by Mike Horn
“When bear like that, ears up,” he said, “he looking, sniffing, just curious. Not attack. But when he like this”—he stretched his neck toward me and stared at me, glaring ferociously—“dangerous!” His whole body shook. He snarled and ground his teeth. He cupped his hands to describe the flattened ears of the beast.
“He attack,” he said. “You die!” A shiver went through my body at the realistic performance. Simon leaned over the tracks and scraped carefully at the bottom of the prints.
“Bear pass by two days ago,” he said.
“How can you tell?” He showed me the interior of the paw prints, where the ice was covered with a fine layer of wind-blown snow. The wind had been blowing for exactly two days.
A little farther along we found other tracks, free of snow, showing that a bear had passed by barely an hour before.
If the bear prints follow a zigzag pattern, Simon also taught me, then they belong to a bear looking for food. When a bear is out hunting for food, he often returns along his tracks. Better not camp along his path! It’s also best to avoid the shores of any large body of water, which is where bears go to hunt seals.
On the other hand, straight tracks means that the bear, with its exceptional sense of smell, has scented a prey—or perhaps a female bear in heat—as much as forty miles away, sometimes farther! The bear will plunge straight ahead and completely ignore the presence of humans along the way. You can sleep where you find this sort of track because there is little chance that the bear will retrace its steps.
“Female … very bad!” Simon declared. The female bears, he explained to me, give birth only once every three years. Following the birth, they become fat and dig themselves a burrow in the snow, where they take refuge, doing nothing other than suckling their infant. When they finally emerge from their burrows, skinny and ravenous, then they have to battle their male mate who will do his best to kill the cubs so that he can mate with the mother again.
It’s fair to say that with all of this conflict and hunger, the females are in a bit of a mood, and it’s better not to meet up with one.
All the same, Simon added, such encounters are sometimes unavoidable. When confronted with one, he recommended not to shout, not to slow down, to keep on going, swinging your arms as wide as possible and trying to look as big as you can. If the female bear shifts direction, you should do the same, trying your utmost to wind up face-to-face with her. She will sniff at you, and once she figures out that you aren’t edible, she’ll let you go by. At least in most cases. If hunger wins out, then she’ll kill you for want of prey better suited to her dietary requirements. After all, polar bears are at the top of the food chain, and we humans are much lower down.
In order to give me every tool for avoiding a face-to-face encounter with a bear, Simon also taught me to recognize the tracks of the Arctic fox. When you see those tracks, it means that a bear isn’t far away because the foxes can scent the presence of seals on the edges of waterholes, and they feed on the remains abandoned by the polar bears. Ravens find this same banquet equally attractive, so if you see birds of prey circling in the sky, you can be certain that there is a bear nearby.
Last, Simon taught me to examine the stool left by bears. If the excrement contains hair (usually seal hair), it means that the animal has eaten and is therefore not a threat.
As for wolves, Simon went on, they fall into two categories. Solitary wolves with thick pelts have their own territory and their own family. They are only rarely hostile to humans. The wolf pack, on the other hand, can kill and devour anything it encounters and is much to be feared. Even when they are not in the pack, the individual wolves that make up a pack can be identified by their fur, which is usually rubbed away along their flanks because the pack tends to move in a close cluster, and the wolves rub against one other in order to stay warm. The wolf packs have their advance scouts that run ahead to sniff out potential prey. They come ahead of the others, and then the pack will circle around you for a while before rushing in for the kill. There is only one thing to do in this case, Simon warned me. Shoot.
He saved the best for last. The wolverine is the most ferocious animal in the Arctic. This squat, brown-and-yellow carnivore, almost never more than three feet in length, feeds on the carcasses left behind by wolves and bears but will also eat anything it can kill. It is as strong as it is aggressive, and it is considered the pit bull of the ice because it is impossible to get a wolverine to release its grip. It is known to attack elk and reindeer, but it also said that some wolverines have even killed bears.
* * *
The second phase of my apprenticeship with Simon was learning to build igloos.
“To survive in worst cold,” Simon explained, “absolutely must finish igloo in twenty minutes. You say nothing, watch.” He walked over to a long pile of snow pushed up by the wind behind a block of ice. That is “igloo snow,” he said. He checked its consistency by probing it with his harpoon. The snow should be uniform, all in one block, and especially not in layers, otherwise the bricks will break when you cut them. When he finally found snow with the ideal level of compactness, he signaled me to draw closer, and he put my hand on his harpoon so that I could feel for myself the delicate balance between softness and strength.
“You see,” he said, “this snow here what you need find.” I could see perfectly. I was as excited as a little boy at this new discovery, which I already knew was going to transform my life—or at least my life in the next few months. I imagined myself building igloos as fast as I could pitch my tent.
With a shovel, Simon dug the beginning of a trench in the snowy ridge. Then, crouching on his knees in the trench, he began to cut out building blocks with a long wood saw, giving them beveled edges for a better grip. He continued cutting as he moved forward. The trench grew longer and wider and curved as the snow inside it was transformed into building blocks about two feet in length but never more than four inches thick. About eight of these blocks together created a platform on the floor where a person could lie down. Simon lined up the large blocks of snow along the edges of the trench as if he were laying bricks. Since the trench was already about three feet deep and the construction rose all around it, it was increasingly protected from the elements. Simon kept making blocks out of compacted snow, taking them from beneath the first line of blocks (that is to say, from the interior of the igloo-to-be). He gave them a trapezoidal shape, so that, once they were laid in place, they would lean toward the center and be pressed together, keeping the structure from collapsing in the middle. He arranged the blocks in a spiral, calculating that the quantity of compacted snow remaining on the interior of the igloo would be enough to complete its construction, and he ran out of snow just as he was laying the last brick.
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
AT 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 wanderi
ng 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.
