Conquering the Impossible (20 page)

Fascinated by the demonstration, I took in every detail, and I noted them down in my travel log. Once he was done with his little building, Simon invited me to have some tea with him inside before traveling back to the village.

The next day I got my second igloo-building lesson.

“This time,” he said, “I build; you cut blocks.” With considerable effort I managed to extract a block out of the compacted snow. I held it out to him. Simon barely looked at it and, without a word, broke it in two over his knee. The second block suffered the same fate. And then to the third. He tossed the fourth block over his shoulder.

I was furious—cutting out these blocks with a wood saw was exhausting—and I was upset that I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. It wasn't until I had cut a sixth block that my work began to find favor with Simon, who said calmly, “Yes … that one, yes!” His teaching methods had paid off, and I learned how to cut a block of snow of the right shape and size to build an igloo.

On the third day, Simon decreed that he and I would each build an igloo of our own. I was still laying my first row of bricks while my teacher was sipping a cup of tea in his newly built shelter. Afterward, his air of disappointment as he stood inspecting my work made me ashamed to be such a bad student. When he dismissed me with the words, “No, definitely, you not survive,” I felt my future looked dim.

On the fourth day, Simon sent me out alone on the ice to give me a head start. When he caught up with me, twenty-five minutes later, my igloo was finished. He inspected it closely and issued his verdict. “Now,” he said, “you ready to go.”

*   *   *

Unfortunately, my departure was still impossible. The weather was still horrible, and no one could say when Cathy's plane would be able to land in Igloolik. I would have to be patient a little longer.

But I couldn't bring myself to feel any regret over the dramatic chain of events that had forced me to spend these few days here in Simon's company. I might have lost most of my gear and provisions, true enough, and I might have been forced to backtrack sixty-two miles away from my goal, but it had certainly not been a waste of time. The lessons that my Inuit friend had taught me were a gift that no one else could have given to me.

*   *   *

When Cathy finally arrived with my replacement supplies, I left Simon's house and moved in with her in a little hut that the local chief of police had found for us. My relations with the police chief had started on a friendly footing, so I answered honestly and trustingly when he asked me during the course of a conversation what forms of self-defense I was carrying with me.

As innocently as could be, I pulled out the .357 Magnum that Cathy had very discreetly brought me from Switzerland to replace the one that had been lost in the fire.

The policeman practically choked.

“But that's completely illegal!” he yelled. “The possession of firearms for personal use is strictly forbidden anywhere in Canada!” He confiscated my revolver and arrested both of us, Cathy and me! My wife was sitting in a cell in the police station while the chief typed up his report. I pleaded with him that I was preparing to cross the polar bears' migratory route and that the gun he had confiscated was intended only to save my life if I happened to be attacked by wild animals.

“If you are stupid enough to trek through the Arctic on foot,” the officer replied, “you are stupid enough to do it unarmed.” I turned purple!

“Give me the gun,” I said to the chief in an exasperated tone of voice. “I'll toss it into the ocean myself.” He refused, and at this point I guess he felt as though he owed me an explanation.

“I'm just doing my job, you know.” This was the ultimate argument of everyone who has a rulebook instead of a brain. I argued desperately that he was the only person on earth who knew about the gun, and I would give him my word of honor that if I was ever caught with it, I would never implicate anyone but myself.

But the representative of the law stuck to his position. He refused to give me back my gun, and he drove a nail into the coffin by informing his Swiss colleagues about this situation. As a result, not only were my wife and I treated like criminals during the three days that Cathy spent in Igloolik, but the Swiss police put her through all sorts of hassles when she got back home.

Eventually we were released, but this episode taught me to be much more careful where I placed my trust.

*   *   *

When he learned about my misadventure, Simon insisted on giving me his own revolver. Knowing the Arctic as he did, he considered it pure madness to venture out into the wilderness unarmed. In return, I gave him one of my new tents, as well as a GPS—he had dreamed of owning one, and I showed him how it worked. It wasn't much considering everything that Simon had given me.

While a terrible blizzard delayed our departure (Simon wanted to shuttle me back toward my route on his snowmobile), my Inuit friend decided to channel his energy into sculpting something out of a little block of gray-and-white marble, brought back from Arctic Bay where my boat was still trapped in the ice. As we talked, and without taking his eyes off me, he caressed and manipulated this tiny bit of rock patiently, as if he were trying to identify the link between me and this stone. He worked on it later with an electric grinder. After two days of work, he took my hand and placed in it the gray-and-white marble polar bear that he had sculpted just for me. The portrayal of the animal in motion, neck stretched out, ears erect, was magnificent and stunningly lifelike.

“Mike,” he said to me, “you have the courage of this bear. Keep him with you, so you always remember me.” I noticed that on the base of one of the paws he had engraved “Simon, Igloolik, 2003.”

But even without the inscription, I was unlikely to forget this token's creator.

We left Igloolik the next day, in a furious wind and a temperature of fifty-three degrees below zero. Simon wanted to drive me on his snowmobile to the exact scene of the fire, at the end of the Fury and Hecla Strait, but I asked him to drop me off somewhere along the way. It was a shame if I had to march a little farther, but in this cold, I wanted him to get back to his warm home as quickly as possible.

Along the way he taught me a great many things about seals, their habits, and the holes where they surface to breathe. At one point we stopped at one of these openings and Simon stood silent and motionless with harpoon in hand, moving nothing but his toes to keep them from freezing. I stood over another hole nearby, making noise to push the seals in his direction. According to Inuit tradition, eating the raw liver of one of these animals symbolically (and literally) gave you its strength and heat. Unfortunately, we caught nothing.

