“There’s something a bit odd about taking a loaded gun to the toilet,” my colleague rightly noted.
That’s what I’ve been doing this last couple of weeks, that and sleeping with a loaded magnum .44. Both of these are firsts for me. Normally I wouldn’t be so keen, but when sleeping inside a cage with apex predators, I feel okay about it. The cage, in this case, is northeast Greenland, the world’s largest national park. The park is home not just to stupendous mountain scenery, but also to thousands of polar bears, muskox, and a few wolves. Muskox and wolves, I am not so concerned with. Bears, more so. Thus the arsenal.
Between two of us camping and doing geological field work, each day we carry a pack of pencil flares, a signal pistol, a magnum .44, and a 30.06 rifle. The idea is that if we meet an angry muskox, or a bear more curious than we’d like, we start from the pencil flares and, if necessary, work our way up to the weapons of mass destruction. It doesn’t always work that way though. Two of my colleagues found themselves faced with an aggressive muskox and fired off a warning shot. That really pissed it off. So, instead, they slunk away, which was much more effective. Nonetheless, in this particular setting, I’m happier with the heavy weapons than without.
