Lock eyes with polar bears
EVERY Halloween, Bob Windsor drives his truck out to the rocks that edge the steely waters of Hudson Bay and scans the shoreline for polar bears. A bandolier of shotgun cartridges is slung over the headrest of his seat. Bob carries three guns and a range of ammunition: cracker shells to frighten bears off with noise, paint-ball rounds that deliver a painful sting and, for the most desperate circumstances, lead slugs the size of an AA battery. These are only accurate at short range, but one of them can stop a rampaging half-tonne animal bent on taking a human life. Bob’s been in charge of Churchill’s polar bear alert programme for almost 10 years; he’s had to use them twice.
“What’s incredible about the bears is their speed and stealth,” he says. “They lay down somewhere and you just don’t see them.”
Compact and whiskered, Bob projects the alertness and physical confidence of a natural hunter, but he’s looking at something that bothers him. A man in an orange hat is hunkered down between two rocks on the beach, about 50 yards beyond the signs warning anyone from walking in the area. Bob has chased two bears out of town in the past 24 hours, both close to this point, where a traditional inukshuk, an Inuit marker, stands as a navigation aid for
