CHAPTER V
OUR WESTWARD DRIFT BEGINS
The problem of laying in an adequate supply of fresh meat for the winter, for our dogs and ourselves, was now beginning to be a serious one. Long before this we had expected to be at Herschel Island but now with a fairly steady drift in the opposite direction it was evident that we should hardly be able to go the rest of the way before the ice broke up the next summer. This meant a whole year’s delay in carrying out the purposes of the expedition, all on account of the unexpectedly early setting in of winter, and it meant, too, the unforeseen question of a winter’s supply of fresh meat for the thirty-one human beings—twenty-four white men and seven Eskimo—now on board theKarluk. Without fresh meat there was always danger of scurvy, that blight of so many earlier Arctic explorers, which later expeditions—notably those under Peary—had been able to avoid by systematic killing of whatever game the country afforded for food.
Our four Eskimo men made daily trips to the open leads to shoot seal; they were only moderatelysuccessful, for the seal seemed to be rather scarce. Occasionally, too, we got a taste of duck-shooting as the birds came flying along the open water on their way south for the winter.
On Thursday, September 11, Wilkins, Mamen and I went out to an open lead after ducks. We took with us one of the three Peterborough canoes which we were bringing along to be transferred to the southern party at Herschel Island for use in navigating the small streams east of the Mackenzie. Dragging the canoe on a sledge to the edge of the lead, we made tea and had a little lunch, and then paddled up the lead in search of ducks. As we went along, we saw several seal and shot one which sank before we could get it.
Soon we saw the birds flying along the landward edge of the ice. We crossed over and I climbed out of the canoe into a kind of natural “blind” formed of the raftered ice, while Mamen and Wilkins paddled along towards the bottom of the lead. They met a good deal of newly formed ice, less than a quarter of an inch in thickness, which they had to smash with their paddles as they went along. There were plenty of birds near the bottom of the lead but the smashing of the ice disturbed them so that Mamen and Wilkins had to turn back and paddle over in my direction, picking out of thewater as they came along a few ducks that I had shot from my blind.
The wind had changed; the ice began to close up and thin ice began to form in the smaller leads, so we had to paddle pretty fast to get out into the open lead without being caught. It was a beautiful sunshiny day and the surface of the water was so clear and smooth that, although the ship was fully two miles away from us in the ice, her rigging was reflected in our lead. We were getting sunsets now, with the gradual shortening of the daylight; the sunset was red and brilliant on this particular day, giving the white ice the lovely appearance of rose-colored quartz. We hauled out the canoe, lashed it to the sledge and left it there for another day’s shooting. Returning to the ship we found that other members of the party, too, had brought in some ducks so that among us we had about fifty birds, a good day’s work.
It was on such journeys as this that I first learned the use of the ski. Mamen was from Norway and had been a famous ski-jumper in that land of winter sports; he had won many prizes for his skill. I knew that Nansen, on his Journey from theFramto his farthest north and back to Franz Josef Land, had used ski and so had Amundsen on his journey to the South Pole, but with Peary wehad always used snowshoes and I had never had a pair of ski on my feet. Mamen now persuaded me to try skiing and a rare sport I found it. Not far from the ship we had a ski-jump, made by filling in an ice-rafter about thirty feet high with blocks of ice; we covered it with snow and then over all splashed water which froze and made the surface very slippery. We would climb up the back of the jump on the soft snow by side-stepping on our ski and then coast down the front. Mamen showed me how to do the telemark swing.
We would walk out to the water-holes on ski, with a shotgun apiece, in search of ducks. For several days we had no luck because many of the water-holes where the birds were in the habit of resting in their flight were frozen over. Finally on the fifteenth we went out again and did somewhat better. When we shot any birds, however, the young ice that formed in the leads made it difficult to get them. We would then break off a piece of ice large enough and thick enough to hold us and, standing on it as on a raft, push along with our ski-poles and work around to pick up the birds. The ice we pushed through was perhaps a quarter of an inch thick, and we would break it ahead as we went along.
Salt water does not freeze so easily as fresh water, on account of the salt, but when it doesfreeze the ice is much tougher and less brittle than fresh-water ice. A man breaking through fresh-water ice fractures a considerable surface; in the case of salt-water ice the hole he makes is just large enough to let him through. Salt-water ice bends and buckles but will still bear you when fresh-water ice of equal thickness will break at once. Sometimes we would find the ice too heavy to push through and once when this happened and we had to go back and get a boat into the water we found that during our absence the gulls had eaten the duck we had shot.
All this time, of course, we kept up the regular ship’s routine. The darkness was coming earlier in the afternoon as the weeks went by and by September 17 we had to light the lamp for our six o’clock supper. Already, on the fourteenth, we had put the stove up in the cabin. The days were usually cloudy and the engine-room and the galley-stove did not supply quite enough heat to warm the cabin, though in our skiing trips we found it still comfortable in rubber-boots, sweaters and overalls.