ALASKA
although in Iñupiat terms, crossing the modern border meant little. The 64-year- old wears an authoritative moustache and an ill-fitting hunter’s jacket, and accepts compliments or thanks with an almost imperceptible nod. I can’t describe his hair to you because over the three days I’m with him, he’s never without a thermal hat. Bruce’s hands are large and worn and he knows certain things like the backs of them — things like the safe distance to be from polar bears and when to start the engine should their attention linger on his boat. A member of the Iñupiat community, his
manner is at once terse and illuminating. For example, when I ask whether or not he feels American or even Canadian, he exhales as though doing an impression of a horse before replying: “I feel like an Iñupiat because I lived that life — I still live it today. I hunt and I fish and I support my family.” In the early days of working with the
bears, he was asked to help Sir David Attenborough’s legendary cold-climate cameraman, Doug Allan, film them for the BBC. “It was fun — when we first started, we used to walk around here with them,” says the skipper while we’re at anchor just 15 metres or so from a pair of sleeping bears. I give him a hopeful look that asks: ‘Could we possibly do that today?’ But a small landslide of his eyebrows tells me that, no, we absolutely cannot. When Bruce speaks, he does so with the
slow rhythm of a strolling bear, almost as though he resents having to form the words at all. “There are all kinds of rules and regulations now,” he sighs. “I had to take all the training, go through all the paperwork. That took a while.” In 2018, authorities also started
insisting that Iñupiat hunters sink any whale remains in the ocean, making it harder for the bears to reach them and discourage their presence. Now he oſten sees them diving for scraps, their colossal white derrieres bobbing on the surface like driſting polystyrene. Centuries of habituation mean they haven’t gone elsewhere — yet. In fact, the number of interactions with the townsfolk has risen; bears are frequently found wandering around Kaktovik. As a result, visitors aren’t allowed to walk around
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at night. Many locals have large, mean- looking dogs, which here, at 70 degrees north, maintain their winter coats and surliness all year long. Many effectively act as bear alarms. During my time in town, a local
shoots a polar bear for allegedly trying to kill his hound. Bruce explains with righteous profanity that he and others in the community think this is an outrage. Nonetheless, it’s ruled justified self-defence and the man is only given a warning. It’s another one of those moments that underlines just how serrated this edge of America can feel, how to people from the nation’s Lower 48 states — or further afield like me — life up here is distant and ultimately unknowable, even when it’s right in front of us. Of course, there’s plenty here that does
have universal appeal. The North Slope lies 250 miles inside the Arctic Circle, far beyond the treeline and fewer than 1,400 miles from the North Pole. Its latitudes are so extreme that to see it on a map is to wonder if the air is thinner up here. It may not be, but it’s oſten more colourful — Bruce tells me that in the darker months the Northern Lights are spotted so oſten that he hardly pays attention. The polar night lasts for 66 days and we’re so far north that it can snow at any time of the year, including during the 66 summer days when the sun doesn’t yield. No road reaches Kaktovik, leaving it
at the mercy of the vagaries of Alaskan light aircraſt. Delays and cancellations are frequent, but it’s a highly localised service. When it’s finally time for me to depart, the pilot realises someone is missing from the passenger list, so one of the workers from the airstrip jumps in a truck, drives to her home and picks her up. When the lady climbs into the plane, she apologies as though she’d momentarily delayed a bus. Before leaving, Bruce explains that
schedules aren’t the only thing subject to change round these parts. When he first moved to the area, he counted 90 polar bears at the bone pile, but following a freak storm in 2005, numbers started declining dramatically. “The ice wasn’t very thick, we had 100mph winds for a week and, well, this ocean got pretty messed up,” he tells me on the final morning. “The next year, we
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