The pounding noise shatters the ancient, eerie silence of the Davis Strait, a frigid finger of ocean separating Canada and Greenland. Thwick-thwack, thwick-thwack, thwick-thwack. It comes from above but the marine fog is thick, the source invisible. The sound gets closer, louder. THWICK-THWACK, THWICK-THWACK, THWICK-THWACK. The pilot wears an old red neoprene survival suit. But it's hot in the helicopter, and the bulky outfit's mittens make it difficult to operate the cyclic stick. After forty-two days, twenty-one thousand miles, and three continents, he sometimes has to relax a little. So he is bare-chested, with the suit unzipped to his waist, when the sputtering begins. The helicopter is not big: a plucky 880-pound Robinson R22 that maxes out at 117 mph. The pilot knows every inch, every bolt. He has been flying R22s for years. He knows what the sputtering likely means: A belt transferring power from the engine to the rudder blades has just snapped. He also knows what comes next.

Manifold pressure increases. Speed decreases. The helicopter is going down. The pilot switches to autorotation, a safety mode that allows the craft to glide downward. From a height of three thousand feet, it falls through the fog at a rate of roughly seventeen feet per second. But falling where? It isn't until two hundred feet above the partially frozen sea, barely enough time to maneuver, that the helicopter pierces the fog. The pilot aims for an ice floe about the size of a basketball court. In a few seconds he realizes he won't make it, so he expertly tilts the helicopter for safest impact and lands the skids smoothly on the water.

Ananov in the Robinson R22 during his record-setting attempt Alexander Gronsky

The pilot knows the blades could accidentally chop off his head when he climbs out of the craft. By leaning his weight to the left, he tips the helicopter in order to smash the blades to pieces against the sea. This kills the engine, but now, tail-first, the machine starts to sink. Fast.

Freezing water floods the cockpit, wrapping around his naked chest, rushing down the legs of the unzipped survival suit. His gear begins to float—plastic fuel tanks, a small bag of clothes—but the most crucial items are suction-cupped to the windshield: two GPS trackers, one distress beacon, and a satellite phone. Somewhere beneath the seat there is also a deflated life raft containing a survival kit with three flares, a half-liter of water, and a tiny box of protein tablets.

Almost instantly, the pilot is submerged to the neck. There is only time to save one thing: satellite phone, distress beacon, GPS tracker, or life raft. The phone can call for help. The beacon and GPS tracker can give rescuers a chance to actually find him. But none of those do much good if he can't stay afloat.

He reaches under the seat to grab the raft, but it is stuck, and the cockpit is so cramped that he can't get enough leverage to yank it free. He swims out the door, takes a deep breath, then dives back under and into the submerged helicopter. The water is black and salty and cold—35 degrees Fahrenheit. It is difficult to keep his eyes open. But he must find the raft. It has floated out from under the seat and become tangled in the seat belt. He unsnares it, swims to the surface, and greedily gulps air.

The fog will hide him from any rescuers. Night will come. Hypothermia will come.

Once he catches his breath, he begins swimming to the closest ice floe, the one he tried to land on—160 feet away. The life raft weighs about twenty pounds. The pilot clutches it above his head with one hand and paws at the water with the other. He propels his five-eleven, 176-pound frame, now weighted down by the waterlogged suit, through the waves. Each stroke gets him closer, yet sucks even more water into the suit, further yanking him down. Killer whales and the elusive Greenland shark hunt these waters, but none of this is on his mind. He is single-minded: Make it to the ice floe.

After three grueling minutes, he does. But this ice is two feet thick, radiant blue, pitted and roughened by at least two years of melting and refreezing. The weight of the suit makes it impossible to hurl his legs over the jagged lip. Yet he keeps trying, searching for the right spot at which to hoist himself up, like a toddler trying to climb out of the deep end of the pool. The sharp ice scrapes away skin. Blood runs down his forearms and into the sea. He finds a smooth section, presses his bare chest flat against the ice, uses his nails as claws, and shimmies atop.

