Conquering the Impossible (21 page)

Forty degrees below zero.

No matter how much energy I put into making forward progress, my body temperature kept dropping. In my journal I ranked the days in columns by good points and bad points: I had gained or lost this much ground in terms of distance from my goal; I had covered this much distance today; my last position and my new position. I needed to record this data in black and white and be able to interpret it all. This system helped me answer certain questions that I was curious about. What was the relationship between distance covered and wind speed? Or between my speed and the outside temperature? I could see that my aggressiveness would decline proportionally with the cold—in a sort of self-defensive reflex, no doubt. And the speed with which I completed everyday tasks followed the same curve.

Fifty-eight degrees below zero.

When I woke up, I found my nose frozen to my sleeping bag by the frozen vapor mist of my breath. The only way to extract myself was to tear the skin off the tip of my nose, skin that had already been burned in the fire.

Sixty-nine degrees below zero.

My blood was thickening, growing viscous in the cold. I was having a hard time bending my knees while I skied. I felt as if I were moving in slow motion. It was hard to breathe. The air was burning my lungs, and I was afraid that my tissue in my lungs was going to freeze. My fingers had already begun to succumb to frostbite again. They were swelling, and blisters resurfaced on my thumbs.

I had been told again and again that it was impossible to go anywhere in this region during the first two months of the year. Still, it was even worse than I had expected.

Sixty-two degrees below zero.

It was getting warmer—if the word can be used to describe such frigid temperatures. But now the wind veered around and began to blow hard out of the Southwest. The wind gusted straight into my face, and my abraded nose began to freeze. The blisters on my thumbs began to ooze.

I decided to spend a day in my tent.

*   *   *

I started off the next day rested and with renewed determination, but my nose and my thumbs were painful, and I never really got warmed up. I kept moving forward, heading south, unfortunately, since it was still impossible to think about crossing the Gulf of Boothia. I began to wonder: would I ever be able turn west toward my ultimate goal?

Suddenly, I stopped short. I was face-to-face with a polar bear.

Fox tracks had already alerted me that there might be a bear nearby, and the crows flying overhead had confirmed the likelihood. But the birds were circling too widely to help me locate the beast with any accuracy, and so I had just charged ahead. The bear must have smelled me coming for some time—particularly with the wind at my back.

We stood about thirty feet apart on a strip of ice wedged between the open waters of the Gulf of Boothia—the bear was skirting the gulf, waiting to ambush the seals—and the cliffs of the coastline. It was impossible for me to go around.

All the same, I remembered seeing bear droppings earlier in the day that contained seal hair, and that memory reassured me. In fact, the animal was not looking too hungry or too aggressive. After ignoring me at first, it sat still, sniffing at my scent. That wasn't necessarily a bad sign. There seemed to be a good chance that it would leave me alone.

The bear wiggled its tiny ears (their small size keeps them from freezing), wrinkled its nose, opened its eyes wide, and gaped its mouth. This was its way of gathering information about me. Suddenly, the ears stood straight up! Questions crowded into my head: How was the bear walking? Paw prints—close together or far apart? Male or female? I couldn't see any cubs around.

I followed Claude's and Simon's advice. I walked straight toward the bear, swinging my arms to make me look as big as possible. The bear didn't move. Then, suddenly, it reared up on its hind legs. It still wasn't wearing the distinctive expression that warns of an imminent attack. Its stance was intended to frighten me, as well as to improve its vantage point, from which to get a better view of me. I knew that the bear was trying to make up its mind.

To attack or not to attack?

Just as I skied past it, the bear dropped back down onto all fours and looked back at me one last time before turning its back on me for good.

While the bear went on its way, swinging its big bottom heavily from side to side, I marched on confidently, not turning to look, and heaving a deep sigh of relief.

I was proud of having put into practice the things that Claude and Simon had taught me for the first time. After the police chief in Igloolik had taken my gun away, I needed to restore my self-confidence. This successful test helped me to reinforce it—the key to survival was my body of knowledge and experience more than my stock of weapons.

