ON OCTOBER DAYS in Khatanga, the Arctic sun floats lazily into view at midmorning and then drifts along the horizon like a half-inflated helium balloon until midafternoon. Dawn and dusk last for hours, saturating the entire snowy landscape with the deep blue and orange of the sky. Among the drifts rise half-finished buildings, piles of bricks, and rusted twists of metal, since nothing in Khatanga is ever torn down or hauled away, but simply left to stand in the place where it died or was forgotten. One vast section of town is the abandoned military base, with skeletons of jeeps and a plane's fuselage abandoned at the roadside, and rows of collapsing barracks, slogans from Lenin hanging askew above their doorways.

Still, here and there I found nodes of buzzing activity. Intermittently for several days, a lime-green ultralight plane whirred back and forth above the airstrip—a French pilot testing out the latest gadget that Buigues had ordered from abroad. A couple of blocks away, an old wooden bank had been converted into a laboratory, where MacPhee and his colleagues drilled core samples from bones gathered over the summer.

But the center of all the action was a sprawling single-story house where Buigues held court like a tribal chieftain. (A random sampling of its clutter tells everything about him: a mammoth tusk, a pair of Sorel boots, a half-empty case of champagne.) When Buigues is in town, there is a constant stream of visitors and supplicants: television producers needing to schedule a shoot, Cerpolex employees planning expeditions, Dolgans selling mammoth bones or just stopping by for a glass of cognac.

In every superficial sense, the 46-year-old Buigues is an unlikely Arctic explorer. He spent his early childhood on the edge of the desert, in Morocco's Atlas Mountains, on a farm settled by his grandfather. "Until I was seven, I never went to school," he says. "I played outdoors with the Arab children, and my mother taught me at home." Then, in 1962, amid the collapse of colonialism, his father moved the family back to France, to a small town near Toulouse. "On the first day of school, I was excited about this new thing, the books and the new clothes. I got there, sat and listened for a few hours, and decided I didn't like it so much, so I stood up and told the teacher that I'd had enough school for the day and I was leaving. She told me to sit down. I remember how shocked I was that this was how it worked—that I'd lost my freedom."

From that very first day, Buiges says, he plotted his escape. Finally, at 15, he ran away from home. Buiges moved in with an older friend, an artist, and—with plans of lending his support to the proletarian revolution—took a job in a plywood factory. Eventually he left and started university, but soon dropped out again. In his twenties he drifted from job to job: cook, ambulance driver, mechanic. Then, through the parents of a girlfriend, he happened to meet Jean-Louis Etienne, the French explorer who would later become famous for his ski expeditions across both poles. "He had just decided to make an expedition by ship to Greenland," Buiges recalls, "and he told me, 'I need somebody like you on board, someone who can do everything from cooking to fixing the engine."

For the next decade, Buigues served as Etienne's right-hand man. Shortly after the start of perestroika, he visited the Siberian Arctic for the first time and left Etienne to start Cerpolex. "Jean-Louis was mostly focused on the Antarctic," he says. "But the Arctic has more magic for me. The North Pole is alive, with the ice always cracking and moving, and the tundra also always moves and changes, like a desert, like a white Sahara."

Buigues says he also loves the far north because, unlike the far south, it's alive with humanity. In fact, he is one of the few outsiders whom the nomads trust, according to Vladimir Eisner, one of his longtime confidantes in Khatanga. "Their life has been hard since Communism ended," he told me. "Bernard gives them flour, tea, sugar, petrol, clothes for their children. And when he pays them money, he gives it not to the men, who will drink it away, but to their wives, who will feed the family."

The forlorn environs of far northern Siberia are a kind of paradise for Buigues, one of the few places on earth where it is truly possible to slip the bonds of the present.(He revels in his double existence, in coming home after months, bearded and smelly, to his wife in Paris.) In Soviet times, too, despite the region's reputation as a place of imprisonment, it was also a place where some Russians came seeking freedom. In Khatanga, Buigues has surrounded himself with men like these—frost-seasoned outdoorsmen like Eisner and Boris Lebedev, a hulking, gentle-eyed trapper who came to town in the 1970s. "I still remember my first sight of it," Lebedev says, "a little village in those days, with smoke rising from the roofs of the houses. It was only here in the north that a human being could be himself." Buigues's reasons for coming, perhaps, are not so very different.

The French interloper's presence in town has won him enemies as well as friends; recently, he told me, he got word that Moscow ivory dealers were irritated by his competition for mammoth tusks and might be planning some sort of reprisal. But he'll continue his hunt, he says, even though he's not exactly sure why, not certain what has brought him from a farmhouse in the African hills to a village at the edge of the polar sea. Perhaps, he says, what's drawn him to mammoths is some half-lost ancestral memory of them, "a knowledge that we have all kept deep in our cortex. You know, in Paris I live near the zoo, and I often go there to see the children watching the elephants, standing there and looking, much longer than they look at the lions, or the bears, or the giraffes. Maybe this has something to do with it also."