CHAPTER TWO

For weeks Pete lay in the snow as the hours dragged by. He was not able to sleep, or in any way loose consciousness. One day he day dreamed that he was walking across the snow and that he came across his frozen body in a snow cave. When he reached out to dig the snow away he casually noticed that his hand was actually a very large white bear paw. Once he noticed the paw he also noticed that he could smell the frozen body under the snow. It smelled good, like food. He easily pushed the hardened snow away from the carcass. He sat on his haunches. The urge to tear into the flesh and devour the body was irresistible. He grabbed hold of a frozen leg with powerful jaws and began to bite down when he panicked. Something was very wrong. With all the will power that he could summon, he dropped the body from he jaws, turned around and ran away. He ran as hard as he could. He was full of the adrenaline of fear and he used it to put distance between that frozen body and himself.

After running about three or four miles, he began to relax. Then the strangest thing happened. A big Polar Bear seamed to run right through him. Pete stood in the snow and watched the bear race away. He looked down at his feet, but there were none. He tried to look at his hands, but then again there were no hands to see. He turned around to face the way that he and the bear had come. All he saw were the tracks of the bear. He just thought about moving back toward the frozen body and he glided along about six feet above the snow.

Soon he made it back to his stiffened self. The body was now lying uncovered in the snow. His torn pants were showing the hole in his leg here the bear had bitten though. Slowly it dawned on him that this was not a day dream. Somehow he had entered the mind and body of a polar bear that was intending to eat him, and he had turned it away.

Pete didn't stray to far from his carcass for the first few days, but as time progress he began to venture away. He experimented with going into and coming out his body. He found that he could leave a piece of his awareness near the body and still look at things far away. He could leave something like a perimeter watch around himself. If any animals or humans got close he would go investigate. As the winter ended and early spring arrived he was constantly running predators away from the area.

He found that he could influence animals senses just by thinking about a smell, or a sound, or even fears, while inside them. He could make them feel that something was after them, or that there was something good to eat in some other direction. He got pretty good at knowing what different animals liked and what they disliked.

Pete knew that people must be searching for him, or that people had been searching for him, but he didn't want to found in the condition his body was in. He didn't know if he would thaw out and be able to walk around again or if his destiny was to wander around as a ghost, but he was certain, that, if found by people, something messy would happen to his body.

Pete began to make his journeys more distant. He was able, eventually, to find his way back to the village that he had started this winter trip from. He could not hear any talk of him being lost. At the air strip he was able to influence someone enough to ask another person about the lost white man. The other man responded that they had stopped actively searching for him over a month ago, but to keep an I out just the same. Pete also found the fellow that he had paddled up the river with. He hung out near him for awhile, but nothing seamed to be going on. It was dark and cold. Many of the natives were drinking. Pete drifted back to his vigil and waited.

The season progressed and eventually it began to warm-up. The days got longer. Snow melted. As the sun rose higher and stayed longer in the sky Pete began to thaw. Finally one extremely warm day with the sun blazing down on him he felt that had warmed up enough to try and move. He entered his body and tried. The pain was excruciating, but he did move his leg. It took two or three hours till he was able to sit up. His hunger had become apparent. He ate the grass around him in great quantities. By the time the sun had made a complete circle in the sky. Pete was on his feet and moving toward his original destination.

Pete projected himself and located the carcass of an Arctic fox close by. He quickly found it and devoured the protein. Within three days he had found enough to eat that he felt in very good health. The caribou began to get close. Pete had fashioned a weapon out of an old femur that he had found, with that he was able to kill a young caribou that he had lured over to him with his strengthening mental powers. From the hide of the animal he made a pack in which he put with the meat of the animal. Thus set he was able to make good time.

Mosquitoes had been a major problem to him before, but with his new mental influence Pete found that easily keep them away from himself by sort of exuding a presence that the bugs did not care for. Without this ability the blood suckers would have drained him dry even before he had thawed out completely.

Pete walked all day stopping only to rest one or two hours and eat. It wasn't long before he spotted an airplane. A few days later and many miles more he saw another one. Soon he was seeing more than one a day, and he new that he was close to a settlement. He was walking close to the shore as he started to near Coppermine. Before he got into the village a group of hunters spotted him from a skiff and picked him up off of the beach.

He was quite a sensation. When he told them that he had been on the tundra all winter they did not believe him. They thought that he had run his boat aground further up the coast and that he was a liar. That sounded like a good story to him so he agreed with them. They wanted to go get his boat but he made up some excuse about it sinking. He was able to massage their minds just enough to make them feel that finding him was not so unusual that they needed to make a big deal about it when they got back into town. When he did arrive in Coppermine he surrounded himself in a shroud of obscurity, that made him uninteresting and unimportant. Nobody noticed him.

Pete made friends with one of the men that had picked him up, and he helped the man fix some stuff around his. In return Pete got food, a place to stay, and somewhere to build a new Kayak and small sled.

Pete left Coppermine while it was still ice free. He paddled as fast and as hard as he could for he knew that the ice was coming in. With more hardships than can be accounted for Pete makes it to the West coast of Greenland. The weather was still good when he happened across the carcass of a whale that has washed up on the beach. Using the remaining days of sunshine he cut the whale up and dried the meat out while gorging himself to a weight of almost three hundred pounds. Pete settled in to wait for the first big snow. He moved his camp up to higher ground and packed his supplies into cashes. He did not want to repeat another winter like the last.

It didn't take long for the snows to come. Pete had taken his kayak apart and built himself a small sled. He packed the sled with as much food as he could safely haul and headed South inland from the coast. As the daylight got shorter and shorter his daily distances got less also. By the time daylight was only two hours long in the day he made a winter snow cave and got ready for a long wait.

During his traveling on Greenland Pete had been concerned with finding passes through the rocky mountain ranges, so he didn't do many long distance projecting. But when he settled in for the winter he began to venture out. It was this winter that he found out that there were other people that could sense his bodiless presence.

Pete had been soaring the skies along the coast like an eagle. It was pitch dark. Up a long inlet he saw a light. He was along the South Western coast, where settlements are rare but not absent. Pete moved closer. He saw an old fishing boat anchored out from a rickety dock and a wooden house. He came in close and noticed several shacks and an oil tank close by. he windows were shuttered close. Pete drifted through the buildings walls and saw an old Eskimo man sitting next to an old oil stove sharpening hooks. He sees another person wrapped up in furs asleep on the bed.

The old man stopped what he was doing. He looked around, and asked quietly, "Who is there?" The sleeping woman did not stir. The old man was not afraid just curious. "Are you the spirit of a dead man?" Pete was not able to answer but he did move close. The old man went back to work and said, "You are welcome here spirit.", and he said no more.

After a while Pete drifted over to the man, he put his astral hand into the mans chest and sends a warmth of good memories. Memories of whale kills and full bellies, of laughing children and the warmth of a woman. A smile came to the old mans toothless face. "Ahhh, the spirit of good memories. I thank you for them, but a man can not live on memories. Send a whale into the Fjord for me."

At that point the woman woke up. "What did you say?" She asks

"I asked the Spirit to bring me a whale"

"come to bed old man. Leave the sprits alone" She said. And he did.

Pete spent the rest of the twilight days voyaging and keeping his body warm. When the daylight got to be more than two hours long Pete packed his sled and began to travel again.

Pete never was able to coax a whale into that bay, and he was traveling too far inland the come by in person, but he did check on the old man every once in awhile.