Every inch of him is soaked, and his chest is now exposed to the biting wind. He shivers violently, an automatic response intended to generate heat. His shaking hands struggle to peel off the suit, its neoprene material clinging stubbornly to his skin. Once it is off, he flaps the suit up and down, trying to wring out the water. And it is then, fifteen minutes since the belt snapped, as he stands on the ice floe in nothing but his running shoes and underwear, that the situation becomes clear.

Sergey Ananov is trapped on a slab of ice in the Arctic Circle. He has no locator beacon, no phone, and barely any water. The fog will hide him from any rescuers. Night will come. Hypothermia will come. And whatever large, powerful creatures that scratch out their existence in this primordial world—maybe they will come too.

His eyes wander past the ice and over the roiling open waters of Davis Strait. He is alone, and with each minute that passes he will drift farther from the spot where the helicopter went down, lessening the chance he will ever be found.

The world has been trampled over and clambered up and submarined down, but if man searches hard enough he can still find a remote and dangerous front on which to battle nature. There are still records to be had. You can still be first at something, the way Hillary and Shackleton and Yeager were, and the way Musk and Branson and Bezos want to be. The allure for these men is that simple: the desire to be recorded as the first human to try something, and to succeed at it. Immortality. Who doesn't want his name to live forever?

Back on June 13, 2015, the day his Robinson R22 lifted off from the airfield at Shevlino, Russia, about twenty miles from Moscow, the fifty-year-old Ananov was the head of a Moscow trash-and-recycling company. He had already set five world aviation records in the R22 but nothing as ambitious as this: becoming the first person to fly alone around the world in a helicopter weighing less than one metric ton—approximately 2,205 pounds, more than twice the weight of the R22.

According to the Switzerland-based Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the group that keeps track of world aviation records, there has been only one successful around-the-world solo helicopter flight. But that flight was in a heavier craft, and the pilot had support aircraft trailing him, packed with spare parts and extra fuel. The R22 is intended for activities like flight training, mustering livestock, and patrolling pipelines—not circumnavigating the globe. And except for a couple of friends tracking his progress online in the event of an emergency, Ananov was doing it alone. This would be the record to put him among the legends.

Alexander Gronsky

He began by crossing Siberia into Alaska, flew south through the western United States, then zigzagged across the American heartland. Since no one had ever achieved such a mad record, there was no time to beat. But Ananov didn't want his trip to look like the leisurely jaunt of a dilettante. He began his days at dawn and often landed in the dark, averaging about 435 miles a flight and sometimes topping 600 miles. He refueled at local and regional airfields. He ate mainly fast food—hamburgers, pizza, KFC—and slept in cheap hotels.

Ananov got to know America, staying the night in outposts like Sidney, Montana, and Guntersville, Alabama. The people were friendly—some of them gave him fuel. The R22 holds about twenty-nine gallons, and in two large plastic jerricans kept beside him in the passenger seat—along with his small bag of clothes, chocolate bars, and the occasional leftover hamburger—Ananov could carry another twenty-nine gallons. An electric pump allowed him to transfer this fuel into his main tank as he flew.

He entered Canada near Montreal, traversed remote Quebec, and crossed the Hudson Strait to Iqaluit, capital of the Inuit territory of Nunavut. It was from here that he took off that morning of day forty-two—less than three thousand miles from home and certain glory.

Now, stranded and shivering, he allows a few minutes to beat himself up for his mistakes. If only he had dived down into the freezing water once more and retrieved one of the GPS trackers or the distress beacon! If only he had managed to land on the ice floe in the first place! He could somehow have hailed a mechanic to fix the R22 and still captured the record! But none of this matters now. It is wasted energy to even think these thoughts. And so he gets to work.

First he must get the survival suit back on. He can't wring out all the water, and he struggles into the dank neoprene, pulling it up all the way so the built-in cap covers his head. He now has a thick layer between him and the wind, but that layer is soaked, and his body continues to shiver. The suit's mittens have reduced his hands to clumsy paws, and he fumbles with the cord to blow up the life raft. After several yanks, the raft inflates. He takes the cord and ties it to his leg, so the raft won't blow away. Using it as a windshield, Ananov lies beneath, flat on his stomach.

