It wasn’t supposed to happen. Eric Fortier had been promised that polar bears avoided the area. By Aaron Spitzer

ERIC FORTIER woke feeling something pushing against his feet through the tent wall. It was 3 a.m. and already a bright, late-July morning on Baffin Island. He flexed his legs and pushed back, muttering to his girlfriend, Anne Dumouchel. Anne opened her eyes in time to see the shadow — a huge paw. Then came the swipe, slashing the tent-fly, slicing the roof. That’s when she started to scream.

For the past week, ever since the bush plane had dropped the two couples at the headwaters, Eric had been awestruck. It was almost like he and Anne, and Alain and Patricia, were the first people on Earth, canoeing through a polar Garden of Eden. And it was easy: basic whitewater, little rain, favorable winds, and not too many bugs. The only downside was that the trip had to end. Camped here in the shadow of Mount Fleming, the pristine valley was broadening toward the sea. In just over a day, they would bid the river goodbye and make the easy journey across Soper Lake to the take-out. From there, it was three kilometres by road into the tiny Inuit community of Kimmirut, followed by another 2000 kilometres by air back to their busy lives down south.

For Eric, a quiet, bespectacled 32-year-old orthodontist, and Anne, a year older and a dentist, this was their annual backcountry adventure. Residents of Gatineau, Quebec, they’d gone camping together for years, hiking in Newfoundland and British Columbia, paddling in Florida’s Everglades. Eric’s best friend, Alain Parenteau, a 31-year-old pharmacist, was also an avid outdoorsman, and had travelled with them before. Only Alain’s girlfriend, speech therapist Patricia Doyon, 25, was new to the wilderness.

It had been Eric’s idea to come to Nunavut, and after searching the Internet he’d found the perfect spot. The Soper River rises in the highlands of southern Baffin Island. Swelled by rainwater and snowmelt, it winds some 60 kilometres through a lush tundra valley to the sea. Numerous cascades feed the Soper along its path, inspiring the area’s Inuit name, Katannilik — land of falling water. It’s a territorial park, and, by Arctic standards, a popular paddling route.

Enchanted by this description, Eric spent the spring preparing. He studied maps, pored over the park guidebook and talked with officials and past travellers. When his girlfriend expressed fears about polar bears, Eric made inquiries. There were none, he was assured. The guidebook said the same. “Polar bears do not come into the Soper Valley.” The river, his sources promised, was paradise: unspoiled, accessible, adventuresome and safe.

Now, after a week on the water, Eric had to agree. The most imposing creatures they’d seen were caribou, which browsed lazily on the riverbanks. The take-out point was within striking distance and, because they’d registered with park officials, their whereabouts were known. The river was even patrolled. The day before, while fishing for Arctic char below a waterfall, two uniformed wildlife officers came backpacking up the valley. Friendly and courteous, they checked Eric’s fishing permit and chatted with him about the weather. Then they bid him goodbye and continued hiking upriver. Eric had noticed they were carrying a gun, a .44 magnum rifle. But he hadn’t thought to ask about it and went back to casting for char.

Aside from meeting the officers, they’d had the river to themselves. Once, looking far down the valley, they caught a glimpse of another group, a big crew of American paddlers about a day ahead. Otherwise, the water, the wildflowers, the caribou, the fish and the fresh Arctic breeze were theirs alone.

AS ERIC CONTEMPLATED this idyll, he could not have imagined the events that were beginning to unfold a half-dozen kilometres downstream. Tom Hallenback and his 15 American clients had reached Soper Lake. A salty, gregarious, grizzly-bearded man, Tom was employed by the Maine-based outfitter Sunrise County Canoe Expeditions. Over the years, he had probably guided more canoeists down the Soper than anyone. He was used to smooth trips, and this one had gone like clockwork. All that remained for the next morning was to get his group across the lake and into Kimmirut.

But then something unusual happened. Another guided group — this one of eight Canadians — had also been at the river’s mouth, and had paddled down the lakeshore to camp where the view was better. Now, Tom saw the guide coming back. She was waving at him. “Polar bear!” she shouted. “On your side of the lake.” Tom scanned the shoreline with his binoculars and spied a white speck lumbering back and forth on a sandbar a kilometre away.

In more than two dozen trips on the Soper, it was the first bear the veteran guide had seen. And he’d never heard of anyone else seeing one, either. But he always carried a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun and now he was glad he did. He huddled his clients and told them about the sighting, asking them to bring their tents together and stay in camp. Not long after, the Canadians paddled over to join them. Just to be careful, Tom set up an all-night watch. By morning, the bear had disappeared.

