Experience: I fought off a polar bear with a saucepan

I’ve had 35 close encounters with polar bears during my time as an explorer and campaigner for the Arctic Ocean. There’s always that surge of adrenaline when you see one – that sense of: “Oh God, it’s happening.”

I’ve learned how to deal with bears over the years. Although I take a shotgun and special cartridges – they’re to scare them off – I’ve never hit a bear with a bullet. But there was one occasion when the closest thing to hand turned out to be my mother’s saucepan.

It was back in 1990 – I was 28, and early in my career. I was on the east coast of Spitsbergen, the largest island of Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago.

Svalbard has a high concentration of polar bears in the spring, gathering for the mating season. When a bear is hungry, it essentially becomes a meat-seeking missile – it can smell you from many miles away. If you’re unwashed in a dark tent out on the floating sea ice, you can look (and smell) not unlike an oversized walrus.

I’m the world’s heaviest sleeper, but when I’m exploring, my amygdala – the part of the brain that controls fear – goes into overdrive and I sleep very lightly. For three or four nights I’d been waking up repeatedly because I thought I’d heard the dreaded crunch of bear paws in the snow.

Getting up to check was an ordeal. Condensation from my breathing and cooking would freeze into a thick coating of ice crystals on the inside of my tent, which would shower down when I brushed against them. If I touched the outside of my sleeping bag with bare fingers for too long I would get frostnip – an early stage of frostbite.

The least arduous way to check for a bear was to get up on to my knees while still inside my sleeping bag, unzip the tent and poke my head out of the top to get a 360-degree view. It was cold, awkward and miserable, and, often, there was nothing there.

On the day it finally happened, I was finishing breakfast inside the tent. I’d made porridge in my mother’s saucepan, which was one of those heavy old-fashioned ones with a plastic handle. The camping stove was still on, to melt snow for my Thermos flasks – the roaring noise was loud enough to drown out a jumbo jet. When I turned it off, there was initially silence. Then, I heard crunching in the snow.

Because of the previous false alarms, I felt quite nonchalant as I unzipped the tent’s entrance. It was a tremendous shock to see a huge, fully grown polar bear facing me, only an arm’s length away. I had a loaded gun in the tent to scare it off, but the gun was behind me and I knew that if I swivelled to get it, my salivating visitor could attack. So my hand instinctively reached for the nearest combat-ready thing I could see – the porridge-encrusted saucepan.

Holding the tent flap back, I hit the bear as hard as I could on its head. I clearly remember it wrinkling up its face and tilting its head almost quizzically to one side. I think the noise of the pan startled it as much as the impact – we could both still hear the reverberations. As I wondered whether to hit it again, it wheeled round and cantered off and out of sight.

Surprising polar bears is crucial. I’ve been in situations where I’ve heard the bear pump-priming itself with oxygen as it prepares to launch itself for the kill – the heavy breathing sounds like a London tube train. That’s when you’ve got to use your firearm to maximum effect – holding your nerve and firing immediately above its head.

Most crucially, you need to remember they have more of a right to be there than you. Polar bears are the charismatic megafauna of the Arctic Ocean – and I have now dedicated my life to campaigning for the protection of them and their habitat.

As a young adventurer I used to feel it was me against my surroundings, but then I realised I could work with nature. Many years later, I would become the first person to complete a solo trek from the tip of Canada to the north pole while pulling all my supplies – a feat that still hasn’t been repeated.

There have been times, alone in the Arctic, when I have felt more in tune with the world than anywhere else. It breaks my heart that, because of the rapidly melting sea ice, I have witnessed a wilderness habitat that others may never see.

As told to Rachel Halliburton

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