Conquering the Impossible

by Mike Horn

  Here, and in Nome, I had watched three seasons and four months go by—time that I could have used to reach at least the Lena River, which flows into the Laptev Sea, and to cross its immense delta before the spring thaw. But this was no time for regrets. I would be able to make some progress now, and that was what counted!

  The whole town came out to watch me leave. In the crowd, I recognized “Dima,” the customs officer; Igor, the phys-ed teacher; Sergei, the dentist; and all the other friends I had made during my stay. Each of them had tried to persuade me to wait for spring before venturing out into the wilderness. I thought back to Arctic Bay and how my friends there urged me to take the same precautions.

  I set off onto the harbor around which the city was constructed—it was my triumphal boulevard. The residents were clustered along the shoreline, and they cheered and waved encouragingly. They had all known that I would leave one day, but they had stopped believing it would actually happen. For that matter, they still refused to believe that I could cross the entire country on foot, since it was likely a journey that they would never undertake.

  7

  To Die Just a Little

  BECAUSE THE RIVERS WERE ALL FROZEN OVER, I had been forced to abandon my first plan, which was to kayak out of Provideniya. It was now also out of the question to follow the coastline on foot because the violent currents kept ice from forming in the Bering Sea.

  The end result was that I would head toward the nearby mountains now, skirt them along their eastern flank, follow the coastline north for the few miles where it was frozen, and finally cut directly across the mountain range to hook up with the river that flowed straight to Lake Ioni.

  My goal was to complete my tour of the Arctic Circle by the following Christmas. I was still sticking to my rule of never descending below the Arctic Circle, unless I was forced to by an impassable obstacle or bureaucratic problems.

  * * *

  At last I was entering the mountains of Chukotka. It was permanently dark this time of year. A strong snowstorm was blowing snowflakes from one mountain valley to another, and as I approached each pass I could feel a blast of polar air chilling my face. The rocky outcrops that stuck up through the blowing snowdrifts suggested this landscape’s harsh brutality, while the frozen lakes lay dormant in thickening blankets of white. The countless valleys were punctuated by rocky massifs, sketching out an intricate snow-sunken labyrinth, which was constantly challenging to navigate.

  Once again I felt as if I had traveled backward in time, and not fifty years, as at Provideniya, but at least a century this time. The landscape itself had a more primitive character than all the places I had already traveled.

  * * *

  At the end of the first day, I met up with my two companions nineteen miles north-northeast of Provideniya, in the little village of Novyi Chaplino, our first planned rendezvous point.

  However, on the second day, on the pretext of going to get fuel at the village of Yandrakinnot, Ivan disappeared with his snowmobile. Something told me that we wouldn’t be seeing him again.

  On the fifth day Nikolai headed down the wrong valley and got lost in the mountains, so I had to go looking for him. My “guide” was apparently so unfamiliar with the terrain that he was endangering his life and my own. He had been born 180 miles north of Provideniya in a little coastal village named Nachken, but the Chukchis, like the Inuit, never traveled in the winter darkness and knew very little about how to read maps.

  After twelve hours of searching and an entire day wasted on his account, I finally found Nikolai, trying in vain to climb a slope that was too steep for his snowmobile with the added weight of pulling his sled. Once he unhooked the sled, the snowmobile climbed the slope quickly and easily, and the sled plummeted down the slope. However, the snowmobile became lodged more deeply in the snow and still did not manage to reach the top of the ridge.

  I spent four hours—at a temperature of twenty degrees below zero and in total darkness—climbing the hill myself, in a state of rage fueled by the certain knowledge every step was wasted effort. I seriously considered then and there abandoning my so-called guide and continuing alone.

  When I finally got up to his elevation, Nikolai was sitting in the snow next to his vehicle, lost, white-faced, and clearly upset. He was a man in distress. My lips were frozen, but my anger had dissolved. Although minutes before I had wanted to kill him, I helped him get his snowmobile free and back on the road.

