AUSUITTUQ/GRISE FIORD
Lost sleep, goosebumps, and the shakes. Ooleesee Akeeagok can't stop thinking about the bear.

Prolific bear hunter Manasie Noah saved the day for one Grise Fiord boy, who was one of two people nearly attacked by a bear stalking people in the heart of the hamlet last week. - photo courtesy of Manasie Noah

"I was chased by it," the 20-year-old Grise Fiord resident said of the March 14 incident in the heart of the hamlet.

It all started just after 10 p.m. "I was trying to go play volleyball at the gym. I came out from my house and started walking, and it was behind a house. I was passing through, and it was right in front of me. Probably five to 10 feet away from me."

Until that moment, she had been walking with her eyes on the ground.

"I saw something move," she recalls. "I thought it was my friend's dog, because they have a light brown big dog. But when I looked up, it was a bear, and it looked at me. So I screamed and ran away."

She ran toward her friend's house nearby, frantically running for the door.

"I was trying to open the door and it was right under the stairs," she said.

"I ran in and nothing was coming out of my mouth," she told friends on her Facebook wall. "I couldn't speak or nothing for (a) good 5-10 secs and finally let them know there was a bear. My hands were shaking for about (a) good hour!"

Safe, she later heard she wasn't the only one in town to have a close encounter with the seven-foot-three bear.

Manasie Noah was in the process of picking up his children and their friends from the gymnasium at around 9 p.m., when his 11-year-old son Nallinniq spotted the bear near the fuel tank farm.

"(He saw) a ghostly white figure at a stance, with its ears bent back, legs crouched, like a lion ready to pounce," Noah recalled. "He shouted 'Bear!'"

Noah backed up the vehicle and shone the headlights in the bear's direction.

"We then saw a young boy walking towards it under a street light and the bear was not under the light," he said. Noah honked his horn and flashed his high beams, and the boy, Abraham Pijamini, looked and saw the bear. "(He) ran as hard and as fast as he possibly could back the way he came to a more populated area, the gym. And I raced to him to see if he was alright."

Making sure Pijamini was fine, Noah rushed home to get his Canadian Ranger rifle, which he had locked up after hunting seals that day. He returned to the scene to find the bear running across the river, where there are no street lights. People were heading that way, so he waited a bit to make sure no one went in that direction before taking his children and their friends home. He headed out again to find the bear near the tank farm.

"It had crossed the river where it then encountered Ooleesee Akeeagok and chased her into a neighbour's home," he said. He picked up the conservation officer, and they met another man who said yet another man was chasing the bear in a car to keep it away from his dog sled team.

"He had shot at the bear, but ran out of ammunition," the man said, so offered the kill to Noah.

He could see that the bear had something wrong with it, as it was not running away and had a limp.

"I did not have any second thoughts thinking that this bear can or might hurt someone if it is left to roam our home community," Noah said. "I shot it with my Ranger rifle once. It did not take too long for it to pass on."

He noted it was his ninth or 10th bear, but after skinning it in -35 C temperatures, he found no meat was salvageable because its injuries were old, perhaps from a fight with another bear or from falling off an iceberg.

"(It) had a serious injury or wound on its hind quarter and its innards had been crushed in one spot.

The fat was almost green from sickness, let alone there was very little fat on it to begin with."

Noah's father was there to supervise the skinning and told him the meat was not safe to consume.

For Akeeagok, it was her first and hopefully last time seeing a polar bear up close.

"It still scares me," she said, the fear evident in her voice. She notes she's not walking home any more.

"I usually get a ride."

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