by Mike Horn
I had wanted to see. Now I had seen.
I wasted no more time complaining, turned around, and set my course for the Melville Peninsula. I was now resigned to the idea that I would have to travel all the way around the Gulf of Boothia. At least after the resupply I now had all the food supplies I would need.
But over the satellite telephone Cathy told me that, ahead of me, the ice had broken away from the mainland, creating an impassable liquid barrier. So I was now trapped. The tides and currents had rendered the rocky shoreline inaccessible to me, and the pressure of the ice had lifted huge blocks of ice, giant dominoes that piled up into stacks towering as high as fifty feet in the air all around me.
There was nothing to be done. While I waited for conditions to become more favorable, I pitched my tent on the Gulf of Boothia, on the continental side of the Fury and Hecla Strait. From my campsite I enjoyed an incomparable view of the Melville Peninsula.
I had just lit my camp stove when it suddenly ran out of fuel—something that happens on average every two or three days. I left the tent to get a full bottle from my sled. I stepped back into the tent with the new bottle and separated the camp stove from the empty fuel bottle. Then I opened the new bottle before inserting it into the stove to replace the old one.
This routine procedure would not even be worth mentioning if I hadn’t overlooked two details.
First, a tiny pilot light had remained lit on the camp stove, even though it was supposed to go out, in theory, as soon as the bottle of fuel was removed.
Second, my benzene bottles had been filled at a temperature of about fifty degrees below zero. However, for the past few days now, the thermometer had risen to a balmy temperature of ten degrees below zero, due to a completely unseasonable and inexplicable heat wave.
As a result of that forty degree rise in temperature, the gas inside the fuel bottle had doubled in volume. And despite the pressure valve, my fuel bottles had all become pressure cookers and were on the verge of bursting.
The instant I opened the new bottle, its contents exploded like a bottle of champagne shaken up by a winning team in the locker room.
The benzene expanded until it came into contact with the pilot light, and then … KABOOM! It caught fire instantly!
My face was covered with burning fuel. By smacking myself violently, I managed to put out the fire that had consumed my beard and my eyebrows, but my forehead was all one scorched blister, and the tip of my nose was an open wound.
But I had more serious worries. My survival instincts had led me to drop the bottle, and the quart of gas had spread everywhere. In a moment’s flash I imagined my parka, my trousers, my boots, my satellite telephone, my GPS, my gun, my distress beacon, my mattress, and my sleeping bag—all burned to a crisp! All burned at the same time! I was surrounded by flames, and a wall of fire was crackling between me and the opening of the tent, preventing me from escaping. I thought of trying to get out the back of the tent by ripping open the nylon, but it was too strong to fight my way through it. I wanted to try to cut it, but in my panic, I could no longer find my knife.
The tent was fire resistant, so it was the only thing that didn’t burn. Instead, it melted. Incandescent drops of liquid nylon rained down on me, setting my thermal underwear on fire, as well.
Suddenly, in place of the vestibule, which had melted from the blazing heat, there was nothing but a gaping hole. Instinctively, I plunged through the flames and leaped outside where I rolled in the snow to soothe the burns on my face and to put out the flames on my seared clothing. It looked like I would get away with minor injuries, but I had just narrowly escaped being roasted like a chicken.
At that instant I realized that unless I managed to save at least one GPS and my satellite phone, it would be impossible to contact Cathy to ask her to send new gear and give her my coordinates so that she could send help. I knew that the closest village, Igloolik, was at least ten days away on foot.
Without the slightest hesitation, I plunged back into my tent and plucked out of the flames a bag that held one of the GPSs, a battery, my satellite phone, and a gun. On my way through, I managed to snatch up a few other items, but I couldn’t save my parka, my pants, or my mittens.
