James Raffan - Ice Walker: A Polar Bears Journey through the Fragile Arctic

Praise for

ICE WALKER

For most of my life, I have read stories of animals, stories that possibly made me who I am. My heroes have been the likes of Ernest Thompson Seton, who was able to get inside the skin of other creatures without anthropomorphizing. James Raffans Ice Walker is a worthy member of that tradition. As he captures the smells, sounds, and feel of the Arctic, we become engaged and travel with Nanu and share her world. We care about her, her cubs, and her environment and end up wanting to protect those all the more. This book is important reading!

ROBERT BATEMAN, Canadian naturalist, artist, and bestselling author of Life Sketches and Robert Batemans Canada

An unbearable truth shadows every page of this intimate portrait of a female polar bear and her rapidly changing world. Our reliance on fossil fuels has placed us all on thin ice, bears and humans together. James Raffan enlarges our sympathies with this quiet, unsentimental call to fellow-feeling and action.

CANDACE SAVAGE, FRSC, award-winning writer and naturalist

Stories touch us in ways that no list of facts can. James Raffan proves to be a master storyteller, bringing us an intimate saga of a polar bears three-year life cycle. Beautifully drawn with scientific accuracy and cultural sensitivity that comprehends the land itself and all its inhabitants, Ice Walker gives us a fresh sense of the reality of climate change.

BERT HORWOOD, author and emeritus professor of science education at Queens University

This is a great piece of Canadian literature. Raffans painstakingly simple and stark prose combine with an impressive firsthand knowledge of the landscape and its inhabitants to create a compelling and worrisome story that holds a powerful mirror of accountability up to us and what we are doing to this amazing planet.

GRANT LINNEY, environmentalist, polar educator, and presenter with Al Gores Climate Reality Project

Just as a polar bear slips between worlds, from solid ground to sea ice and back again, James Raffan moves effortlessly between the tangible and the imaginative in this strikingly evocative, scientifically rigorous exploration of bearness. In journeying vicariously with a female polar bear through a world in flux, we see that no one and nothing exists in isolation, especially in the far north. Failing to recognize this reality more broadly will only accelerate our undoing. Ice Walker, then, is an act of defiance and hope. This is nature writing at its most intimate, compassionate, and exhilarating pitch.

KATE HARRIS, award-winning and bestselling author of Land of Lost Borders

Also by

James Raffan

BOOKS

Arctic Moments

Circling the Midnight Sun

Emperor of the North

Deep Waters

Tumblehome

Bark, Skin and Cedar

Fire in the Bones

Summer North of Sixty

COLLECTIONS

Canada Coast to Coast to Coast

The Music of Canoesongs

Rendezvous with the Wild

Canexus with Bert Horwood

Wildwaters

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Copyright 2020 by James Raffan

Phyllis Bruce Editions, published by Simon & Schuster Canada

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This Simon & Schuster Canada edition October 2020

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Author photograph Jason Van Bruggen

Cover image by Mike Kolesnikov / Getty Images

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Ice walker / James Raffan.

Names: Raffan, James, author.

Description: Simon & Schuster Canada edition.

Identifiers: Canadiana 20200164287 | ISBN 9781501155369 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Polar bearEffect of global warming onHudson Bay. | LCSH: Polar bearClimatic factorsHudson Bay. | LCSH: Global warmingHudson Bay. | LCSH: Climatic changesHudson Bay. |

LCSH: Global temperature changesEnvironmental aspectsHudson Bay.

Classification: LCC QL737.C27 R34 2020 | DDC 599.786dc23

ISBN 978-1-5011-5536-9

ISBN 978-1-5011-5538-3 (ebook)

To Huxley, wherever you are.

A woman had a miscarriage and ran away from her family. As she ran, she came to a house. In the passage lay the skins of bears.

She went in. The inhabitants turned out to be bears in human shape.

But she stayed with them. The big bear caught seals for them. He pulled on his skin and went out, often remaining away for some time, but always eventually bringing something home.

One day, the woman who had run away took a fancy to see her relations and wanted to go home. Then the mother bear spoke. Do not talk about us when you get back to men, she said. She was afraid that her two young ones might be killed by men.

So the woman went home, and a great desire came over her. And one day, as she sat caressing her husband, she whispered in his ear, I have seen bears.

Many sledges drove out, and when the mother bear saw them coming toward their house, she had great compassion on her young ones and bit them to death. She did not wish them to fall into the power of men.

Then she rushed out to look for the woman who had deceived them. She broke into the house where the woman was and bit her to death. When she came out again, the dogs closed up a circle around her and rushed upon her.

The bear defended herself, but suddenly she and the dogs all became luminous and rose into the sky as stars. And those are what they call Qilugtsatthey who are like a flock of barking dogs after a bear.

Since then, Inuit have been cautious about bears, for they hear what people say.

Adapted from an Inuit story told by Greenlandic Inuk Aisivak to explorer Knud Rasmussen in his book The People of the Polar North, 1908

I magine you are in the International Space Station, curving over northern North America. From the heavens, Hudson Bay looks like an enormous paw print on the torso of the continent, a massive beating heart drawing lifeblood from a vast network of lakes and rivers that drain nearly 1.5 million square miles of what is now the United States and Canada. At the estuaries of all the great rivers that flow into the bay, freshwater and seawater mix and begin to swirl in a great counterclockwise gyre that freezes and thaws, contracts and releases, as the earth makes its way around the sun.