Conquering the Impossible (28 page)

I narrowly avoided one catastrophe after the other. I knew the slightest mistake could have proved fatal, but I just couldn't bring myself to stop. I was intoxicated with the adrenaline rush. When evening came, I had traveled forty miles, but I chided myself for running risks that were quite unnecessary. I would be in a lot of trouble if someone up there stopped watching over me. As I folded up my kite, I swore I would never use it in pack ice again. I had a complete change of attitude. My goal from now on was no longer to get to Tuktoyaktuk as quickly as possible, rather just to get there at all. The farther I went on this expedition, the less of a right I had to compromise its success by running pointless risks.

*   *   *

The landscapes I was traveling through were some of the most beautiful places I had ever had an opportunity to see. This Far North, where land, sea, and sky are all different facets of the same diamond, where the mountains look as if they had burst through the ice, made me think more than ever about the fragility of our earth.

By the time I came even with Cape Young, I saw no remaining signs of the grizzly bears except for their tracks through the snow that headed toward Banks Island on the north side of Amundsen Gulf. It snowed periodically, which was the natural companion of the warmer temperatures. The thermometer no longer dropped below fifteen degrees below zero, and the ice would partly thaw during the day and then freeze up again during the night, which gave it an unpleasant, cardboard-like consistency. This “damp cardboard” stuck to my skis and slowed me down. But I was like an athlete in midseason condition, and I approached Paulatuk on schedule to meet up with Jean-Philippe and his basketful of provisions.

Jean-Philippe had also brought his closest friend, Pierre-Alain, a Swiss restaurateur who closely followed all of my expeditions. Jean-Philippe brought him along to this reprovisioning point as a present for his fortieth birthday. All of Pierre-Alain's friends had chipped in to pay his way, and so there the two of them were, traveling from Paulatuk to meet me, on their rented snowmobiles and accompanied by their Inuit guide. We met at the exact spot where I climbed onto dry land. The trip from Paulatuk had taken them four hours. It would take me three days to retrace their brief journey.

During those three days we camped together, but while I made progress toward Paulatuk, Jean-Philippe and Pierre-Alain set out to explore the region's amazing landscapes and wild fauna. Thanks to the mobility that their snowmobiles gave them, they could rejoin me from time to time to check on my progress or to bring me a snack, vanishing into the distance and then reappearing unexpectedly, chasing me down by following my tracks, or going on ahead to set up their camp. Pierre-Alain had brought supplies of fondue and other Swiss delicacies, so that the three days we traveled together turned into a jolly excursion. Despite that conviviality, and even though we weren't very far from Paulatuk by this point, I didn't waste the tiniest scrap of food or ounce of fuel. I never wasted food or fuel, both out of a sense of principle and superstition. Even if I had an extra forty-five pounds of surplus food to haul, I could never bring myself to abandon any of it on the ice field. There was no question of letting my friends carry part of my load either—for safety reasons. If for any reason we were unable to meet up again, I had to be self-sufficient.

On the last day I told Jean-Philippe and Pierre-Alain to go on ahead to wait for me in Paulatuk. Arriving at the end of a stage is a gift that I like to enjoy greedily, all by myself. I like to be alone so that I can gradually slow down to a stroll, taking my time to watch as the village grows larger and closer, considering what I went through to get there, savoring the small victory while allowing myself to think ahead to the next stage.

I had taken thirty-three days—only two of which were sunny—to reach Paulatuk from Cambridge Bay with daily distances of about twenty-five miles. That distance might not seem like much when plotted out on a map, but it had taken me four months to cover the same distance under harsher conditions from Arctic Bay to Committee Bay.

If there was a reason I had made it this far, I think it was first and foremost because I believed in myself, and also because I had never let disappointments diminish my sense of hope. The other ingredients of the magic potion were a blend of experience and wisdom. The wisdom was the product of the terrible errors and hubris that had come close to costing me my life. I would need wisdom and experience, in spades, to cross Siberia in winter.

