When Mardi George and her family bought the Pleasant Point Camps two winters ago, she was curious to know something of the history of the old 19th century hunting cabins set deep in the woods east of Moosehead Lake.

George already knew that Teddy Roosevelt had spent time there during his presidency, but she hoped to locate the camps’ former owners who might be able to tell her even more about the outpost’s sporting past.

She was referred to Wayne Duplisea, a retired railroad engineer from Hermon and a former Maine Guide who had owned a cabin in that region for 35 years. The two had never met, but in their correspondence a name soon emerged that turned out to be common to both, one that would link their memories in a timeline stretching from Bangor to Island Falls and all the way to the North Pole.

When George mentioned that her grandfather was Dr. Hal Hunt, a Maine Guide and polar explorer, the name didn’t immediately ring a bell with Duplisea. But he had grown up hearing from his mother’s family, who lived in Island Falls in the early 1900s, of a beloved country doctor there named Harrison Hunt. He had been their family doctor, the remote town’s only doctor, and had delivered Duplisea’s aunt.

“I wrote to Mardi and asked if it was possible that Hal Hunt and Harrison Hunt were the same man,” Duplisea said recently. “Turns out he was.”

Duplisea sent George a copy of a taped conversation between his aunt and uncle made some 30 years ago in which they reminisce about the family’s early life in Island Falls. On it, the two speak of the “giant of a man” named Dr. Hunt who rumbled through town on a motorcycle, rafted across the swollen Mattawamkeag River to deliver Duplisea’s Aunt Myrna, and performed an appendectomy on his Uncle Ralph right on the kitchen table.

George then sent Duplisea a slim book, published in 1980 by her mother, Ruth Hunt Thompson, that told the story of Dr. Harrison Hunt’s four-year expedition to the Arctic led by the Maine explorer Adm. Donald B. MacMillan. “North to the Horizon” told a tale that Duplisea had never heard before, one that most Maine people are probably unaware of as well.

Hunt, who started a medical practice in Bangor upon his return from the Arctic and died in 1967, wrote little of his adventures in the vast, unexplored North and gave very few interviews or lectures about his experiences. But he shared his stories freely with his family, often while sitting around a campfire in the woods of northern Maine that he loved so much.

“My grandfather was a man of many stories of the North Pole and its people,” George said, “and I would sit and listen to them by the hour. I think he felt it was truly an adventure of a lifetime, regardless of what happened on the expedition.”

Harrison Hunt was born in Brewer in 1878. He graduated from Bangor High School, Bowdoin College and the Maine Medical School. He worked as a doctor first in Bangor, where his father had his medical practice, and in 1906 moved to Island Falls. In 1913, he signed on as surgeon for the Arctic expedition assembled by MacMillan, whom he had known at Bowdoin. Hunt’s father thought it a foolish venture, and his wife, Marion, despaired of being left alone with their 4-year-old daughter, Ruth.

Hunt, on the other hand, saw the trip as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a part of history.

“If enlarging man’s knowledge is important,” he wrote in his diary, “then, I felt, this expedition should be important, for such was its purpose.”

The seven-man mission, sponsored in part by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was to find and explore the fabled mountainous territory at the top of the world that Cmdr. Robert Peary, another Bowdoin grad, claimed to have seen on his polar expedition in 1906 and named Crocker Land.

“Its boundaries and extent can only be guessed at,” said MacMillan, who had been part of Peary’s earlier expedition, “but I am certain that strange animals will be found there, and I hope to discover a new race of men.”

The expedition ran into difficulties early. The heavy-laden ship, which departed from New York, wrecked on the rocks off Labrador. The men and two-years’ worth of supplies were put aboard another ship that deposited its cargo at Etah, the northernmost Eskimo settlement in Greenland. MacMillan and one of his men eagerly set out by dog sled to find Peary’s Crocker Land. After traveling for two days and 150 miles across the polar ice cap, however, they were forced to conclude that the “white summits of a distant land” that Peary swore he had seen through his field glasses was actually a mirage, a hallucination caused by Arctic light and mist.

After the two explorers returned, the expedition team traveled widely across the region, collecting plant, animal and mineral specimens. They took some 5,000 photographs and made extensive records of weather, tides and magnetic variations.

Not only did Dr. Hunt prove himself to be an invaluable hunter and resourceful wilderness trekker – skills he’d learned in the Maine woods – but he soon became a friend and healer to the Eskimo families in the region. He learned their language and traveled thousands of miles with them across the frozen expanse.

He lived with them in their igloos and, while not a part of his job description, ministered to the sick in villages ravaged by tuberculosis. He once drove a dog sled 150 miles to tend to a sick child.

The Eskimos called Hunt “angekok,” their big medicine man.

The expedition was supposed to have lasted two years, after which a relief ship would arrive and take the men home. But the ship dispatched by the American Museum of Natural History was ill-suited to the severe climate, and the poor timing of its departure caused it to become trapped in ice far from the expedition’s base. By the fourth year, with supplies low and the men growing increasingly desperate to leave, Hunt traveled by dog sled and kayak to southern Greenland, and then on to Denmark by ship, to get word to the museum that it must send a capable relief ship north by the summer to bring back the other members of the party.

W. Elmer Ekblaw, who accompanied Hunt part of the way, later wrote admiringly of the Maine doctor’s grueling, 1,200-mile journey for help: “Because of thin ice, he was forced to go by an entirely new route, directly back over the mountains. The story of his successful journey south is an epic, a record of success over incredible difficulties, and dauntless perseverance in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles.”

Back with his family in Maine, Hunt practiced medicine in Bangor and headed into the North Woods and to the coast whenever he could get away. He traveled around the state for a year as a doctor for the Red Cross Blood Mobile Unit. At 76 years old, at the request of the Maine Seacoast Mission, Hunt took his family to Swans Island, where he worked as a general practitioner. When his legs grew unsteady and his eyesight and hearing began to fail, Hunt and his wife moved back to Bangor in 1960. He died seven years later of pneumonia.

From kitchen-table appendectomies in Island Falls to sick-bay igloos in the northernmost villages of the world and back to the old Eastern Maine General Hospital in Bangor, Hunt’s 56-year medical career provided him with a rich and varied professional life from which he drew enormous satisfaction. And if chasing a mirage to the ends of the Earth was not exactly the history-making event he had hoped it would be, Hunt never let his disappointment over the quixotic expedition turn to bitterness.

“My grandfather always had such a positive view of life, such a generous nature, that he never looked back on those days as anything but a great adventure,” said his granddaughter, whose wilderness camps sport the skin of a polar bear Hunt shot while in the Arctic. “He gave a lot of gifts to people in his life. He gave me my love of the North Woods, and I’ll always thank him for that.”