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Leslie Brown 11 -5 OF BEARS AND BINS I have been afraid many times in my fifteen years, but one incident sticks in my mind as a terrifying experience that I can never laugh or even smile at. Everyone remembers accidents that they had as a child - a car accident, a fire, a near-drowning - but very few have experienced my fear. When I was three, I fell in the Moose River, parka and all, but the first breath of choking water is only a dim recollection in my mind. The incident I talk of occurred three years ago, when I was living in Churchill, Manitoba. In order to continue I must describe Churchill. Most people know that it is a port of Hudson Bay at the mouth of the Churchill River. It consists of several small are as, within a two or three mile radius. The part that I am concerned with is called Fort Churchill. It consists of the government offices and residences, the Navy PMQ ' s and recreational facilities, and the research worker ' s homes. The town is made up of long, two-storey units, each with about thirty or forty apartments linked by heated corridors. The housing units are contained in one area except for one isolated unit for Department of Transport and R.C.M.P. employees, where I lived. The recreational facilities are concentrated in F area, which also holds the pupils of the vocational school and the single quarters. One significant fact about Churchill which I have failed to mention as yet and which distinguished it from other northern towns is that it happens to be in the middle of the migration route of the great polar bear. The reader must understand that this is through no fault of the animals, since they were there first. Actually, the majority of the bears wait near the town site only until the bay is frozen over and they can continue their journey, but in recent years, they have been more and more attracted by the town dump and the numerous garbage cans on the doorsteps. Each winter the residents are prepared for another onslaught of stragglers and lazy bears. One Wednesday evening in late November, I discovered that the Garrison movie was “The Agony and the Ecstasy”, and decided to go at 7:30. When I set out it had been dark for several hours and the air was a clear forty below. A wide band of green spanned the sky, and the snow reflected the stars. To get to F area I had to leave A area, walk along the road away from the bay and around the arena, past the hospital and turn to the closest entrance. A t that time the bears had been around for a few weeks, each night leaving our block surrounded by footprints and crushed garbage bins. A few months later a bear came into our laundry room because someone had left the door open, and before the police could get him out, he had torn the stairs to splinters and left his mark scratched all over the walls. A bear is nothing to take for granted and all the people in Churchill know it. I made my way safely to the theatre but the one thought in my mind as I walked was, “Where is the best place to run if I bump into something huge and yellowish? I never gave the animals a thought for two hours as I disappeared into Renaissance Rome. I made my way home, giving corners a twenty yard radius and almost but never quite running. As I walked over a rise in the road a form emerged from the right. I knew immediately that it was much too small to be a bear, but the reflexes of my brain were ahead of the logic. As the dog passed me I broke into a run. Oddly enough many people in situations like mine think that nothing would ever happen to them. When people read of accidents they are a separated and indifferent case. People in general find it impossible to identify with victims of accidents, for they are always certain that they are the exception. People who smoke are aware of the danger of cancer, but they, of course, are invulnerable. In Churchill I was faced with reality, and I accepted it for what it was. I know people who had been mauled, and I also knew the Indian couple that had died at the hands of a bear that year. I know many people will think that I mad e a mountain out of a molehill, but I must deny that; I never thought that my fears were stupid or needless, and I still do not think they were. The north, bears included, is a beautiful land, but it is a land where nothing can be taken for granted. My only hope is that civilization will not spoil one of the last stretches of unburdened land and sea and air.
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