Sunday, April 29, 2007

On thick ice

Yesterday, we had some arctic training with Simon, one of the local elders. He has a cheeky grin and an interesting way with words - sort of a cross between Santa and an Arctic Yoda. The training mostly consisted of him telling polar bear hunting stories. One of his pointers was that it's mainly the hungry and/or angry bears that we need to worry about. One trainee asked the obvious question: How can we tell if they're hungry and/or angry? The answer: "You can't. I can, because I've hunted them all my life, but you... [shrug]." The moral: Every bear is a hungry bear.



Simon then took us out on snowmobiles, out onto the frozen bay. I didn't even realize we were on the ocean until we saw the iceberg. Crazy blue.



It was also crazy cold. I need my bags full of winter gear! C'mon, United!!

3 comments:

Jen said...

Yesterday 5 fully functioning, arguably healthy adults spent 1 hour attempting to catch one mallard duck.

Guess who won?

Gooddamn Langdon. We were able to catch his similarly murdering brother Algernon and exile him to the Botanical Garden, but this is a dubious accomplishment as he was either sick or hurt, and was not able to walk.

Tip: (May Come in Handy in the Arctic): If you have a catch a duck, poison or maim it first so he can't walk. Or staff up appropriately. 5 grown-ups won't do it.

Kim Binsted said...

There are a couple of Husky puppies here who could've taken Langdon down, I'm sure. They tackled a wolf yesterday - OK, a stuffed wolf, but still, a sign of character. One is even named "Big Red"!! The other is "Sunshine" - sorry.

Jen said...

I'm not anxious to greenlight the final solution on Landgon. Their names are "Steve" and "Roger" and they share Big Red and Sunshine's philosophy about stuffed wolves and ducks.

We're going to try a throw net first, then we're trying for the "Maiming by water bottle," which worked perfectly with Algernon. Hopefully this plans will stave off the Executioner's Song.