The birds of Mushuau-nipi.

The Ungava grizzly, a ghostly presence.

For more than a century, Innu and Inuit hunters, Hudson’s Bay Company clerks and explorers spoke of a great brown bear of the barren lands, larger and more feared than the black bear. With no specimen in hand, its existence was long doubted. Then, in the mid-1970s, the archaeologist Steven Cox unearthed a grizzly bear skull (Ursus arctos) in the midden of an eighteenth-century Inuit sod house on Okak Island, Labrador. For Stephen Loring and Arthur Spiess, this discovery “effectively ended speculation about the former existence of the species in the barrenlands of northern Quebec and Labrador”.

Their 2007 article adds two new pieces to the file. The first is a photograph taken in August 1910 by William Brooks Cabot at Kaiaukuapiskasts, which Cabot called Long Pond, on the Innu trail linking the camp of Tshinutivish, on Mushuau-nipi, to Voisey’s Bay. A bear skull is tied to the top of a pole, as the Innu did out of respect for the animal. The authors compared its profile with those of six grizzlies and about fifteen black bears in the Smithsonian collections. The dished forehead of the skull resembles that of the Northwest Territories grizzlies and of the Okak skull more than that of any of the eastern Canadian black bears they examined. They remain cautious: “we acknowledge that this attribution cannot be conclusive”.

The second is an unpublished manuscript by Lucien Turner, a Smithsonian naturalist stationed at Fort Chimo from 1882 to 1884. Turner describes a barren-ground bear that haunts the George River valley itself.

“A species of Bear supposed to be the Barren Ground Bear is well known to inhabit the sparsely timbered tracts along George’s River from within thirty miles of its mouth to the headwaters. This animal is not plentiful, although common enough and too common to suit some of the natives who have a wholesome dread of it.”

Turner never managed to obtain a specimen, despite the large reward on offer, but he saw two skins. The Innu called it matashu. Around 1870, a hunter from Pettisikapau Lake is said to have killed three after they attacked a woman. Around 1911, an Innu man from Sept-Îles is said to have seen one but did not dare shoot. In 2004, Francis Benuen still recalled that his father, before 1930, had killed two cubs whose mother he never saw. Jacques Rousseau, crossing the peninsula in 1948, already spoke of it in the past tense: “Long ago, it seems, skins of a tundra grizzly bear were brought to the Hudson’s Bay Company posts […]. They have even deserted the memory of the Indians” (our translation).

Loring and Spiess place the probable core of this small population around Kameshtashtan (Lake Mistastin), east of Mushuau-nipi, and believe it survived into the twentieth century. Their conclusion has a melancholy ring: “Soon no memory of grizzly bears will remain among the people of the Ungava region.” The camp microphone will never hear this great brown bear, and what we know of it now rests on the archives and on the stories that remain.

Sources: Stephen Loring and Arthur Spiess, “Further Documentation Supporting the Former Existence of Grizzly Bears (Ursus arctos) in Northern Quebec-Labrador”, Arctic, vol. 60, no. 1, 2007, pp. 7–16; Jacques Rousseau, À travers l’Ungava, 1949, p. 126.