  * * *

  Not only did Nikolai not know how to read a map, but he had no idea of how to use a GPS. When I offered him one of mine, he thanked me warmly, trying desperately to conceal the fact that he didn’t know how to use it. I spent two days filling this gap in his knowledge, simplifying it through a method that consisted of programming his GPS for a specific point on the map and then entering “go to” so that the device would lead him to the selected location where I would then catch up with him.

  Nikolai was hauling substantial reserves of fuel on his sled, and in order to top them off he had to make detours to the various supply points along the way. These resupply missions became twice as frequent after Ivan disappeared and therefore caused him to burn twice as much fuel in the process. Each time he left, I would mark his route on the map and set his GPS so that he only needed to drive the course marked out for him until the GPS displayed: “You’ve reached your destination.”

  His next refueling was twenty miles away, and on the return he needed only to follow his own tracks back to the point of departure where he had left three empty gas cans to mark the spot.

  I reached the appointed location before him, so I pitched my tent and waited. A few hours later, a terrible blizzard darkened the night with a wall of driving snow. Nikolai should have arrived a long time ago, and I began to worry about him.

  I finally decided I would go look for him, but just as I emerged from the tent, I saw the headlights of his snowmobile. He rushed into my tent the way a drowning man swims toward a life raft.

  He had just started back, he told me, when the blizzard started to blow. Since he could no longer see his tracks, which were buried by the snow, he had gotten lost. Since he didn’t really trust the GPS, he had decided to find his way in “the Chukchi way.” But in the pitch black of night with a blizzard whipping all around him, finding three gas cans sitting out in the middle of nowhere was a futile exercise. He realized that he was likely to die without gear for spending the night in the elements, so he finally decided to turn on his GPS. He started off slowly, following the device’s directions. Just ten yards from my tent, which he hadn’t even seen, the GPS told him that he had arrived. The GPS device had just won a new convert.

  From that point on, Nikolai stopped arguing with me about the routes I proposed.

  * * *

  One morning, after spending a night in a hut so old that it was nearly falling apart but still sheltering me against the wind, I turned into a valley where I noticed fresh dog tracks despite a rough snowstorm blowing around me. Their owners couldn’t be too far away. After traveling another one-and-a-quarter miles, I distinguished a hulking dark-brown shape that appeared and disappeared in the snowy fog. As I drew closer, I marveled at the sight before me—it was a yaranga, the traditional dwelling of the Chukchi Inuit.

  These enormous reindeer-hide tents, which vaguely resemble the teepees of Native American Indians, contain a smaller squarish tent inside, which is also made of reindeer hide. This structure is based on the age-old principle of layers of insulation. If it is forty below zero outside, then it will be five degrees below zero inside the first tent, where they do their cooking, and much warmer inside the second tent, where three seal-oil lamps provide both heat and light.

  I had come suddenly into contact with a way of life that hadn’t changed in the past century. Whether it was the dwellings or the clothing, everything here seemed to be unchanged. The Chukchi Inuit still dress in sealskins and caribou hides, they still make their sleds by hand, and they eat frozen reindeer an
d seal meat. Dogs are still their only means of transportation, and their only means of sustenance continues to be reindeer herding.

  These are the original Chukchi people who have their roots in Mongolia. While the Inuit live on the coast and draw their living from the sea, the Chukchis make their living inland.

  For the moment, however, I couldn’t see anyone. There were no dogs outside, only a few wooden sleds. I climbed inside the tent on all fours. I still saw no one. I took off my skis without drawing any attention. True, the howling blizzard must have drowned out all sounds. Finally, I announced my presence with a yell. A moment later, a piece of the wall of the interior tent flew up—there was no door, to preserve the heat inside—and a head poked out, flush with the ground, as if poking out from under a sheet. I stood upright, and the perspective must have made me look like a giant. Two almond-shaped eyes fixed in the tanned and tousled face stared at me in a blend of amazement and panic, and the head disappeared. I waited. A few seconds later, the wall of the tent was lifted again, more cautiously this time, and this time two heads poked out.