I had crossed into the Northwest Territories, which lies between Nunavut and the Yukon, and I was on schedule to cross the Bering Strait in August. I would hoist sail at Point Hope to cross the Chukotka Sea to Vankarem on the Russian side. From there I would set out to cross Siberia. The timing was perfect, as long as I didn't waste a single day—as long as everything went smoothly until I reached Point Hope.

*   *   *

Paulatuk, the smallest town in all of the Far North, is just a cluster of prefabricated houses near an airstrip. The place was empty because the few inhabitants had left to hunt snow geese, which were migrating from Banks Island. Each family had a goose quota to contribute to its supply of meat for the coming winter.

We were housed comfortably as guests of Christian Buchère, a Swiss biologist who had been living here for the past two years, working on a Canadian government project to monitor and study wildlife. Christian was surprised when Jean-Philippe told him a few days prior that I would be arriving. His shock was partially due to the fact he hadn't heard from us for a year, but mostly because he had heard that I had died on my aborted attempt to reach the North Pole!

*   *   *

The snow was melting, and I wasted little time, leaving Paulatuk after two days. Before departing, I consulted a village elder, John, about the best route to follow, as was my custom. It is no accident that at regular intervals, I sought out men who were close to nature, in whom knowledge and wisdom had traced rings, like the rings of an oak tree. More and more each day, I understood that my journey was much more than a physical or athletic challenge; it was an expedition of discovery—into the remotest territory of humanity and my own human nature. My exploration of this remarkable terrain was taking me farther and farther afield, which is certainly why my adventures were relatively short early in my career and now take years.

I set out at four in the morning, under a heavy snowfall that clumped to my skis and slowed down my progress. The snow was partly melted, and it spread out across the ground in a black-and-white patchwork that was soon quite impassable with a sled. I climbed back down to the ice on Amundsen Gulf, but the ice, because the snow wasn't freezing anymore, was covered with a liquid film.

The Paulatuk Peninsula proved to be sufficiently snow-covered for me to cross it on skis, so I did so, following the tracks left by the goose hunters.

I had almost reached the other shore when I met an Inuit family of five—including an old man who looked like he was at least one hundred—returning from a hunting expedition. Green was their surname, inherited from a family of Boston whalers, and they offered me the hospitality of their traditional encampment for the night, which they had already set up near their snowmobiles. I accepted with pleasure, and once again I was treated as an honored guest. Seated around a banquet of caribou and goose, with Eskimo fritters made from flour and seal oil for dessert, the Greens explained that no one had traveled by snowmobile from Paulatuk to Tuktoyaktuk in at least eight years. And as for on foot, well, according to them, it would be impossible for me to cut across Cape Bathurst Peninsula because of the cliffs on the east coast, which were two- to three-hundred feet high. These cliffs were called the Smoking Hills because at regular intervals they emitted roaring jets of steam, as if a dragon were breathing deep within their black flanks. As for the river whose mouth lay a few miles ahead, the ice covering it was very likely to be flooded already. I would certainly drown if I fell through and was swept under by the current.

The Greens recommended that I skirt around Cape Bathurst and Baley Island, directly west, before crossing Liverpool Bay, which should present no problems at this time of the year. On the other hand, the marshes at the estuary of the Mackenzie River would prevent me from reaching Tuktoyaktuk with my sled if I took a straight line. They recommended that I go north around the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula and cut down at a gentle southwest angle toward the village itself, staying on the ice the whole time. The ice would certainly be covered with river water. But my new friends figured that I still had five days to get through safely before it became impossible.

Finally, they warned me that there would be a high risk of encountering grizzly bears and polar bears, which were attracted to the Smoking Hills by the openings made in the ice by the crosscurrents near Baley Island.

I set off again after a breakfast consisting of rice, snow goose, and fritters, following the route that they had suggested. A little past Franklin Bay, I happened upon polar bear tracks. Soon after, I saw the grizzly paw prints in the snow. The bears were following the river that flows out into the sea midway up the Cape Bathurst Peninsula, where it gushes out onto the surface of the ice. I continued toward the cape after making an enormous detour to avoid being swept away by the river water.

