Iqaluit (Mar 03/03) - He was utterly lost, desperately shaking with cold in a harsh black night in the wild, hardly expecting to live.

On the eve of Jan. 25, Tim MacLeod zigged when he should have zagged. A missed turn put him more than 16 kilometres inland from Iqaluit in -30 C temperatures with a wind blowing. It was soon pitch black.

Rescuer meets survivor. Jimmy Noble shakes hands with Tim MacLeod, who spent the most terrible hours of his life huddled in a snow cave. - Chris Woodall/NNSL photo

It would be nearly 12 hours before his rescue, but it was a near thing his rescuers didn't find a corpse.

He notes that wearing a broken watch may have saved his life.

"There's definitely a point when you know that you decide to hold on or give up," MacLeod says. "If I knew (at about midnight) I had so much time left to go (until 6 a.m. when he was spotted) I would have given up."

The trip started out like any day he's had in the four years he's been riding the ice and shorelines of Frobisher Bay.

Tim was with friends. He was riding his '98 Yamaha WR400 motorbike, specially equipped with a ski on the front wheel. His friends were on a snowmobile ahead.

"The wind really started to pick up," MacLeod says. "I had missed the turn and had kept going for some miles until I started to sink into softer snow."

That was his first clue of trouble.

"I drove around for an hour trying to see the snowmobile trail, but I ended up farther inland yet," he says.

At this point it was pitch black.

"I knew it was about -30 C. I was soaking wet with sweat: the bike is quite a workout, so I usually just wear a windbreaker and a sweater," MacLeod remembers.

Shelter for the foolish

He had reached a small lake. Knowing that moving around aimlessly was futile, he parked his bike along the shore.

Shortly thereafter, Tim's fearlessness evapourated. Leaving his bike, he wandered around looking for signs of Iqaluit. When his luck ran out, so did his cool.

"I wasn't thinking clearly and was running around screaming. When I look back on it, I must have looked pretty foolish," MacLeod remembers.

Sometimes foolishness has a purpose. Tim thinks his bit of mania may have kept him active enough to regain some body heat.

Once he settled down and found his bike, Tim used his gloved fingers to dig out three large blocks of snow to create a snow cave of two walls and a roof against a rock back wall.

"That kept me going for an hour or two. At least it kept my mind going," Tim says. He also ran his motorbike to draw strength from the heat it generated.

He ran the motorcycle as long as he dared. "I knew I didn't have enough to get back, but I needed some to start it so the headlight would work to signal ... someone."

Then, that was all she wrote.

"I crawled inside my cave and started freezing," Tim says of the long deathly-cold night ahead. His only company was the lake ice.

One last chance

Dawn was barely breaking. Tim was barely alive. Then he heard a snowmobile, maybe two miles off, and remembers his last-ditch desperation.

"Then I saw the light of the snowmobile. But my bike's headlight wasn't on for him to see me.

"Then he went out of sight. I thought: that's it."

But thinking that the snowmobiler might climb a ridge, MacLeod put everything he had to getting his bike going.

He had one last chance.

"I got a bit of a backfire, but that flicked on the light just enough.

"The snowmobile guy saw it. I knew I'd been found," Tim says, his voice filling with certain emotion.

"It's indescribable, you can't describe that feeling of being found," Tim says.

Jimmy Noble is the man who found Tim MacLeod. He and two other search and rescue riders had been looking for Tim for a couple hours. Tim's friends had notified Iqaluit RCMP during the prior evening that MacLeod was overdue.

Noble stripped MacLeod of his iced clothes and re-wrapped him in a heavy parka and blankets from the komatik Noble was pulling.

But first: tea time.

"Jimmy asked me what I take in my tea. I said I'll just eat the teabag. I was pretty hungry by then," MacLeod says.