Free Conquering the Impossible by Mike Horn

and taking on the general appearance of jerky. The fingernails fell off, and pus oozed out. I couldn’t tell if things were getting better or worse. But I decided not to give in to adversity, and to do everything I could to get the upper hand, as it were.
    After a month, I went back to Chamonix, where they injected a substance into me, a radioactive compound that had the property of bonding with all the living tissues it encountered, so that X-rays could distinguish clearly between living zones and dead zones. This examination revealed—hear ye, hear ye!—that I had recovered a bit of life in certain tissues. But the rest was dead—definitively, this time.
    Ten days later, the extremities of three of my fingers were amputated, and the lifeless tip of one of my thumbs was shaved off. Later, the amputated fingers were reshaped to look more like fingers. After the operation, the surgeon decided not to close the wound but to allow the skin to grow back as much as possible, which resulted in a further layer of growth.
    When I went back to see him a few weeks later, my amputations were barely visible to the naked eye. The tips of my fingers were flat, with a bevel cut instead of being rounded, and the pads of the extremities had been replaced with a horny layer.
    Admittedly, my fingertips had lost their sensitivity, and I had difficulty picking up a needle or twisting a nut onto a small bolt. But I still had ten fingers, and that was what counted.
    One thing is certain, my surgeon told me: if I had spent just a few more days on the ice field, I would have lost my fingers.
    I asked him when I could go back to the Far North.
    â€œYou are absolutely forbidden to expose your hands to extreme cold for at least two years, Mike,” the doctor answered me.
    Four months later, I set out to travel around the Arctic Circle.

 
    2
    Terra Incognita
    I WAS POSITIVE OF ONE THING. I needed to go back as soon as possible. Starting from the moment I got back home, during the treatment, during the operation, and during my convalescence, I never stopped thinking about what it was like up there. It was as if I was sitting on the bench, waiting to be put back into the game.
    Regardless of what my specialist said about it, I couldn’t possibly wait for two years. It would feel as if I had been buried alive. For that matter, I am a professional, and a professional could not afford to be off the circuit for such a long time. People have short memories.
    I calculated that if I were to leave at the beginning of August, I would have three months of relatively mild temperatures in which to become reacclimated to the cold. Moreover, I would be done with the long maritime section of my voyage right away, and under the best conditions, since the Greenland Sea would be free of ice. Once I was on solid ground, so to speak, whatever bad weather did hit wouldn’t impede my progress. And I could also expect Baffin Bay, between Greenland and Canada, to be navigable.
    I had a two-month window to make it by boat across these two bodies of water before they froze and were no longer navigable. That was why I would start there, to avoid the risk that a delay in Russia or elsewhere might force me to wait for the thaw, stuck somewhere for eight months.
    Now, if everything worked more or less according to plan, I would be on the shores of the Bering Strait (between Alaska and Siberia) sometime around September 2003, during the time of the year when the daunting waters of the Bering Sea observe a sort of summer truce. Two months later, the sea would be covered with ice, and I would have to wait until February of the following year for the ice to be sufficiently thick and solid to cross on foot.
    In short, a relatively tight “slot.” I decided to start out on my journey around the Arctic Circle on August 4, 2002.
    Far from having beaten me, my relative failure in my effort to reach the North Pole had given me an invaluable body of