A few minutes later, standing in front of my campsite, now reduced to ashes, I took stock of the situation. It wasn’t a very reassuring inventory. I stood on the ice field dressed in thermal underwear and socks; I had a spare pair of gloves and another cap in my sled; my boots were still usable. However, I no longer had a tent, no more sleeping bag, no more warm clothing, and no more heating stove because part of the stove had actually melted in the fire. Moreover, the rise in temperature that had been the cause of my catastrophe was not likely to last—these Arctic “heat waves” are always short-lived. It had been pretty mild that day, but the weather forecast for that night was calling for a blizzard and a return to bad weather and more seasonable temperatures.
While I waited, I needed to find a way to stay alive.
To ward off the cold, I started to build the only conceivable type of shelter given the location and the circumstances: an igloo.
In contrast with what is commonly believed, igloos aren’t built with slabs of ice but rather with bricks of compacted snow. But compacted snow, unfortunately, was still hard to find so early winter. Still, saw in hand (I had one in the sled), I went hunting for any small pile of snow on this piece of slowly drifting pack ice. Because of my lack of experience in building igloos, I took quite a while. And as I was feverishly working to build a shelter, the blizzard started blowing and the thermometer dropped back down to twenty-two degrees below zero. After many difficult and frigid hours, I was able to build my shelter.
Once I was in my igloo, I called Cathy to explain the situation—taking full responsibility for this incident. As a professional, I was expected to make sure that this sort of catastrophe didn’t happen. I should have checked to see whether a pilot light was still burning on my stove, and since I knew perfectly well what effect a rise in temperature would have on the benzene, I should have checked the pressure in the fuel bottles. In short, I was guilty of a lack of vigilance.
I gave Cathy a long list of everything I had lost—luckily, back home I had replacements for everything—and asked her to bring it all to me at Igloolik.
In my sled, I found a packet of small round candles, known as nine-hour candles. I lit one, and fifteen minutes later it was as if central heating had been installed. I was still in my underclothes, but I was no longer cold. While the blizzard was howling outside, I used my candle to melt a little snow for drinking water.
I called Claude Lavallée and asked him to contact Johannessy in Igloolik. Lily’s father, who had already done me one favor by bringing my gear and supplies out to me once, would certainly do me the favor of coming back out again. To keep anyone from panicking, I told him that I could last for four or five days, or even reach a nearby cabin. “Okay,” Claude replied, “call me back in an hour.”
One hour later he had talked to Johannessy. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police—had asked Johanessy to find a teammate to come out and rescue me. A call from the authorities confirmed it, “Stay where you are; we will send a team to transport you to Igloolik, where you can wait for your supplies before starting off again.”
In the Arctic even tiny incidents tend to take on the dimensions of affairs of state. I sensed a feverish quality bordering on panic in what had already become a large-scale rescue operation, a rescue that would result in my losing forty to sixty miles, since Igloolik was at the far end of the Fury and Hecla Strait! And to think how simple it would have been just to bring me my gear and provisions so that I could set off again from there.
I told the policeman that I would stay put for one day. Then I would start hiking toward Nuvaluk to move toward my rescuers and help them to find me, because in the pack ice where I was situated it would be hard for them to spot me. “That’s out of the question!” shouted the policeman in a rage. “We organized
this rescue operation, so we’re telling you what to do! Don’t move an inch!”
There was nothing left for me to do but make myself as comfortable as possible and wait. I had my nine-hour candles, enough food and fuel to withstand a siege, and all the time I needed to sit and relish the joys of meditation. While digging through the embers of my campsite, I found the fuel bottle that was responsible for the fire. I sawed it in half, I perforated it like a colander, and I stuffed the remains of a charred polo shirt, which I had soaked in benzene, into it. I lit it, and it provided a perfect burner to heat my coffee. It actually got too hot inside the igloo, and the snow started to melt. A little chimney, practically at the top of the igloo, let out the excess heat.