*   *   *

At the very bottom of Committee Bay there is a tiny island, Sabine Island, which I was planning to use as a sort of sidewalk to reach the western shore of Boothia. I set my course for it, but I soon realized from their tracks that countless bears were heading in the same direction. It's not hard to figure out that if the bears are heading in that direction, it's because there are seals there; if there are seals, it's because there is open water; and if there is open water, I won't be able to cross it on foot. So I turned south again.

Sunday, January 16. Ninety-eight degrees below zero.

The wind, blowing harder than usual, and the intensifying fog made this the coldest day of my expedition. This was the first time since my departure from North Cape that I experienced temperatures under the threshold of seventy-five degrees below zero. In fact, it wasn't just a milestone for me; it hadn't been this cold in the region in the past two decades.

That's what I call being in the right place at the right time.

I was constantly on the lookout for cracks, hollows, and openings in the ice where I might catch a ski or wedge a foot. Like anything else, bones break much more easily in extreme cold. But the hazards were all hidden under a fine layer of snow.

My thumbs were frostbitten once again. The blisters had reappeared under my fingernails, my fingertips were oozing the way they had on the way to the North Pole, and the prospect of amputation was jeering at me once again.

When I made camp, I was too exhausted to cook, eat, or drink. I fell asleep while I was taking my shoes off, my feet still in the vestibule. By the time I managed to restore a little warmth to my fingers, just enough to keep them from freezing a second time, the sensation that they were being pounded with a hammer began to torture me once again.

In any case, I couldn't risk staying in my tent. There was a real risk that I would freeze to death in my sleeping bag, which was only made for temperatures down to fifty degrees below zero.

There was only one way to survive—to get up and march through the cold, which is exactly what I did.

*   *   *

The bear that suddenly blocked my way was even bigger than the last one, at least ten feet tall. It was one of the most imposing bears I had ever seen. (Simon, on the other hand, had killed a bear once that stood eleven and a half feet tall.) Less curious but more aggressive than his cousin of the other day, he wasn't advancing with his paws close together (that was good news), but he wasn't very fat either (that was a little more worrisome). I didn't shift course by an inch and—according to the time-tested method—I swung my arms as high as I could.

The bear went by me without taking its eyes off me for a second. Then it turned around and started following me from a few yards back, walking a path roughly parallel to my mine, playing hide-and-seek behind the big blocks of ice. I knew that he was waiting for a chance to attack me from behind, because bears will almost never attack you face-to-face unless they are really hungry. I decided to seize the initiative, so I headed straight toward him, dogging him, following every turn he made. I wasn't trying to provoke him. I was just showing him that I was big and strong, too, and that I wasn't afraid of him at all—even if I was actually quaking in my boots. That failed to impress him, so I stopped and got my rifle out of my sled.

The Canadian authorities had warned me that it is strictly forbidden to shoot anything at a bear but firecrackers or rubber pellets. And that's only if the bear is acting in a very threatening manner. But I wasn't ready to run the risk.

Anyway, my rifle had been damaged in the fire. The breech was blocked solid with frozen snow, and the round refused to slip into the chamber. At these extremely cold temperatures, a weapon should be stored completely dry. Even lubricating oil would freeze, rendering a gun useless.

I had a sudden surge of ill feeling toward the policeman back in Igloolik who had confiscated my .357 Magnum with its very simple firing mechanism—trigger, hammer, bullet—that would withstand any climate.

Even so, it wouldn't have been easy to shoot wearing mittens, and without them my skin would freeze to the gun grip.

The bear came toward me. I unhooked my sled to give myself more freedom to move. I picked up my flare pistol. The phosphorus projectile that it fires would set the animal's fur on fire if I managed to hit him. But I only had one cartridge. If I missed him, he wouldn't miss me. I wasn't even carrying a knife. I guess I could have tried poking him in the eye with one of my ski poles, but I wasn't in much condition to try a stunt like that.

