Wes Werbowy can still see the polar bear's head pressed up against his tent's mosquito netting.
"I wish I could find an artist to capture this image in my mind," says Werbowy, who survived a recent up-close-and-personal encounter with a polar bear with the help of an old Inuit trick.
"It is burned into my brain -- the eyes peering and the ears flat and the head about as big as a bushel basket jammed right toward your face.
"There was just this implacable stare for a thousandth of a second. And I thought, well, it's my day to die."
Werbowy was camping on the tundra outside of Whale Cove, Nunavut, on July 16 with three Inuk hunters he was training to be outfitters and tour guides. The party had set up camp with separate sleeping and cooking tents to minimize the bear hazard, but one large male bear didn't take the hint.
A light sleeper, Werbowy says he was awakened shortly after 3 a.m. in the pre-dawn Arctic twilight by a sound he didn't want to hear.
"I can hear a bear inhaling with a snuffling sound," he says. "They do that when they're on the trail of a quarry -- and it's right outside my tent."
He'd left his shotgun at the front of the tent. Werbowy started to unzip his sleeping bag.
"The bear heard that zipper. And that, to him, was the sound of food being unwrapped.
"There's no describing the beginning of the apparition. He was just there -- it was instantaneous. I've got a thousand pounds of bear, standing on my firearm, his face collapsing the screening of my tent right toward me where I'm still in my sleeping bag and staring at this black nose about two feet from my face."
That's when he remembered some words of wisdom an Inuit elder had once shared. The most sensitive part of a polar bear is his nose and if all else fails, take a swing at it.
That's what Werbowy did.
"I came up off the mat with as strong a fist as I could throw and I punched him as hard as I could right on the nose. It was like hitting a bag of thawed hamburger. It was just this tremendous resounding splat.
"Instantaneously, he just changed ends and vanished."
Werbowy climbed out of his tent and woke his companions. Simon Enuapik was the first one out.
"I just ran to him with this great big grin and said, 'Simon, shake my hand. I've just punched a polar bear right in the nose!"' Werbowy recalls.
James Enuapik, Simon's brother, was also in the second tent.
"We tried tracking the bear but it was so foggy," Enuapik says. "Wes was so excited that he punched a polar bear."
Werbowy admits it.
"I was on a high that's very difficult to describe. And duplicate."
Enuapik says the area where they were camping is known for polar bears.
"Every camping trip, people encounter a polar bear now," he says. "This past winter I've been hunting seals, I've seen fresh bear tracks every trip I went."
He says the trick that saved Werbowy's life is well-known to Inuit hunters.
"My uncle fought a bear three times. The three encounters he had with a bear, he always would punch its nose. It's the most sensitive part of the polar bear."
Werbowy is just pleased that both he and the bear escaped the encounter unhurt.
"I've just won a life lottery. And so did the bear."