Back in Igloolik, Johannessy issued a call for help on his citizens band radio. He was looking for a volunteer, available and ready to start out immediately, for a nonemergency rescue mission on the Gulf of Boothia. Simon, an Inuit who lived in the village, answered the call. He added that he had a family and dogs to feed, and that if there was no emergency, then he would take advantage of the trip to hunt seal. The two men purchased a number of heat-and-eat meals at the local co-op, hooked sleds up behind their snowmobiles, and loaded the sleds with extra fuel. The rescue office of the RCMP underwrote all the expenses.
Twenty-four hours after their first radio call, Simon and Johannessy set off into the night. Since they knew my GPS position and my condition, they took the time to stop occasionally along the way, searching for seal holes.
As for me, I sat listening for the slightest engine noise. The RCMP had told me that the rescue party would arrive the morning after setting out, but that evening arrived and no one had shown up.
The next morning I called the police in Igloolik again to tell them that I intended to set out for Nuvaluk. Once again, the policeman flew into a rage and ordered me to stay where I was. “The rescue party left twenty-four hours ago,” he said. “If you leave your present location, they won’t be able to find you!”
That wasn’t completely true. They had a radio, too—even though they would have to stop and set up an antenna in order to use it. I could have easily radioed my new position to them. Once again, however, I obeyed his order.
Another twenty-four hours went by before snowmobile headlights began to dance in the distance. From the doorway of my igloo, I watched the firefly lights as they flickered on and off among the massive mountains of ice. In order to help them find me in the vast mosaic of pack ice, I shot off one of the flares from my “bearwatch” system. Simon saw it. Johannessy didn’t, and he continued to wander around, lost, in huge, looping circles.
Simon—I only knew his name from having heard it over the radio—was the first to pull up and stop at the igloo. He was a fur-wrapped Inuit, dressed in caribou skin, with caribou gloves; on his feet were mukluks, the traditional Inuit boots. He was a true man of the Far North, like so many whom I had already met, but there was something distinctive and familiar about him.
When he took off his hood and showed me his face, his eyes buried in wrinkles, I was shocked.
“But … I know you!” he said.
“And I know you,” I replied in astonishment.
Simon was the very same Inuit who, a month before near Bell Bay, had guided me and given me a fish. We hadn’t spent more than a few minutes together, but we greeted each other like old friends.
His smile could have melted the polar ice cap. With enthusiastic sign language, he examined my igloo and asked me how long it had taken to build it. I answered proudly, “About six hours!”
“Much too long,” he answered. “Next time die, if not faster.”
Johannessy finally joined us. He and Simon had brought me a new sleeping bag and a heavy caribou-skin parka, which I quickly put on.
By the time I had piled what remained of my supplies on Johannessy’s sled, attached my sled to Simon’s harness, and climbed up on the seat behind him, we were starting off again for Igloolik.
Stung by the icy wind and battered by clumps of snow in my face, I began to literally freeze as we motored over the ice. Even the two Inuit, seated as they were on the hot engines of their snowmobiles, were forced to stop every two hours and dance around their vehicles to keep from freezing.
They were in no more of a hurry on the way back than they had been on the way out. What with the stops for seal hunting, the stops to fix Johannessy’s old, broken-down sled, and the breaks to stock up on iceberg ice, which was the best tea-brewing water available, it was clear that we were going to have to camp a second night before we got back to Igloolik. We spent the night three hours away from the village, in a fishing shack that was abandoned for winter. Simon, who had never stopped observing me since chance had brought us back together, peppered me with questions. His black eyes shone with excitement as I described the various experiences of my long march thus far.
In turn, I learned a bit about Simon. He was about fifty years old and had always lived in the ways of his ancestors, making his living—and filling his belly—by fishing and hunting alone. He was also an artist and craftsman. He sculpted animals in motion out of marble, ivory, and granite. He had even participated in international exhibitions of Inuit art, traveling to Austria, Russia, and elsewhere.
In the time it took to get back to Igloolik, a tiny village of two hundred, Simon and I had become fast friends. When he asked me where I planned to stay and I replied that I had no idea—especially because my papers and my money had all burned up in the fire—I already knew what he was going to say to me.