  The two Chukchis spoke to me in Russian, the official language of the former Soviet Union, established by law throughout all of its territory and for all its peoples on threat of imprisonment. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t understand a word of Russian.

  Suddenly embarrassed at the idea that I might have disturbed or frightened these people, I turned and fled. In this blizzard I wouldn’t travel more than a mile or so before having to stop and set up camp. I had barely left the yaranga, though, when its occupants—who had quickly thrown on warm clothing—caught up with me and, pulling me by the sleeve, led me back inside. In the antechamber, they helped me to take off my parka and my snow-covered trousers and invited me, dressed in my polar undergarments, into the square tent that is the heart of their household.

  I sat down with two men and a woman, the wife of one of them, on a small reindeer-hide carpet where the seal-oil lamps stood burning. The three Chukchis continued their conversation while gobbling down a meal of walrus meat—rotten walrus meat.

  According to a traditional recipe, they bury the walrus meat during the three months of summer, and the heat of the sun begins the process of decomposition. The smell carries for miles. Then they dig it up and leave it outdoors when the weather turns colder and allow it to freeze. They slice it up and eat it on the dark winter days. It is an especially prized Chukchi delicacy.

  Since I was a guest, they offered me the best part. I brought the chunk of flesh to my mouth, doing my best not to smell it and repressing my impulse to vomit. I chewed on it, trying hard not to taste it. Since I made signs that it was yummy, my hosts pushed the board on which the entire slice of meat lay on display toward me. I took another bite, and I realized that this rotten meat tasted of cheese. “Stinky cheese,” admittedly, but still, cheese. Not so bad, after all. Hunger had its way, and I did justice to the food that my hosts were offering, to their intense joy.

  Nikolai, who had followed my tracks, caught up with me in the yaranga and served as my interpreter. Astonished to learn where I had come from, and even more amazed to hear where I was going, the Chukchis offered to let me use their sleds as a means of transportation. When I explained why I couldn’t accept their offer, they had a hard time understanding.

  They were delighted to meet their first Westerner. I was even more delighted than they, after my lengthy battle with the Russian bureaucracy, to be in contact with such kind and genuine human beings. My trek across Russia was starting out nicely.

  That night, on a reindeer-hide floor that was too small for me to stretch out my legs, Nikolai and I shared the bed of an old Chukchi man, his wife, and another member of his family. Everyone pulled on the single blanket—made of reindeer skin—to try to cover themselves.

  For the road, my hosts offered me a large chunk of rotten walrus meat, an enormous portion of whale meat, and some Eskimo fritters made with flour and seal oil. I wanted to offer them some of my rations in return, but they refused to accept them, insisting that I would need them for such a long journey.

  However, in this territory where polar bears were constantly passing through on their way to the fish-rich waters of the Bering Strait, carrying such aromatic foodstuffs might well be dangerous. I wrapped part of it in hermetically sealed plastic bags and gave the rest to Nikolai, so that he could offer it as a gift to the inhabitants of the next village.

  * * *

  My guide Nikolai told me he thought that our daily distances were too long. Even though he was on a snowmobile and well outfitted by me, he was still terrified at the idea of being forced to spend a night out in the open. It was true that he still had trouble pitching his tent and that his heating stove didn’t work. I began to get the impression that he saw our expedition as a sort of excursion into the countryside.

  He became increasingly dependent on me. On three occasions he spent the night in my tent, which was designed to hold only one person, obliging me to feed him and warm him using up my own reserves of energy and benzene. On this treacherous and almost unexplored terrain, in the nearly permanent darkness and extreme cold of the Arctic night, I found myself supporting the extra burden of a “guide” whom I had to look after and take care of.

