Drifting in a wooden ship, rucks of ice pressuring and lifting the keel to musical heights,
with Fridtjof Nansen and Nansen Fugan, two exemplary men who lived eleven centuries
and a world apart—one an explorer of the cold North, the other of the windy Mind.

For those few who can stop drifting in circles and set out toward the Pole, there is no
farthest North. They continue trekking over the trackless tundra. I marvelled as time after time he
pulled up beside an insignificant hump in the snow and thrust his snowknife beneath the crust to exhume a
a steel fox trap. I was witnessing, for the first time, two amazing processes: an Inuk’s navigation
over great distances of seemingly featureless terrain, and only when they arrive
where they began, have they gone as far as a human can.