* * *
After I moved my things into Simon’s house, he introduced me to his girlfriend and the child that they had adopted. Life here was pretty basic, but the house was heated and we had plenty of caribou and Arctic char to eat thanks to the hunting and fishing prowess of the master of the house.
A few days after my arrival, someone announced on the radio that he had killed three seals and two caribou, which was too much meat for his family alone. Instead of building up a reserve of food, this Inuit did what anyone in the community did whenever he or she had extra food—he invited anyone who wanted to share his bounty to drop by. Simon and his girlfriend brought an Arctic char to the feast. Sitting on the ground in a strange kitchen, in the midst of a group of Inuit whose sparse conversation amounted basically to the sound of chewing, I gobbled down the meat and raw fish and thought once again about how much civilizations can differ.
* * *
My stay in Igloolik coincided with the big, traditional Inuit festival held every year in honor of the sun, one week before the first sunrise of the year. To call it a sunrise may be overstating things. When the sun makes its first appearance after three months of darkness, it does nothing more than peep over the horizon for about five seconds. But that mere cameo is quite sufficient to trigger great public celebrations.
During the course of the elaborate ceremony that was held, the Inuit solemnly extinguished the sun of the previous year, symbolized by a seal-oil lamp with a cotton wick that had once been used to heat igloos. Then they lit a flame that represented the sun of the coming season, the sun of renewal.
This second sun also symbolized warmth and life flowing back into the bodies and souls worn down and left depressed by the interminable Arctic night. Those who endured the long winter often became depressed and, under the influence of alcohol, were sometimes rendered violent. Many suicides and killings resulted from cabin fever in the Far North, a violent neurosis triggered by the prolonged lack of sunlight and exacerbated by confinement.
I expelled these morbid thoughts from my mind when watching the spectacle of the traditional dances. The dance I witnessed that night had none of the flavor of the shows staged for tourists. This dance seemed to emerge straight from the mists of time; it was the absolute truth of a people whose spirit continues to burn like the age-old lamps burning in the igloos. The same igloos that the older residents still built and preserved in order to maintain ties to their roots, even if they, l
ike everyone else, lived in prefab houses.
* * *
Cathy was supposed to have reached me by now with the supplies, but bad weather had grounded her plane for three days at Iqaluit, on Baffin Island, the administrative capital of Nunavut.
Once again I was stuck, unable to move. Simon, disturbed at the idea of seeing me waste precious time, decided to make the best of things by helping me complete my Arctic education.
“You learn to know bear!” he decreed when we found some tracks with claw marks near the village. He knew bears the way you might know members of your own family. He had killed an enormous bear once, and he often worked as a guide for hunters. In theory, polar bear hunting was illegal, but when the big beasts became too numerous in certain areas, then the local villages were each assigned a specific quota. Once these numbers were assigned, the Inuit had a choice. They could either hunt the bears themselves for their meat, lard, skins, and fur, or else they could sell their quotas—known as “tags”—to lucky hunters who have always dreamed of facing off with the biggest predator on the ice field. These tags often fetched prices equivalent to more than fifty thousand U.S. dollars.
“Look,” Simon commanded, “paw prints far apart, snow comes inside. Bear walk this way.” He started walking forward, swinging his posterior heavily from side to side, Baloo-style.
“Bear well fed,” he said, “not hungry. Fat, big bottom. Not dangerous.” He made a face that looked like the expression of the supposed bear with a contented snout and half-closed eyes, suggesting he was sleepy and ready for a nap. Then Simon changed his gait and his appearance, walking now with his legs rubbing each other and his bottom tucked in tight. Under his tanned leathery face, I could sense the quivering muzzle and the beast’s fangs at the ready.
“Paw prints close together, not deep,” he said, “no snow inside. Bear skinny, hungry. Dangerous.” Now he stood on the tips of his toes, hands folded one over the other, depicting the bear’s forepaws, muzzle pointing and eyes narrowed. I felt as if I could see the bear right in front of me.