  A Chukchi like Nikolai should have been able to survive the conditions here better than me, theoretically, since this was his own stomping ground. But we had traveled relatively far from his hometown, and the Chukchis aren’t accustomed to moving around much, especially in winter. He had a hard time believing that I could march twenty-five miles a day under these conditions.

  We agreed that he would stay in one village until I reached the next one on our route. He would then join me on his snowmobile, and the next day he would drive ahead of me to the village after that one. In this manner he wouldn’t have to camp or cook for himself. If after three days I didn’t see him arrive, I would know that something had happened to him and I would go looking for him. If he ran into trouble when he was ahead of me, I would almost certainly find him along the way.

  * * *

  We had already crossed over the first range of mountains when Nikolai informed me that he had barely enough fuel to make it to Yandrakinnot, the next village, and that he was unwilling to run the risk of traveling there alone. He used my satellite phone to call members of his family who lived in the village in question and asked them to bring him some fuel.

  We waited for them together, but no one showed up. It is true that this was the season of end-of-year feasts and celebrations, and so the inhabitants of the region rarely sobered up this time of year. The mission must have been forgotten amid the empty bottles of alcohol. Nikolai then called on one of his friends, a Chukchi hunter like him, but this fellow demanded one hundred dollars a day to transport the fuel. Finally, as a last resort, he called some cousins of his from another village, Lorena, who promised to bring him some fuel. I had the feeling that we would be there for a while.

  We waited in a hut in the middle of the tundra on the shores of Lake Ioni. I began to boil over with impatience. It had been twelve days since we left Provideniya; we had covered 250 miles on foot but only 125 miles as the crow flies!

  I suggested to my guide that if he liked, he was free to forget about me and just go back to his comfortable home, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  The days passed. We finished off the provisions given us by the Chukchis of the yaranga—whale maktak, reindeer, rotten walrus—which allowed me to economize on my travel rations. I did a little repair and maintenance work on my equipment, and I helped Nikolai improve his map-reading and his solar-navigational skills, even though the sun wouldn’t be of much use this time of year.

  Nikolai spent hours playing with his GPS, which is the best way to learn how to use it. Since his people lived in reindeer-skin tents, he knew nothing about the art of building igloos, and it was I—now a master igloo-builder!—who taught him.

  He deepened my knowledge as well. I discovered, for instan
ce, that it is common practice for a Chukchi, feeling that his end is drawing near, or simply tiring of life, to ask a younger Chukchi to help him to die. He will choose a place that is dear to his heart—the mountain pass where he killed his first bear or the valley where he went on his happiest hunting party—and have his son or grandson take him there. The young Chukchi is then obligated to kill his father or grandfather. The older Chukchi returns to the wilderness, which has fed him and kept him alive for so many years. That is why, in Chukotka, you will frequently find graves in the most out-of-the-way and unexpected places.

  It was in this little hut in the middle of nowhere that we spent a New Year’s Eve enlivened by the bottle of vodka that Nikolai had the inspiration to bring. At midnight we made our wishes. I wished that I would return home before the end of the year that was just beginning.

  I still harbored some resentment against my guide for all the days he had made me waste, but I avoided letting him know to keep the atmosphere from becoming tense. He needed me and I couldn’t abandon him. I could see that if this turned into a regular thing, I would have to continue on my way and allow him to catch up with me when he could. I couldn’t endanger the expedition just for him.

  When his cousins from Lorena finally brought him his fuel, Nikolai and I had been sitting there waiting for seven days! We set out again the next day, me on foot, and Nikolai at the head of a squadron of snowmobiles, since the two fuel couriers were following the same route. They were going to help him transport his fuel reserves to Nutepelmen, where he would wait for me. I would arrive in five days.

  Nutepelmen was the first place where I was required to report my presence to the authorities. In this case, the authorities meant the mayor of the town, who would radio the exact date I came through his town to the FSB.