Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
experienced. But the wildlife, or more particularly the insect life, would have dampened the enthusi-
asm of most. True, there were three magnificent weeks in June when the ice was still breaking up on
the lakes and the place was heaven on Earth. These were warm, sunny, peaceful days when anything
seemed possible. But then the flies came.
The mosquitoes appear first. They are big and noisy and desperately annoying. They insert hypo-
dermic needles into your skin, and the moment they bite, you can feel it. A few weeks after the mos-
quitoes come the black flies, smaller but more devious. They are master miners. They carve out a cav-
ity in your skin, injecting you first with anaesthetic to prevent you noticing. The anaesthetic they use
is a nerve poison. If you get a few hundred black fly bites quickly enough—within an hour, say—you
begin to feel the effects of the toxin. You feel nauseous, can't concentrate, and lose your bearings. You
struggle to hold a line of argument in your head.
Spend long enough in the Arctic, and you will develop your own definition of a bad fly day. Ac-
cording to Paul, a bad fly day is when you can hit your arm once and find a hundred corpses in your
hand. On bad fly days, mosquitoes whirr and whine around your head in a dense claustrophobic cloud.
Black flies crawl everywhere on your clothes and skin, and into every crevice. To avoid inhaling them,
you have to breathe through your teeth. If you run your hand through your hair, it comes back greasy
and bloody. At the end of a bad fly day, you empty your pockets of globs of dead and half-dead flies.
They have crept up your wrist, down your neck, under your belt, down the top of your boots. On bad
fly days you soak yourself with industrial-strength Repex, the repellent of choice. Repex doesn't keep
the flies away, but it stops them from biting. It lasts two to three hours. On bad fly days you don't have
to be reminded to reapply.
In the Canadian Arctic, between the fine few weeks of June and the return of winter in late August,
every day that is not freezing cold or blasted with wind is a bad fly day.
And then there are the bears. The first time Paul encountered a grizzly, he had been out all day
on a long traverse, walking twenty or thirty miles. He was heading back to camp around 11:00 p.m.,
walking north fast, straight into the setting sun, his baseball cap pulled down low to block the dazzling
sunlight. Suddenly the bear appeared under the brim of the cap, coming for him at full speed. The an-
imal was backlit, its body in shadow but surrounded by sunlight. The ends of its hair shone silver, and
foam and saliva were spewing from its mouth in glistening arcs. All Paul could see was a bear-shaped
halo of light and foam.
Man and bear stopped in their tracks and stared. Paul remembers thinking,
Stand still. Don't move.
If it charges, fall on your right side and protect your right hand
. Paul's right hand was precious, his
drafting hand, the one he used to draw his meticulous geological maps. But the bear didn't charge.
Paul made the slightest movement to the right, and the bear turned and raced off to the left, to where
her two cubs were waiting on a small knoll. She cuffed her cubs and hustled them away. A few seconds
later the foaming, glistening vision had vanished.
After that, Paul kept a pair of running shoes beside his sleeping bag while he was in his tent at
night. If something pawed at the side of the tent, Paul would throw a shoe to shock it, and then rush
out to scare it away. There wasn't much danger if you were awake and could frighten the bear off. The
real trouble was if a bear came to the camp while you were away. A black bear or a grizzly could tear
a camp apart trying to find food, and that would be disastrous. If your tent was destroyed, you were
at the mercy of the flies. All day long you were fighting flies. You had to have a refuge from them at
night, or you'd go mad.
The only way out was to shoot any bears that persisted in returning to the camp. Paul had to shoot
three bears over the years—two black and one grizzly. He hated every time. He was shocked how