This is not the teeth-chattering cold of spending too long on a ski slope. This is the cold of gangrene and cardiac arrest and brain death. This is the cold of hypothermia. Ananov gets up and tries to walk around his ice island, dragging the raft behind him, but he is quickly panting. Nerve and muscle fibers don't work so well in the cold, as the chemical reactions that enable their functioning slow down drastically. Because of the shivering, his muscles are continuously contracting. There is also the wind—cold and unbearable. He figures the most helpful thing he can do right now is nothing: simply keep as still as possible and try to retain heat and energy. He lies back down under the raft.

About three thousand miles away, in San Francisco, a Russian-American friend of Ananov's named Andrey Kaplin is one of those tracking the journey online. They connected on a Russian Web forum for private pilots, and first met just weeks ago when Ananov passed through on his journey. Kaplin sees that one of the GPS trackers indicates the helicopter's speed has flatlined. He makes a call to another of their pilot friends in Moscow, Michael Farickh. It is the middle of the night there, but Farickh jumps out of bed and makes the call that counts: to the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Halifax dispatches two C-130 Hercules aircraft to the pilot's last known position. But it is too late in the day for a thorough search. Halifax also radios the Pierre Radisson, a 323-foot Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker commanded by Captain Stéphane Julien. Though here too, a snag. The vessel is at least a day away, in Frobisher Bay, escorting a freighter into Iqaluit. With no other icebreakers in the area, Captain Julien cannot abandon his charge.

But Julien knows how dire the situation is for Ananov. He became fascinated with the Arctic at six years old, watching Super 8 films of polar bears and ice floes with his uncle, who sailed with the Canadian Coast Guard in the 1960s. At seventeen, Julien signed up, and by 2003 he was commanding a medium-class icebreaker used for research. From polar scientists and Inuit guides, Julien has learned the Arctic's secrets. He has done twenty-nine Arctic tours, sailed the Northwest Passage seven times, rescued several human beings from an icy death. He decides he will not let the stranded pilot perish. Safely depositing the freighter in Iqaluit, he battles back through the treacherous passage he has just traveled and heads for the Davis Strait.

Ananov knows none of this—and hopes only that the GPS trackers, waterproof to one meter, somehow communicated his desperate situation before sinking six hundred feet to the sea bottom. Or that the buoyant distress beacon became unsuctioned from the helicopter's windshield and bobbed to the surface. He also knows nothing of the predator now tracking him. For somewhere in the strait, one of earth's great hunters has stood upright and is waving its head back and forth. It can smell a ringed seal under several feet of snow and a rotting whale carcass from ninety miles away. But this scent? It draws a blank, having never encountered a middle-aged Russian—a 176-pound salami on an ice floe. Moving in its pigeon-toed walk, swinging its front paws out with each step then turning them inwards and landing heels first, the polar bear heads off to inspect.

The summer before, in nearby Arctic Bay, thirty-one-year-old Adrian Arnauyumayuq and his twenty-six-year-old brother-in-law loaded up a snowmobile and ventured out on their annual hunting trip. The first night, they set up camp on an ice floe, a few hundred feet from the edge. In the morning, they were wakened by a thousand-pound polar bear ripping apart their tent. Arnauyumayuq quickly reached for his three-inch hunting knife, stabbed the bear in the face, and then tried to flee the tent. But the bear pounced on him, clawing open his back and gobbling his head.

Ananov hides beneath his raft and hopes the monster leaves. It doesn't.

"I could see inside its mouth," Arnauyumayuq later told the local newspaper Nunatsiaq News. "It was all black and smelly."

The bear flung Arnauyumayuq aside and went after his brother-in-law, fracturing his collarbone before Arnauyumayuq could grab his rifle and shoot the bear dead.

