CHAPTER XVII
THROUGH THE PRESSURE RIDGE
At dawn the next morning, February 28, leaving at this sixth camp some cases of biscuits, with alcohol and coal oil, we started again landward, going over the trail made by the advance party. At oneP. M.we came up with them. They were halted by a huge conglomeration of raftered ice tossed up by the storm which had delayed us at Shipwreck Camp. The rafters were from twenty-five to a hundred feet high and ran directly across our path, parallel to the land, and extending in either direction as far as the eye could reach. Viewed from an ice pinnacle high enough to give a clear sight across in the direction of the land the mass of broken ice looked to be at least three miles wide. To get around it was clearly out of the question; an attempt to do so might lead us no one knew whither. Clearly it was a case for hard labor, to build a road across it practicable for sledging; I had seen similar apparently impassible ice on our polar trips but never anything worse. At three o’clock, therefore, I told all hands to set to work building igloos and said that to-morrow we wouldbegin with pickaxes to make a road across the rafters. While they were building the igloos I made a reconnaissance ahead for some distance, returning about dark. We had no thermometer, so that we could not tell the exact temperature, but from the condition of the coal oil, which was very thick and viscid, it must have been between forty-five and fifty-five below zero. It was excellent weather for sledging, fine, clear and calm, if the going had only been good.
March 1, at daylight, I sent back Chafe and Mamen, with an empty sledge and ten dogs, to bring up all the oil, biscuit and alcohol that remained at the sixth camp. They returned with a well-laden sledge, late in the afternoon. I discovered during the day that Malloch and Maurer had frozen their feet, a thing which caused them a good deal of suffering and me a good deal of anxiety. Men with frozen feet are seriously handicapped and make the progress of all difficult until they recover. Fortunately in the present instance the men made known their predicament soon enough to be relieved before dangerously frost-bitten.
At daylight the next morning I sent McKinlay, Hadley and Chafe back over the trail again, to go clear through to Shipwreck Camp with an empty sledge and fourteen dogs. They were to bringback the Peary sledge that we had left there and full loads of pemmican, biscuit and tea.
Our work at road-making which we had begun the day before, was progressing steadily. It was cold, seemingly endless labor, for almost every foot of the trail had to be hewn out of the ice to make a path three or four feet wide, smoothed off enough to permit our sledges to be drawn over it without being smashed. By three o’clock in the afternoon we had got over the first big chain of ridges and on to a small level floe. We were still far from the other side of the great rafters but by working diligently could feel that we had accomplished something at last. We worked on a little too long before starting back to camp and darkness was almost upon us. So I asked the cook to go back to camp while the rest of us were finishing our day’s work and tell Keruk and Malloch and Maurer that we were coming and wanted to have hot tea ready for us as soon as we got back. Malloch and Maurer had been compelled by their frozen feet to rest for the time being, though they insisted that they be allowed to do their share of the work and I almost had to use force to keep them quiet.
The rest of us finally knocked off work and made our way back over the rather tortuous road but when we reached camp no preparations had been made to give us our much-needed tea and on inquiryI found that Templeman had not turned up. It was now almost dark and I was a good deal concerned about his absence, for though a splendid cook and as willing a worker as a man could be, he was not strong enough to withstand for very long the hardships that would surround him if he were lost on the ice. I set out to look for him and we fired off guns and shouted and altogether made all the noise we could to attract his attention. Finally to my great relief I saw him floundering through the snow on a big floe about a quarter of a mile from the camp. My revulsion of feeling was like that of an anxious parent who thinks his youngster has gone off and got lost and then discovers him making his way homeward. In the parable the prodigal son receives the fatted calf; in practice I fear that most errant youngsters receive a sound spanking and perhaps do not suspect until years later that this disguises a tremendous feeling of joy, which expresses itself perversely in punishment for recklessness and warnings “never to do it again.” So when I espied poor Templeman my first impulse was to berate him soundly for wandering from the narrow, though none too straight, path back to camp but when I got near enough to see that he was wading through snow, into which he sank to the waist at every step, and had had the good sense to keep his pickaxe with him, though hewas by this time barely able to carry it, my heart smote me and I relented. Templeman said he was sorry he had gone astray but that he had really wanted to do a little scouting by himself. That is the worst temptation in the Arctic; when you send a man out by himself he may go astray and when he realizes that he has lost his way, instead of attempting to retrace his steps, he continues on. I was delighted to see Templeman and to know that he was safely with us again.
At daylight the next morning the chief engineer and I began sledging supplies over the road already built from the camp to the level floe in the midst of the rafters. The rest of the party continued the road-building beyond the floe. We made three trips, with two sledges and eight dogs, and made a good beginning at the transportation of our supplies on the way towards land. We saw several bear tracks and some seal holes in the ice. I sent Kerdrillo and Kataktovick on through the rafters, to report on ice conditions; they found that the going got better as they got further across the rafters which, where we were working, were like a small mountain range. Building a road across them was like making the Overland Trail through the Rockies.
I have always regretted that I took no photographshere but somehow when the light was good enough and I had the time, my camera would be back in camp and when I had my camera with me we would be on the march and I had no time to play photographer. Taking pictures was no sinecure on this trip, anyway, because the cold seemed to affect the shutter and the unrolling of the films. If George Borup had been with us as he was with Peary on our North Pole trip, what a great collection of photographs he could have taken!
