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Slack.com slash DHQ. I want you to imagine a photograph. Okay, we're way up north in

the Canadian Arctic, in a place called Ellsmear Island. This is a land where packs of white

Arctic wolves prey on musk oxen. Okay, picture big, shaggy buffalo with thick, curling

horns. All right, our photograph, it shows what happens after a wolf kill. The point

of view is from inside the carcass of a dead musk ox, rib bones, curve across the foreground,

already picked clean, a wolf stares at the rest of the meat. We're so close that we can

see something in the wolf's eyes, a primal glint of determination, or maybe it's just

hunger. But have you ever wondered, how do a photographer get that shot and not get eaten?

Wolfproof camera traps. This is Tom O'Brien. His business card says he's a photo engineer

at National Geographic. But really, he's our photographer's secret weapon. From his workshop

in the National Geographic Basement, Tom designs completely custom camera gear for our photographers.

If you can dream it, he can probably build it. The photographer on the wolf assignment

needed a camera that he could place inside the carcass and leave it there for days. And

I had to think like a wolf or like a dog because I was like, well, dogs, we all know

like to chew on things, right? And so they'll chew on the cables, they'll chew on the boxes.

Right. After Tom designed the camera trap, he protected all the cables with stainless steel.

But how could he be sure that an Arctic wolf couldn't actually bite through? I'll be honest

...