The Arctic is full of these kinds of stories. They blow around in the wind, drift with the tide. It has always been this way, ever since the Tuniit people arrived five thousand years ago with bows and arrows. Mostly these stories end not in survival but disaster.

Sergey Ananov has no rifle. He has no knife. About four hours after falling out of the sky, he is still on his stomach inside his makeshift tent when he hears the sound of heavy breathing and crunching snow. He peeks out from under the raft and sees the bear, its fur wet and glistening after swimming from floe to floe—a task it can do for days without stopping.

Ananov hides beneath his raft and hopes the monster leaves. It doesn't. The creature bobs its snout up and down, sniffing the air, and lopes straight for him. The bear is about five feet away, so close that Ananov can see the black of its footpads and toenails. Biologists will tell you that at this point the bear has one of two motives: hunger or curiosity. Both are bad for the pilot since polar bears often satisfy their curiosity with their teeth.

If I meet the bear face-to-face I will die, Ananov thinks. And that death seems imminent, guaranteed. Then, from somewhere deep in his core, a primeval and spontaneous urge is unleashed. Ananov bolts up, flings off the raft, and rushes the beast—his arms flailing, roaring as loud as he can. And it works! The bear actually gallops away. But Ananov does not stop. He chases the bear to the very edge of the floe, with the raft still attached to his leg and bouncing behind him. The bear nimbly launches across to a neighboring slab, then looks back at Ananov, who continues to scream furiously. His eyes are black coals of rage. He is roaring. The bear jogs a bit, sits down on his backside, and looks right at the pilot, examining him mutely. Ananov still roars. But now it is not only directed at the bear. It is directed at the cruel fate that put him here. It is directed at his utter helplessness.

For a full minute, the strange encounter continues. Man roaring, beast watching. Then the bemused bear gets up and trots off into the Arctic fog.

The euphoria and adrenaline from the encounter with the bear do not last. The hours lumber on, minutes that feel like years. Then the sound of a plane.

Ananov cannot see it because of the fog, but with his clumsy mitts he seizes one of the three flares, aims it at the noise and pulls the cord. A dazzling orange-red flame leaps into the air. Ananov hears the plane arc directly overhead and continue on. The flare burns for thirty seconds, then fizzles.

His shivering is so fierce and constant that it causes him to sweat.

Evening approaches. The cold is deep, raw, gnawing. The temperature is hovering right at the freezing point. Ananov rations his protein tablets, about two thousand calories' worth, into three-day portions. After that, he figures, he will be dead.

Humans can go without food for more than three weeks—so long as they have water. Ananov has only the half-liter that came with the raft. His shivering is so fierce and constant that it causes him to sweat. He has also been urinating frequently in the survival suit—a liberating release that provides brief moments of warmth and happiness. He is losing water simply from breathing. If all this bodily fluid is not replenished, the corresponding drop in blood pressure will be fatal. It seems a bit of cosmic ridicule: quite literally dying of thirst while surrounded by water and even sitting atop the stuff, yet unable to drink a drop of it. Ingesting saltwater would only speed up the dehydration.

Ananov does not sleep. He listens for bears. He thinks about his wife, Jane, and his children. His twenty-two-year-old daughter, Daria, has just graduated with a degree in journalism from Moscow State University. His twenty-year-old son, Andrey, is studying economics at Moscow State Institute of International Relations. At least they are grown, Ananov thinks. And thanks to the trash business, at least they will be taken care of.

About a hundred miles away, the Pierre Radisson finally reaches a section of open water and Captain Julien fires all six engines, 40,000 horsepower in total, plowing forward at the ship's top speed: nineteen miles per hour.

In the morning, another plane. It is still too foggy to see the craft but Ananov, hopeful, lights his second flare. No luck. However, the still-hot flare casing does him some good: He uses it to burn holes in his survival suit at the tip of each foot. Now the urine that has been pooling in the feet and legs of the suit can drain directly onto the ice. The small things that enable man to survive.

