We have a young man who works at the site here in Nanisivik who is from the community down the road called Arctic Bay. He is Inuit and like the rest of the people who live there they all live the part of the life style that they have lived for a long time. That is the hunting and fishing lifestyle that they love and allows them to exist in such a harsh environment.
As part of this aspect of their life they have to go out into a harsh environment to hunt and in this case be hunted. I am not sure of this gentleman's name but he works with one of the environmental engineers here who I have come to know quite well, Stuart. We were talking the other day about Polar Bears and Stuart pipes up and says I've got something to show you related to Polar Bears.
He showed us a couple of pictures taken of his helper the Inuit gentleman. They were taken 3 months after he and his hunting partner had a night time encounter with a Polar Bear. The story goes that they were travelling along when all of a sudden they were being chased by a Polar bear who caught up with them very quickly and took a couple of swipes at the helper and quickly started attacking his hunting buddy which allowed the first guy to gain control of his gun and was able to kill the Polar Bear before it killed them. Here is what the scars look like 3 months and 172 stitches (mostly sub dermal) later. Each one of those long scars were the result of the claws of the bear through some pretty heavy clothing. OUCH. Very big claws attached to a very big bear. That is why we have resident wildlife outlooks here around the clock.
The 15 mile trip back home must have a lot of fun too. Again enlarge the picture to get the full effect.
I came here via your wife's blog "Sewing on the Edge" and I must say that those claw marks are very impressive, and I am glad to hear that the men escaped with their lives! I was once at a zoo, in Tacoma, that has a polar bear exhibit. You can go into a subterranean room which has a window on the polar bear pool and you can watch them swim, which really gives a sense of how HUGE they are. Human people are the same size as the seals that Polar Bears eat as their regular food, and watching the bears swimming I was very glad that there were many inches of glass thickness between us and them!!
ReplyDeletesorry to be a stickler, but there are two c's in Arctic Bay.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Julie I had spelled vicious incorrectly also. Should have run the spell checker before I posted. I am a bit of an amateur compared to you know who.
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