Teen adrift on ice with polar bears

A teenager spent two nights adrift on an ice floe in the Canadian Arctic with three polar bears for company before being dramatically rescued.

The 17-year-old, Jupi Angootealuk, was forced to shoot dead one of the bears after it ventured too close while rescuers tried to locate him from the air.

The young hunter was stranded on an ice floe which had broken away from the mainland and drifted 48km out to sea in weather that dipped below minus 15C.

Jupi had left his native town of Coral Harbour, an isolated hamlet of 700 Inuit hunters on the northern edge of Hudson Bay, with his uncle Jimmy Nakoolak on Friday morning.

The polar bear season had just begun and the two hunters headed out on to the frozen seas with their rifles to test the ice and look for bears.

But, 17km into their trip, their snowmobile broke down and the pair were forced to risk the journey back to Coral Harbour on foot. As they walked, they were separated when the ice beneath them began breaking up and drifting away in opposite directions.

Despite having badly injured knees, Nakoolak managed to stumble across a search-and-rescue party on Sunday morning which raised the alarm.

The floe was now 9km out to sea and contained a polar bear and her two cubs. At some point the adult polar bear was shot dead by the boy in self-defence.

Two aircraft were scrambled to look for the missing teenager. Late on Sunday afternoon Phil Amon, a pilot with Kenn Borek Air, spotted the boy on a patch of ice little more than 30m across.

"We circled around him for about 40 minutes or so," he said. "He never waved at all. I don't think he really wanted to move because the bears were so close."

Unable to land on the ice, all Amon could do was drop an emergency rations kit and alert a Hercules transport plane which was carrying a specialist search-and-rescue team.

The Hercules spotted the boy that evening but Jupi was forced to spend a second night on the ice as flares failed to keep the area sufficiently lit to continue the search. The following day two officials parachuted on to a larger ice floe and made their way to Jupi.

Jean-Pierre Sharp, an official at Canada's Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre, said: "The fact that our technicians were able to parachute in to land on an ice floe close by is an amazing thing. It's kind of like trying to jump from lily pad to lily pad out on some ice and slushy water."

Yesterday the boy was recovering from hypothermia with his uncle in the nearby town of Churchill.

Speaking through Coral Harbour's Mayor Jerry Panniuq, Nakoolak described his relief.

"It was nice to know that he had a rifle with him and I was kind of worried that he might have been attacked by a bear or something," he said. "When I heard he shot a bear I was happy to hear about it."

Despite the polar bears' endangered status, Inuit communities in Canada are allowed to hunt a limited quota.

Each year about 450 bears are killed, with snowmobiles replacing dog sleds as the primary way of stalking them. Inuits have resisted pressure to ban the annual hunt, saying their culture and economy depend on the bears.

- INDEPENDENT