Tom reported the bear to park officials when his group arrived in Kimmirut the next day. A warden decided to check it out and struck out for the river mouth, his rifle loaded and ready. Arriving at the sandbar, he found prints everywhere with seven-centimetre claws clearly outlined in the sand. The bear was young — probably a male, maybe around 350 kilograms. But no one could say for sure. The tracks petered out and a search of the lakeshore and the nearby hills turned up nothing. More than half a day had passed since the sighting. By now, the warden guessed, the bear was long gone. He stowed his rifle, launched the boat and turned toward home.

Eric and his friends arrived at Soper Lake a few hours later. That evening, at the river’s mouth, the two couples looked out over the blue-green expanse. Somewhere across it, eight kilometres distant and hidden by the rocky, indented shoreline, was the take-out and the road into Kimmirut. Seagulls wheeled in the gusting wind, and the low-angle sun threw the fractured landscape into vivid relief. The scene was all theirs. No one else was camped on the lake, and the two wildlife officers were somewhere upstream.
Hoping to get an early start in the morning, they stowed their food out of camp, pitched their tents on the shore, and said goodnight. After climbing into his sleeping bag, Eric removed his glasses and, like always, laid his pocketknife at his side. Just in case.

PLENTY IS KNOWN about polar bears, but when you’re face-to-face with one, here’s what matters: They will eat people. Not often — throughout the Arctic, there’s maybe a single fatality every few years. But still, they’re the only animals in North America that regularly try to prey on human beings.

In many ways, it’s not a fair fight. The white bear is huge. A large male is 10 times heavier than a man, and towers over him, standing three metres on its hind legs. Only Alaska’s Kodiak bears get bigger, fattened on the rich river runs of salmon. Polar bears are no fishermen. They’re hunters that feed on the flesh of other mammals.

For the most part, those mammals are seals, and during the long Arctic winter polar bears prowl constantly for them, patrolling the sea ice and swimming across open leads, often hundreds of kilometres from shore. Seals must surface to breathe, and sometimes they even haul out onto the ice. When a bear detects one, it waits patiently. Then, a slow stalk, a sudden dash, and a slap with its 45-kilogram paw.

With luck, it knocks the seal senseless. It peels back the hide and gorges on the fat. Foxes finish the rest.
In much of the Arctic, the sea ice melts during summer. That’s when the lean season begins. For three or four months, the polar bear must come ashore. Out of its element, it becomes a drifter. It scours the beaches for dead seals and fish, gobbles the eggs of ground-nesting birds, and resorts to vegetables such as seaweed, sedges and moss. Sometimes, it even heads inland, a white bulk against grey rock and green tundra. It has a single goal: to find something — anything — to eat.

That year, weeks before Eric and his friends had arrived in the Soper Valley, the sea ice around southern Baffin Island had melted away. The bears were on land. By late July, they were hungry.

WHEN ANNE SAW the shadow strike the tent roof, she had no doubt. “It’s a bear!” she shouted. Eric lay beside her, his muscles tensed, his mind racing. “It can’t be,” he thought. “That’s impossible.”

The morning sunlight glinted through four narrow slits in the ceiling. The shadow was gone, and there was no sound from outside. Still, something was there. Anne was yelling, desperate to scare it away. Eric sat up and fumbled for his glasses. With the tent fly on, he couldn’t see out. The light filtering through the fabric had a weird, diffused glow. He too began to yell. Soon he heard Alain and Patricia join in, shouting from their tent 10 metres away.

And then he heard their shouting change. For an endless moment he sat still, blood pounding in his ears. “This isn’t happening,” he thought. The screaming continued. Frantically, he grabbed his knife, threw open the tent, and leapt out.

What he saw next seemed unreal. Only metres away, near the wreck of the other tent, was a huge white bear. Beneath it lay Alain — face-up, kicking, crying out, his T-shirt striped with blood. The bear was swatting him with mammoth paws, craning its long neck toward him and flexing its jaws. Patricia stood nearby, horrified.

At Eric’s feet, a slab of stone was tied to a corner of his tent. He slashed the cord, grabbed the stone, charged, and let fly. It hit the animal broadside with a muffled ‘whump.’ For an instant, the bear stood still, long enough for Alain to scramble away. But then, the bear lunged for Patricia. She tried to run, stumbling along the bedrock of the riverbank. Then she was down, and the bear was on top of her. Anne, out of the tent now, yelled at her to curl up. She did, and Eric hurled more stones. The bear paused.

