting outside, to light out for their next low-impact adventure.

  Over the years, the motivations of Churchill’s tourists seem to have changed just as dramatically as their demographics. The first wave of visitors to Churchill were coming to photograph the bears, but tended to have a broad appreciation for the landscape and its ecology. By comparison, locals told me, the current crop feels more myopically bear-centric—they come to Churchill to tick something off a list. A 2010 study in the journal Current Issues in T
ourism on the phenomenon of “Last Chance Tourism” found that a majority of people traveling to Churchill were coming because they wanted to see polar bears before they went extinct. As one industry veteran put it, “People are coming to see the last dinosaur now.”

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  CHURCHILL’S POLAR BEARS are almost certain to be the first polar bears wiped out by climate change. This is a corollary of the same unconventional migration that strands them here every fall to be marveled at by tourists. Polar bears in Churchill are already pushing the limits of what’s possible for their species. Surviving in a place where the primary habitat—ice—simply vanishes for a few months each year has meant evolving one of the longest fasting periods of any animal on Earth. The bears’ lifestyle is almost literally feast or famine: bulking up all winter, then living off that accumulated energy while waiting out the summer on land. It means flirting with a breaking point at the lowest point of that cycle every year, just before the ice re-forms. (A healthy female bear might lose two-thirds of her body weight, only to put it back on after freeze-up.) And it leaves very little wiggle room to adapt if conditions change.

  A body of scientific research, including work by a University of Alberta biologist, Andrew Derocher, has shown that the ice on Hudson Bay is now breaking up three to four weeks earlier than it did in the 1980s, pushing the bears onto land earlier in the summer, and for a longer stretch of time. In short, they are being given less time to eat, then forced to fast for longer. Consequently, in the last twenty years, Churchill’s bear population has declined by more than 20 percent.