The Arctic Hare and the Huskies 0
On my adventure mission with BBC’s Wild Weather – I spent nearly three months in the Arctic. This is an account of my encounter with an Arctic Hare.
Over 1600 inside the Arctic Circle, sitting precariously on the back of overladen sleigh pulled by thirteen specially bred huskies and driven by two elite Danish soldiers I caught a special glimpse of how the world and its inhabitants adapt to the most extreme of environements.
It was -40C on the eastern coast of Greenland at the Meservik army base in the middle of nowwhere accessible only by satelite phone and the Danish mail service. It was 10pm and a cold breeze was cutting across at 48kph. A light dusting of snow was kicked up and swirled as the dogs ( part dog and part-Inuit husky) drove off their hind legs, howling and barking with a thrill of an expedition. The expedition in question was a short one – in fact, a short hop and parcel dispatch. The parcel was me, and the repository was a snow hole , on the side of a hill, that was to be my home for the night.
The night was glorious with moonlight throwing a pink hue on a glossy white landscape. Earlier in the evening the northern lights had danced sea green across the sky for us: taking the perfect shape of a sea horse. I watched mesmerized, sinking and slipping on the snow until I lay flat on my back for ten minutes dazzled by nature’s greatest show. The wispy green apparation faded peaceably away. Still drunk on the experience and a couple of glasses of red wine with Commander Norritt and his Danish SAS unit later , I prepared for my night in the snow hole – an experiment constructed by the producuer to make my life as uncomfortable as possible. One of these days they’ll kill me off.
That night as we left the compound at quite a pelt I noticed one of the dogs in the midde of the pack veer left off the track. His body turned but the momentum of the pack kept him in line. The dogs with their thick fur might be oblivious to the cold but dog number seven was not oblivious to the Arctic hare sitting tall about 50 metres off the moonlit track. Soon the others caught the scent and veered off in the direction of the snow-white hare – in the pink glow its outline was discernable only by its dark eyes. As thirteen howling wolf dogs raged towards it, it moved not a jot.
It knew more than any creature there that night, it was adapted perfectly to this environment , so instead, it just stood tall and surveyed its patch showing no sign of fear.
The dogs jangled in their chains, a triumph of breeding and adaptation, struggling agianst the army handlers who cracked them into line. The men, wrapped in down, were trained to live unsupported with the dogs in the most extreme conditions on the planet, for three months at a time. The army’s elite force learned (just) to tolerate their surroundings and each man had his own bag of tricks – and sockes – to deal with what is frankly an inhuman climate. And then there was me. A freezing terrified Londoner – trained for nothing, and adapted to no climate except one where central heating and a good pub are nearby.
But what a world the weather offers us! And how remarkable it is that we can adapt and mould and mutate to survive in the most ardous of climatic and environemental conditions. I’ve travelled the globe tasting and touching the worst and the best of the world’s weather – from the Sahara to the Tropics, from the blast of the Fastnet wind to the silence of the doldrums and the heat of Arizona to the wet of the Belizian jungle – and the truth is that no animal on the planet can survive its variety and extremes of weather better than man. In the Arctic the hare is entitled to disagree, but thats its kingdom. Across the globe, the awesome and inexplicable truth is that the human body is a remarkable machine that has habituated itself to a wild and turbulent world. I use `man` in the generic sense. Me – I’m still at sea without my central heating and my pub.
Journalist Donal MacIntyre tells Michael Deacon why he led one of the world’s most primitive tribes to an exotic and bemusing new land: Britain.
We were entertaining our new house guests over tea and biscuits. Their conversational gambits were proving to be somewhat unusual. 
In a new series for Discovery and Five Donal Mac Intyre travels to meet some of the world’s most remote tribes to see how they face the challenges of the modern age as they live their stone age existence. From the Bedoin of Oman, to the salt miners of Bolivia, to the Insect Tribe of PNG and the Sea Gypsies of Borneo – Mac Intyre travels the globe on an amazing quest: Here is a brief note on the Sea Gypsies the subject of Mac Intyre’s first programme which airs on Five early 2007.