Later that same morning, Ananov hears a helicopter. It is at least a few miles away. Ananov knows there is no way the pilot will be able to see the minuscule twelve-inch flame. So he decides to save his last flare. The helicopter disappears.

Then another bear. Again Ananov flails, roars, chases the beast, scampers across the ice screaming like a fool. It works again, but without food and sapped by the constant shivering—the only thing keeping his body warm enough to function—he is even more worn-out than the first time.

A third bear walks toward him, sniffing the air with its massive snout, smelling the human body beneath the neoprene fabric

Morning passes into afternoon. There is a depression in the ice near the floe's edge filled with dazzling aquamarine water. Ananov sets his life raft down, creating a sort of water bed. He lies down and dozes, memories spinning backward, until he hears the familiar crunch of snow.

A third bear walks toward him, sniffing the air with its massive snout, smelling the human body beneath the neoprene fabric, a body that is weakening, ripening. Ananov scares it off in the same manner, staggers back to the raft. He flips it over and crawls beneath.

He does not have the energy to fight off another bear, or he tells himself he doesn't. He has never thought of suicide before. But when we humans find ourselves in desperate situations, perspective—our unique ability to view our own situation within the full context of human suffering—has a way of disappearing. Time collapses in on itself. The power to think clearly, the way we would back home, where everything is okay, becomes a vital piece of equipment to be preserved at all costs. Being marooned in the icy brutality of the Arctic has rendered Ananov's mind a gelid mass of fear and uncertainty. He does not want to be devoured and digested by a polar bear. He would rather die on his own terms. As he shivers violently on the ice, he contemplates how he might execute the task.

Twenty-five hours after leaving the freighter, fighting a one-knot current and narrowly avoiding twenty-story icebergs and submerged ice hunks called growlers, the Pierre Radisson chugs into the ice-floe-flecked region of the Davis Strait where Ananov went down. Halifax has drawn up a plan based on Ananov's last beacon point, the wind, and the weather. But the wind is light, and Julien suspects their calculations are off. Instead of beginning the search eight miles from the beacon, as Halifax proposes, he focuses on a two-mile radius.

All available hands are on deck. The mood is tense. In a few hours it will be dark, making a rescue impossible, leaving Ananov to spend another night on the ice. He might not make it. He already may not have made it—not all of him, anyway. The overnight low could drop below freezing. And that is without the windchill. In such conditions, frostbite can occur in as little as thirty minutes. And even if he does make it, by tomorrow his body will have diverted most of its blood from the brain and other organs to the heart, leading to confusion, lethargy, slurred speech—a revived infancy that will slowly, inevitably fade to black. Loss of consciousness, coma, death.

Then, miraculously, the fog lifts. And in that moment, as the sun magnificently sets across the Davis Strait, the brutality of the Arctic also evaporates. In that moment, there is no more beautiful and peaceful place on earth.

Crew members of the Canadian ice breaker Pierre Radisson posing with Ananov

Captain Julien calls Halifax to convey the suddenly favorable conditions, but their planes are more than two hundred miles away in Iqaluit and won't be heading out again until morning. There is one hour of light left. Again acting on a hunch, Julien orders a GC-366 helicopter with two observers into the air. Back on the bridge, a third lieutenant spots a red light on the ice surface.

Julien takes a compass bearing and steers toward the point. The rescue helicopter is notified. They spot the final splinter of light from Ananov's last flare. They spot Ananov. There are no bears on the floe but he is once more running and waving and screaming.

That night aboard the Pierre Radisson, thirty-six hours after the R22 hit the ocean, the pilot is fed salad with olive oil and freshly smoked salmon. Everyone wants to shake his hand and take a photo. He obliges, even though this is not anything like the adulation he was looking for. This is not how he wants his name to live on. This is an insufficient immortality.

As he smiles for the camera phones, he is already thinking about the new R22 he will buy. He is already thinking about how he will pack it differently—the emergency equipment, everything within reach. And he is thinking about next summer, when he will once again lift the helicopter into the sky and point it in the direction of the other side of the world.

This story appears in the March issue of Popular Mechanics