arctic circle

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trapper ray (WAV, 138K)


  I'm not goin', period!
  There aren't any bears anymore.
  Come on, it's two in the morning,
  we're not gonna disturb 'em.
  We'll tiptoe, okay.





(WAV, 250K, 180K, 458K)

 We arrived at the 28th wonder
 of the world, a natural hot
 springs tucked away off a lost
 stretch of northern highway.

  The flora is tropical here, strange. You have to walk
  kilometers on a raised wooden promenade from the parking
  lot over the sulphurous, bubbling bog and through the forest
  jungle before you hit the sight of bathers.

  The location will remain anonymous. If people know where
  this place is, like so many remote spots in Canada, it
  would be overrun in no time. The only hint is, if you run
  into a mad trapper named Ray (WAV, 60K), a fanatical collector of animal
  penis bones, of the martin, fox and particularly grizzly variety,
  then you're hot onto the hot springs.
 
  Ray spent 23 years in the bush. It took that long to learn
  how to clean the meat from those protruberences, so he says.

   (WAV, 610K)

  The second pool, secluded
  and usually empty, is a long
  five meters from a brown bear
  den. Fortunately the bears
  beat their own seperate
  promenade through the woods.

  A mother and two cubs were
  worked up this night. One of
  her cubs was stuck in a tree.
  If some unlucky soul happens
  between the cub and its mother,
  it's game over.


Of course, we only learned all this the next day, after our dip
in the gigantic crucible under a densely starred sky, skinny
dipping along with a local family in the deep pool. The father,
hearing noises and seeing two bright reddish points staring out
from behind trunks, jumped out of the pool and hollered out phrases
in a foreign tongue. I asked him about his song and dance, he was
a local, and said he was making himself bigger and fearless,
to ward the bears off from the occupied baby carriage he'd parked
by the pool side.


  Slithering back into the thick soup,
  my skin felt like silk, and my muscles
  butter. The father had told me that
  last year a German had harassed a brown
  bear, which promptly charged at him.
  Diving into the pool, the bear followed
  suit, and some lucky onlooker caught
  it all on video and sold it to TV.

(WAV 233K, 105K, 438K)



















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