The bear pounced, and while his 12-year-old daughter desperately radioed for help, Aaron was mauled to death. His friend William Tiktaq, 32, told me: ‘That evening, I was in the party that recovered his body. I put a tarp on top of him in the boat, so the salt water wouldn’t get to him. He was badly mauled. There were bites everywhere. It’s not a sight you want to see.’ Six months later Aaron’s death, the first fatal attack by a polar bear in the Hudson Bay area for 19 years, is still a raw and emotional wound, described with sadness and horror by everyone I met. Its impact was intensified by a second mauling in August, when a mother bear and a cub attacked a group of three Inuit hunters near Naujaat, 500 miles to the north, killing Darryl Kaunak. Scared and exasperated by the threat the bears pose, some Inuit leaders are voicing a demand which, if granted, may trigger a global furore akin to Japan’s decision to resume commercial whaling. They want to be allowed to increase their permitted polar bear hunting quota to reduce numbers.