We stood there face-to-face, each with his weapons. One of us would have to give ground, and I'd prefer that it was him. The bear continued to approach. If I was still reluctant to fire, it was because my opponent wasn't yet showing the classic warning signs that usually precede an attack—the same ones that Simon had taught me. He stretched out his paws, flattened his ears, and snarled, his lip quivering, without really baring his fangs. I didn't have any idea what to do now.

Suddenly, as a sort of last resort, I started shouting, “Get out of here! Go on, beat it!”

I don't know what I was thinking, but it worked! As soon as he heard my voice, the beast stood still in his tracks and stared at me as if he had fallen into a trance. Then he turned and fled. My heart was racing at a hundred beats a minute. I refastened my harness and set off again, my flare gun in my pocket within easy reach. But I didn't think I'd see him again.

*   *   *

For several days running the temperature flirted with seventy-five degrees below zero, and then it modified a little. Scorched by the cold and covered with sores, the skin on my lips and my nose was coming off in strips and shreds. At these extreme temperatures, the slightest activity became difficult. I was exhausted by the time I pitched my tent, but because I was afraid of freezing to death in my sleep, I only took short naps. Every night I melted snow to make a gallon of water, which afforded me the luxury of an hour of relative warmth—during which time I would often fall asleep against my will—except on those nights when my fingers, paralyzed by the blisters from the frostbite, were unable to light my camp stove at all.

After eating, but before lying down for my series of short naps, I forced myself to stay awake to repair my most badly battered equipment. I used a special glue to fix the tip of one of my skis, which had split in two. For the umpteenth time, I reinforced the stitching of my mittens, socks, harness, etc., stitching that the extreme cold shatters like glass; I epoxied my thermos, which had cracked in the cold; and I refastened the grips on my ski poles, which came loose in the frigid conditions. There was no question of putting anything off till the next day. Tomorrow, there would be twice as much to do, and I would never be able to keep up with it. And I was constantly aware that the success of my expedition and my survival depended on keeping my equipment in good working order.

I was consuming my provisions at the rate of three and a half pounds per day, so my sled was that much lighter each morning when I clipped into my harness. (It had weighed 460 pounds when I left Baffin Island.) But I was having more and more difficulty hauling the load because of the normal exhaustion, coupled with my weight loss and psychological stress, both of which continued to drain my strength.

Not a day went by that I didn't collapse from exhaustion, repeatedly, falling like a sack, face down in the snow. Each time I would have to dig deep into my untapped reserves of energy and strength to get back on my feet and set out again.

*   *   *

On one of those days, after one of those falls, I reached the end of my rope. It might have been the hundredth time I had fallen. Or the thousandth. Who could say? Now it had become a sort of routine: fall, wake with a start, back on my feet, start off again. But this time, I was aware that the sensation of “kicking the bottom of the pool” was coming more and more slowly. My face was pressed into the snow as if into a pillow. A pleasant sensation of numbness swept over me, rapidly taking possession of my entire being. I felt a longing to slip down to the bottom and rest there. It would be so easy, so relaxing …

I remembered that on my trek through the Amazonian jungle I would collapse this same way, completely exhausted. But immediately, it seemed, the red ants would start biting me, and the intense pain would make me leap to my feet, as if a red hot iron were sizzling into my flesh. Here, to the contrary, all pain vanished, everything became comfortable. I knew perfectly well that I was freezing and in a few minutes would be dead, but I didn't care because I couldn't feel anything anymore. Irresistibly drawn by the other side, I was already beginning to cross over. It would have been so easy … if it weren't for a tiny voice that was ordering me to get up. The voice was faint and distant, but insistent: “Get up, Mike! Get up!” Then my subconscious took over, gradually bringing me out of that trance. The voice started up again, much louder this time, “Get up, Mike!” And now my mouth opened and I shouted out, joining the chorus, “Get up, Mike! Goddamn it, Mike, get on your feet!”