Prisoners of the North by Pierre Berton Page B

Alaska to Prince Patrick Island and revealed the presence of mountains and valleys beneath the frozen surface of the Beaufort Sea.
    In spite of this record, Canada declined to make further use of his abilities after he returned from the Arctic. He was not an easy man to deal with and had a cavalier attitude toward budgetary restrictions. Egotistical, iconoclastic, and dogmatic, he was always convinced that his way was the right way. He was impetuous to the point of rashness and heedless of peril in a perilous environment, gambling his life aboard the drifting ice islands north of the Arctic coast and testing himself against the snow-choked crevasses of the great pack.
    He was built for the challenges that faced him, always in superb physical shape, able to lope hour after hour and day after day behind a dog team without tiring while others became exhausted. It is estimated that he covered twenty thousand miles in this fashion, rarely sitting on a sledge but trotting behind it. He was also a crack shot with a rifle and could bring down a caribou at several hundred yards. And he had one more quality that every Arctic explorer needed: he had incredible luck. He survived and thrived as much by happenstance as by design. The caribou turned up at the last moment; the ice cracked beneath his feet, but he endured. Given up for dead time and time again, he emerged from the unknown glowing with health to the astonishment of his “rescuers.”
    The last of the old-time Arctic explorers, he was prescient enough to foresee the changes that the airplane and submarine would bring to the land of the dogsled and mukluk. Unlike his nineteenth-century British predecessors—Franklin, Parry, Ross, and the others—who insisted on bringing their environment and their way of life with them, Stefansson was not repelled by the idea of “going native.” Indeed, he revelled in it. For most of his dozen years in the Arctic he lived with the Inuit, adopted their diet, spoke their language (including several dialects), and adopted their dress, their customs, and their lifestyle.
    No previous explorer had gone quite so far as Stefansson. To him, the Inuit were not an inferior people, as the elite of the white world—the police, missionaries, and whalers—then believed. In the Arctic he saw them as superior. They were his teachers, and from the moment of his arrival in their land he set out doggedly to learn from them.
    The Inuit trained him in the difficult technique of building a snow house (or iglu)—how to chop out the building blocks of ice, each a different shape from its neighbours, and fit them neatly into the frozen spiral that formed the structure. They taught him to wear loose clothing with few or no buttons that could be donned quickly after sleep to allow the body’s heat to circulate under the fur (as opposed to the tight naval serge of the British). They told him how to keep his face from frostbite, not by rubbing snow on it—a superstition that Stefansson called idiotic—but by always keeping the hands warm and pressing them to the cheeks every few minutes.
    “When a man is properly dressed for winter,” Stefansson learned, “his coat is a loose fitting one with the sleeves cut so that any time he likes he can pull his arm out of the sleeve and carry his hand on his naked breast inside his coat. The neck of the coat is made loose, and whenever any part of his face refuses to wrinkle up he pushes his hand up through the loose-fitting neck of the coat and presses it for a moment on the stiffened portions of the face. As soon as the frozen spot is thawed out he pulls his hand in upon his breast again. In this way he can walk all day facing a stiff steady breeze at −35° or −40° Fahrenheit, which is the worst kind of weather one ever gets in the Arctic, for when the temperature falls below −50° Fahrenheit there is always a dead calm.”
    Stefansson learned from the Inuit to keep his face shaven; if he wore a beard, the