Just to make things more difficult, the temperature rose several degrees, and the heavy, wet snow that had been falling ever since I left Paulatuk had now changed to rain! There is nothing worse in the Arctic. You can get rid of snow by brushing it off, but rain soaks you. It gets into your clothes, and it freezes as soon as a little wind starts blowing. In any case, the rain would change to something else very soon. The weather changes from one minute to the next in this part of the world. It shifts almost undetectably from snow to sunshine, from heat (relatively speaking) to cold, from calm winds to squall. “If you don't like the weather here, just wait fifteen minutes,” they say in Arctic Canada.

The farther I climbed along the peninsula that leads to Cape Bathurst, the less ice there was. Soon, the waves were practically pounding against the rocks. The blocks of ice—crashing against one another like ice cubes in a glass—pushed me against the Smoking Hills, and soon I was wedged onto a beach two yards wide, where rocks were poking through the snow.

Something made me look up. A good fifty yards above me stood the first grizzly I had encountered. The animal was looking down at me with interest but had no way of getting down to me. At least I hoped he didn't.

Two hours later, still wedged between the cliffs and the blocks of ice, my skis weighed down by sticky snow, I felt like I was moving through a fantastic film set. The snow was falling through fog, the mountain next to me seemed to be panting as it belched out its jets of steam. Locked one against the other, the icebergs seemed to be struggling near me, like a bunch of unsettling monsters.

Suddenly, thirty yards away from me on the beach, there appeared a mother grizzly with her two cubs. Snouts sniffing the air, they were all looking for their next meal. The wind was blowing toward me, which prevented them from noticing me for the moment. That was not necessarily a good thing. If the mother saw me too late to turn and run, she would have no choice but to attack. I stopped, but I was reluctant to turn around because it would take me four solid hours of skiing to retrace my steps off that beach—four hours during which I would be easy prey.

I decided to squeeze as close to the cliff as possible, hoping they would just walk right by me. But the mother bear and her cubs saw me and froze. The mother reared up on her hind legs, but the cubs began to gallop toward me! That was the worst thing that could have happened. My rifle, packed on the sled, was out of reach. The only thing that I could think to do was to keep on going, swinging my arms as high in the air as I could, according to a trusted old polar bear method that I was praying would work for grizzly bears, too.

The cubs kept on coming. If they got too close to me, their mother would necessarily consider me a threat; she would rush to their rescue and turn me into hamburger.

The cubs raced past me, continuing on their way as if they hadn't seen me at all. I continued to ski toward their mother, swinging my arms. She dropped down onto all fours. By now we were practically face-to-face. When she moved over toward the water, I squeezed as tight against the cliff wall as I could.

All at once, she broke into a run. As she went by me, she turned her head toward me and took a final look at me. She then caught up with her brood, and the whole family continued on its way. Mechanically, I continued to swing my arms while continuing on my way as quickly as I could. I was so frightened that I was still trembling.

I would need to get off this grizzly bear highway; the traffic was too heavy for my liking, and I couldn't always count on getting so lucky. I tried to find the easiest possible way up the cliff face, but as I got closer to the tip of the cape, my options narrowed. I opted for a cliff face about two hundred feet high. Once I was up there, I could cross the mountains to Liverpool Bay. In a snowy wind that pressed me against the wall, I climbed up and drove in a piton. I used a pulley system to haul up, one after another, my bags, then my empty sled, and finally I climbed up myself.

After six and a half hours of hard work, I reached the summit of the Smoking Hills, where I found an expanse of perfectly passable snow-covered tundra, which only made me regret not having climbed up much earlier.

*   *   *

Across rivers and valleys, I gradually descended back down toward Liverpool Bay. The weather cleared up, as if a curtain had been raised on the blooming of an Arctic spring. The magnificent landscape extended farther and farther into the distance, with silhouettes etched in diamond, colorful flora emerging from the snow, and light growing more vivid with each day.