March 4, at about fourP. M., we finished working through the rafter and came out on the smoother ice on its landward side. Mamen, Kataktovick and I spent the day sledging supplies across from the camp on the farther side and when the road was finished we all went back for the last load. It was not until eightP. M.that we had all our supplies at the new camp and we had to do the last of the work in the dark; the Eskimo had built three igloos while we were sledging. It had taken us four days to get across a distance of three miles. From the shore side it was easy to see the basis of the formation of such rafters. A storm causes the moving ice to smash against and slide over the still ice and the pressure of the “irresistible force meeting the immovable body” throws the ice into fantastic, mountainous formations that are as weirdas that astounding picture of Chaos before the Creation that used to ornament the first volume of Ridpath’s “History of the World.”
At daylight on March 5 I sent Munro and a party back across the three miles of raftered ice to meet the McKinlay party who were about due back from Shipwreck Camp. Munro and the others could guide and help them across the difficult road we had made. While they were gone I took Kataktovick and laid out a trail towards the land for the next day’s march. Now for the first time since we left Shipwreck Camp, we got a view of Wrangell Island; it was high and we seemed almost under it. The air was exceptionally clear and the land looked close to us.
Munro and his party did not get back until long after dark. They had reached our last camp across the raftered ice and not finding McKinlay and the others there had continued on the back trail, hoping to meet them. They went on as far as they could go without being compelled to stay out all night, and then came back, because they had no sleeping-robes and would have had a poor night of it, besides being obliged to build an igloo. They were wise in knowing when they had gone far enough; Munro showed his usual good judgment.
Our progress in to the island was retarded by the necessity of keeping along with us as large aquantity of supplies as possible. This meant relaying supplies, because the going was bad and made sledging difficult, with the small number of dogs we had. On the sixth, as soon as the first streak of light appeared, I sent Munro and his party back again to meet the McKinlay party, while I took Kataktovick and Kerdrillo and went ahead towards the island, road-making with our pickaxes. Munro had told me that when he first saw the three-mile belt of raftered ice, he never thought for a moment that we should ever get through it. Any novice certainly had a right to feel discouraged; it was as tough a job as I ever tackled. We now picked our way—I might almost say pick-axed our way—across the ice from our last camp for a distance of seven miles until we came to a large, heavy floe, which would make a good place for a new camp; here we threw off the light loads which we had brought on two of the Peary sledges and returned to camp. At half past four the McKinlay party came in, convoyed by Munro and his party. McKinlay and his companions had gone clear back to Shipwreck Camp and brought in six cases of dog pemmican, sixteen cases of Hudson’s Bay pemmican, thirty gallons of gasoline, and some hatchets and snow-knives. They had left at the first camp from Shipwreck Camp four cases of Underwood dog pemmican and ten tins of Hudson’s Bay pemmican,for they already had too heavy loads to bring them.
They said that the day before, as the darkness was coming on, they had come to the conclusion that they would be unable to reach the big camp near the raftered ice before night, so they had decided to stop where they were and build an igloo, while there was still light enough to see. They were busily at work, cutting out snow-blocks and piling them up, when suddenly three bears came upon them, evidently the same ones whose tracks we had seen on our march. One of the bears got between them and the sledge which bore their rifles. They made noise enough, however, to frighten this bear and start all three running away; then they sprang for their rifles and shot the bears on the run.
The next morning, therefore, I sent McKinlay, Hadley and Mamen back to bring up the bear meat. The rest of us sledged supplies along the shoreward way, Kataktovick and I walking on ahead to blaze the trail. We had a continuation of the fine weather and low temperature. I suppose it was about forty or fifty below zero. We sledged a good part of the supplies along to the new camp on the big floe and built igloos there. The next day we continued the work, Kataktovick picking the trail. At first it was rough going but after a time it became a little better and we moved all our suppliesten miles nearer the land, returning to the igloos on the big floe for the night. We found that at one of the temporary caches along the way two bears had destroyed a case of coal oil and scattered two tins of biscuit over the ice.
It was hard luck, after getting the oil so near the island, to have bears to contend with in addition to the elements, especially as our dogs were not trained to follow a bear, so that there was no use trying to go after them. A polar bear has a very acute sense of smell and can scent a human being in plenty of time to get away from him, and as a bear can go faster than a man it can escape easily, unless the hunter has dogs trained from puppy-hood to follow a bear and round him up, the way the dogs of Greenland can do. Of the bears that the McKinlay party shot the meat was simply cut off the bones, to have no useless weight to carry and some of it was cached on the ice, with the skins, and the rest brought with us. We expected to be able to get it later on but never did because we did not go back over the trail again, and we expected to get more bears on our way to the island.
On the tenth we kept up the task of sledging the supplies forward. We worked from daylight to dark, some with pickaxes, others with sledges with light loads, for the going was rough. The Eskimo built the igloos and by night we had allour supplies up, Munro, Mamen and myself getting in with the last load just at dark.
The going was bad nearly all the way along here. Kataktovick and I were off at the first crack of dawn picking the trail for the others to follow with their pickaxes and their lightly loaded sledges. It was necessary for us to make fairly good loads, for a white man can not handle a sledge as deftly as an Eskimo can and we had not enough Eskimo to drive all the sledges even if they had been free from the work of trail-making and building igloos.
We made about seven miles during the day. Sometimes we had to get the sledges up on a ridge fifty feet high with an almost sheer drop on the other side. When we came to such rough places we would harness all the dogs to a sledge and all of us who could get a hand on it would help push the sledge. When we got the sledge up to the top we would run a rope from it to another sledge down below and as the first sledge went down the other side it would pull the second sledge up.