Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

NNSL (Jul 13/98) - Every region of the NWT is bear country. Grizzlies populate the Barren Lands and Mackenzie Valley. Black bears call the treeline home. The coast and Arctic islands are polar bear turf.

Territorial biologist Dean Cluff says in terms of aggressiveness he would rank the grizzly ahead of polar bears and black bears a distant third.

His advice in the case of bear encounters is to give the animal a wide berth and go upwind so it can smell you.

"When we notice something, we want to confirm it with our eyes. When animals notice something they want to confirm it with their noses," Cluff says.

Of course, that only works if you see the bear before it sees you.

Rankin Inlet brothers Patrick and Peter Kaludjak were hunting walrus last month when they awoke one morning to find a polar bear feasting on a seal just outside their tent.

As cool as mid-winter sea ice, the two brothers simply watched the bear eat its fill.

"They're harmless -- they're not like black bears or grizzlies," says Peter.

Keeping cool is exactly what Fort Liard's Frank Kotchea advises: "Stay level-headed. If you get scared the bear will sense it, but if you keep cool the bear will just go about its business."

Kotchea got a chance to test his theory this spring."I looked out the window ... and saw this groundhog. It just took off, and then I saw the black bear. He wasn't in any rush, he just walked by."

Cluff himself recalls being taken by surprise by one polar bear while tagging another in 1994.

He and fellow biologist Mitch Taylor were tagging a female bear with two cubs. It was the last bear of the day, he said, so they were tired and probably not that alert.

"All of a sudden the helicopter pilot looked up and started yelling 'Hey! Hey! Hey!'"

He was yelling because another polar bear was less than two metres away.

The chopper pilot ran for his aircraft and dove into the back seat. Cluff said, "What are you doing back there? Get this thing started!"

Taylor and Cluff ended up darting and tagging the bear, a skinny five-year-old male.

Fears of bears can be moderated with a few statistics.

Steve Herrero of the University of Calgary notes that between 1965 and 1985, six people were killed by polar bears. There has not been one instance, that he's heard, of a polar bear killing a human since 1985.