During my ride on Simon's sled, which he was pulling behind his snowmobile, my nose and my lips began to freeze again. As I prepared to put on my skis once more and return to endless days of slow and solitary progress, it felt as if the entire Igloolik experience and my meeting with Simon had only been a dream. However, my Inuit friend with a face furrowed like a Japanese garden, muffled in caribou hide, who practically suffocated me as he wrapped me in his arms with the strength of a bear, was very real indeed.

*   *   *

When he left, I carried in my mind the image of him that I had glimpsed while he hunted seals: a human silhouette, motionless against the ice, lost against the white immensity.

Simon disappeared over the horizon, and once again I was on my own. But I wasn't as alone as I had been before meeting Simon.

 

4

The Big Chill

A
T NUVALUK, ON THE NORTHWEST TIP
of the Melville Peninsula, bad weather forced me to take shelter in a cabin used by bear hunters. Previous occupants had memorialized their exploits on the walls of the cabin. One Japanese hunter boasted that he had killed a beast that stood ten feet tall when rearing up on his hind legs. An American who came through in 1999 also claimed great bear-slaying prowess.

I added my own contribution to this hall of fame: “Mike Horn was here. He didn't kill any bears, and he hopes that no bears will kill him.”

But all around the hut the countless fresh tracks were anything but reassuring. I was on the polar bear migratory route, the path frequented by female bears with their newborn cubs. Witnesses have seen polar bears knock down the thin plywood doors of cabins like this one with a single paw swipe—or even walk through the door.

After forty-eight hours in this flimsy shack, I couldn't stand waiting anymore. I needed to get moving on the way to Kugaaruk, my next destination. I headed for Committee Bay.

The snowy wind and the darkness reduced the visibility to zero and eliminated all contrast. The tallest mountains of ice were invisible until they materialized right before my face. Moreover, the high latitude confused any notion of distance and direction; even my sense of balance was muddled. I sometimes felt as if I were climbing when I was descending and vice versa. As for my GPS, it told me to go over the North Pole to reach North Cape. Of course it was just displaying the shortest route and by continuing along my predetermined route I was ignoring its advice. The gadget was hardly of use anyway. The liquid-crystal display was constantly freezing up.

Since I couldn't push all day on my ski poles with a compass in my hand, I had to rely on the wind to find my bearings and to keep from wandering around in circles on the ice in the starless winter night. Since I knew that the prevailing winds blow out of the Northwest in this part of the world, I kept track of the angle at which the wind hit my face. I also attached ribbons to my ski poles—“tell-tales,” as sailors call them—and I regularly checked the angle that they made against the rear of my skis. When I pitched my tent I made sure that it was aligned with the wind, and the ribbon on my ski pole, planted in front of the entrance, confirmed the direction. If the wind direction had changed, it would be the first thing that I noticed in the morning, and I would mentally adjust the proper angle of my “tell-tales” against the skis to continue on my course.

If the wind shifted during the course of the day, I would be able to tell by making use of the piles of snow that built up behind any large object or hill. The largest piles were created by the prevailing northwesterly winds and would indicate that direction as reliably as a compass needle—a compass needle under normal conditions, that is. All I needed to do was ensure that my skis cut through the piles at the correct angle, and I could be sure I was on the right course. I even learned to read these angles blind—in the pitch black of night or the absolutely stark white of a blizzard—from the consistency of the snow and the way it was piled beneath my ski.

Mounds of snow and nylon strips: two navigational aids that were free, naturally occurring, and infallible—but which took quite a bit of training to master.

Despite my improving skills, I was constantly wasting time trying to find my way, and thus made an average daily distance of only seven miles. In this kind of cold every motion, every gesture had to be as economical as possible, measured out to the tenth of an inch. The greatest risk of dying under these conditions is not exhaustion but malnutrition or the irrational or erratic behavior caused by the panicked feeling of being lost.

The water along the shores of the Gulf of Boothia wasn't frozen, so I was obliged to stay on dry land and follow the shoreline. Bear tracks were increasingly numerous. Most of the tracks led down to the water where seals could be found and eaten. Day by day, more and more paw prints appeared—they were everywhere. I had never seen so many tracks in my life. But I still had not spotted a single polar bear. I knew that they were hidden in the darkness and in the cover of the rocky hills. The bears, on the other hand, had certainly spotted me.

Encouraged by a good strong wind that had been blowing in a favorable direction for several days now, I tried to use one of my kites, but the surface of the ice was too rough.

The next day a blizzard blew up. I knew I needed to pitch my tent quickly before the storm got too heavy. I didn't make more than five miles that day, and the thermometer was dropping.

The blizzard gave way to a rime fog, which soon turned into an icy fog, a pea soup with so much frozen water suspended in the air that I could practically feel it—so thick that I could taste it.

I couldn't see farther than six feet in any direction. Dry cold was tolerable, but this icy dampness penetrated beneath the skin and took hold of the muscles. While I skied along, my perspiration would freeze, forming a layer of ice between my jersey and my skin. I would begin to freeze, in the literal meaning of the word, and it got even worse when I stopped moving. To keep sweating to a minimum, I adapted my speed to the outside temperature and removed a layer of clothing once my body heat had risen. Whenever I started to feel beads of sweat forming, I would stop and bring my temperature down by removing my mittens or my hood for a few seconds. The heat would escape very quickly through my hands or my head.