Patricia got up, ran again, and was again batted down. She lay shrieking, the bear tearing at her back, her suit of long underwear ripped and bloody.

By then, Eric was racing toward her, clenching his pocketknife, the 10-centimetre blade extended. When he came alongside the bear, it didn’t seem to notice. Its shoulder was at his chest, and he swung with an uppercut, thrusting the knife into the thick white fur at its jaw line. Still, it continued to paw at Patricia.

Eric swung again. He felt the knife strike bone. He jabbed once more. The blade was covered in blood.

And then, suddenly, the mauling was over. Almost nonchalantly, the bear turned and ambled down the shoreline, heading in the direction of Kimmirut. The attack had lasted just minutes.

Eric watched the bear go, until, at about a hundred metres off, it disappeared from view. Suddenly, everything was quiet. There was no breeze, and in the sun the air was warm. The green currents of the Soper River rolled past, pouring into the darker waters of the lake. Then, still disbelieving, he turned. There was Alain, shell-shocked, bloodstained, his clothes in tatters. And there was Patricia, hunched over, crying out from the pain in her back.

As Eric stood dumbstruck, he heard Anne giving orders. “Get everything into the canoes,” she said.

“Make sure it doesn’t come back.” Within minutes they were on the lake, their gear a jumble in the bottom of the boats. Alain was in the bow of one, Patricia in the other. Both were dizzy, weak, complaining of the cold. They tried to help paddle, but after a few yards it was clear they couldn’t. Eric and Anne wrapped them in sleeping bags, lashed the boats side-by-side, and leaned hard into each stroke.

Patricia’s back was badly scraped up. To protect it, they’d bound her tightly in a life jacket. Alain’s condition was worse. He wasn’t bleeding much, but he had gashes everywhere and his face was vacant.

To Eric he looked like he’d stepped out of a war movie. In calm voices, they reassured him and insisted he keep talking to be certain he was conscious and coherent.

Inwardly, Eric was terrified. They weren’t safe on land. That much was obvious. But out on the lake, he felt pathetically exposed. Polar bears, he knew, are at home in the water. Out of the corner of his eye, the bear seemed to be everywhere. Atop a nearby hill. Trailing them, in the water. Peering out from around the next island. There was nothing to do but keep moving. Help was far away, and each stroke gained them a few precious metres.

ERIC WAS CLUTCHINGthe pocketknife when he arrived in Kimmirut on foot. It was 6:30 a.m., three hours since the attack. The morning was bright and hot, but the streets of Kimmirut were deserted.

None of its 400 residents were anywhere to be seen. Eric found his own way to the health centre, but it was locked. A phone number for the nurse was posted on the entrance. He went to a nearby house and pounded on the door. No answer. He headed toward another home, but then the first door opened. An Inuit woman called to him, asking what was the problem. Eric heard himself babbling as he desperately tried to explain.

Soon, he was in an RCMP pickup truck with a nurse rumbling back to the take-out, where Anne was trying to maintain the spirits of her injured friends by singing songs from her old scouting days. When the truck arrived, the nurse jumped out and approached the canoes. When she saw Alain, she gasped, and hurried to give him a hand. Within minutes, Patricia and Alain were aboard the truck, being rushed to the safety of town and a medevac to Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital and the site of the territory’s only hospital.

Eric and Anne flew out of Kimmirut later that day, the nurses having assured them their friends would be all right. Patricia had already received stitches to close nine lacerations on her back and thigh. Alain was still in the operating room. All things considered, he had been lucky. The bear’s claws narrowly missed his jugular vein, gashing a hole in his neck. The bear had also torn open his scalp, lip, shoulder and side and had bitten into the front of his thigh. Doctors were cleaning the wounds and suturing them shut. They hoped he could leave hospital in a day or two.

As the plane gained altitude, Eric stared blankly out the window. All at once, he felt sad, grateful, weary and stunned. Anne sat beside him, her face streaked with tears. Below, the shining ribbon of the Soper trailed off into the distance.

THE SOPER RIVER attack occurred July 27, 2001, and Nunavut officials reacted quickly. They closed the park immediately and dispatched a helicopter to warn any paddlers still on the river. Biologists, wildlife officers and local hunters began combing the area for the bear. If located, it would be shot. They searched for five days, but the animal was never found. The park re-opened. Since then, no bears have been seen near the Soper River.

