In the jaws of climate change.

• Author: Shankman, Sabrina

THE ARCTIC ICE CAP IS MELTING, CUTTING THE POLAR BEARS' FOOD SUPPLY AND FORCING THEM INTO AREAS WHERE PEOPLE LIVE AND CAMP. AND TO A HUNGRY POLAR BEAR, A HUMAN BEING IS JUST MEAT.

On August 17,2014, Matt Dyer, a forty-nine-year-old legal aid lawyer from Turner, Maine, emerged from the cabin of the fishing vessel the Robert Bradford as it neared the shores of Nachvak Fjord in northern Labrador. The steep peaks of the Torngat Mountains sliced down to the cold water of the fjord below. The last time Dyer had seen the fjord was thirteen months before, when he was loaded onto a helicopter, semiconscious and covered in blood. Nonetheless, when a group of journalists invited him to join them a year later for a week in the Torngats, he accepted immediately. He wanted to experience this beautiful place on different terms, building memories of its awe-inducing splendor rather than of the horror of a polar bear attack.

This trip was much different than his first. The group of five slept on the Robert Bradford, not on land. And they didn't go anywhere without Maria or Eli Merkuratsuk, the Inuit brother and sister bear guards--both armed with shotguns--who had been hired to guide and protect them.

With one bear guard at the front and one at the rear, the group wove a path inland and crested a small hill. Dyer found himself looking down through binoculars at the site where he had been attacked. Within minutes, he spotted a polar bear. It was standing on a raised piece of land where his party had considered camping a year earlier. Over the next three days, the group saw eight more bears. But instead of meeting them with fear or hesitation, or backsliding into the trauma of what had happened to him, Dyer was filled with a sense of peace.

Back home in Maine now, Dyer is still consumed by--maybe even obsessed with--polar bears. It's not posttraumatic stress disorder. He's just fascinated. He plans to get a tattoo of a polar bear on each of his forearms. If you're a tattoo guy, he explains, you don't go through an experience like that without getting a little ink. Along with the scars on his face and neck, covered now by his newly grown ponytail and beard, and the low, husky rasp that is now his voice, the tattoos will be permanent reminders of just how close he came to death. There won't be a day in Dyer's life that he won't remember the bears.

The ad in a fall 2012 issue of Sierra magazine promised the adventure of a lifetime: two weeks trekking through the...