Park officials, nevertheless, came under rapid fire. Eric and his friends were outraged. In Kimmirut, they’d learned that wardens had known about the bear and that Tom Hallenback and other paddlers had reported it a full day before. Why had officials allowed them to walk into a trap? Alerting them would have been easy. Their registration form pinpointed where they would be and when. Or why not at least post a notice at the mouth of the river? “Obviously,” Eric said, “we would not have camped there.”

Park officials conceded that, in hindsight, they could have done more. But they defended their actions as having been rational and restrained. The warden who searched the lake had found nothing. Knowing that bears can walk dozens of kilometres a day, he assumed the bear was gone. Apparently, he had thought a warning would be overkill. “We don’t want to press the panic button too much,” David Monteith, the director of Nunavut’s parks, said shortly after the incident.

Eric and his friends also condemned the park for publishing shoddy information. The park registration booklet, which is given to all visitors, didn’t even mention polar bears. The park guidebook, meanwhile, had effectively rejected the possibility of an encounter. Eric says park officials had also dismissed that chance, leaving his group dangerously unprepared.

To this, park officials could only plead ignorance. Until the attack, the best information of hunters, elders, biologists and river guides suggested that bears are not seen near the Soper. But they also pointed out that danger is part of nature. “People come up here to experience pristine wilderness,” Monteith said. “There are risks associated with that.” Privately, some locals were more blunt. They derided Eric’s group as having been naive. As they saw it, the Arctic is the land of polar bears. Anyone who thinks an encounter is impossible is being foolish.

Wherever the truth lay, the mauling, and the criticism arising from it, made the national news. In Kimmirut, residents fretted that the Soper would get a bad name. In the Nunavut legislature, politicians worried about damage to the territory’s fledgling tourism industry.

And no one wanted to see another attack. Within days, the guidebook was altered to read: “When you travel in Nunavut you are in polar bear country.” Officials stopped promising there won’t be bears, on the Soper or anywhere else. Now, park visitors are issued a bear-safety brochure, given a briefing about bear-awareness and required to fill out a more extensive registration form. The Nunavut Parks Web site also devotes thousands of words to bear danger. And officials pledge that the next time there’s a sighting in the area, they will warn upstream paddlers.

But no one promises that those changes will prevent another mauling. The attack on Eric’s group proved, above anything else, that polar bears are unpredictable. They are individualistic, inquisitive and prone to wander. They’ve been sighted hundreds of kilometres inland and 2000 metres up a mountainside. They could turn up anywhere in the Arctic, any time.

Most experts agree, however, that the Soper River attack was a fluke. Through no fault of their own, Eric and his friends were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They could take another hundred trips through the park, and chances are they’d never see another bear. The animal was probably an inquisitive, inexperienced young male. It wandered into camp to check out the tents. When it swatted one, pandemonium broke out. The bear became excited, confused, and perhaps even alarmed. After Eric stabbed it, it had second thoughts, saw an easy way out and strolled off down the shore.

Today, Alain and Patricia retain scars from their wounds, but otherwise they’re fully recovered. They’ve grown even closer to Eric and Anne. “They were already friends for life,” Anne explains. “Now, there is a special bond between us.” Both couples still explore the backcountry. Last summer, a full year after the mauling, all four spent a week ocean-kayaking together on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. On the Victoria Day weekend, Alain and Eric took a canoe trip in western Quebec. They carried an arsenal of bear deterrents, including pepper spray, bear bangers and bear bells. Even so, they slept uneasily for the first few nights.

Still, Eric says the Soper ordeal didn’t change him. “I was already living my life pretty much exactly the way I’d like it to be,” he explains. Anne isn’t sure if she changed, either. But what she does know is that the attack reinforced her love for Eric. “I discovered a strength in that guy that I never would have imagined,” she says.

On the morning of Dec. 9, 2002, Anne, Alain and Patricia filed into the ballroom of Ottawa’s stately Rideau Hall, and watched with swelling hearts as Canada’s Governor General, her Excellency the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, presented 28 Canadians with the Medal of Bravery. Eric Fortier was among those called forward. His confrontation with the bear received special mention in the Governor General’s speech. “You did what was brave,” she told the recipients. “You did what was right.”

Eric was flattered, but now, back at his orthodontic office in Quebec, he says he’s eager to move on. “It’s a great honour,” he says. “But it’s obviously an honour you don’t want to be in the situation to earn.”
And he still insists — as he always has — that he isn’t a hero. Not long after the mauling, he summed it up best. “What else was I going to do?” he said. “I had to protect my friends.”