CHAPTER XXIII
EASTWARD ALONG THE TUNDRA
By the next morning, April 7, we were ready to start on our way. Our clothes were all dried out and in order, our sledge was repaired, our dogs were rested and the dogs and ourselves had had a chance to eat heartily and at our leisure. Before we got away an old woman from one of the other arangas came over and asked us to go to her aranga. We found that she had a lot of dried deer fat or suet, which she considered a great delicacy. She offered us some, with sugar to eat with it, and then her married daughter gave us some tea. She had about eight lumps of sugar left from her winter’s stock. She made signs to ask me if I liked sugar. I said yes and took some with my tea. The way these Siberian Eskimo use their sugar is to take a sip or two of tea and then a bite of the sugar; they do not put the sugar in the tea and stir it up, but eat the sugar and wash it down with tea. The old lady also offered me a pair of deerskin mittens which were very acceptable. I gave her some needles suitable for sewing skins and she was very much pleased with them.
The morning was very bright and fine. We got away at ten o’clock with our four dogs and our sledge, and a native came along with us. He had very little on his sledge, which was small and light, and he rode a good deal. We walked as usual, not wearing our snowshoes where the snow was no deeper than it was along here. The going was pretty good. The sun was shining; there was no wind, but it was very cold. For a while our dogs kept up a good pace but they soon slowed down.
During the afternoon we passed two more arangas where we had some tea. All through the day I had the greatest difficulty in keeping my hands from being frozen; I cannot explain why. I had never had any trouble that way before but now it was only by making the most frantic efforts and keeping constantly alert that I was able to prevent their freezing. The temperature, I should guess, was between fifty and sixty below zero. We travelled along well all day and at sunset built our snow igloo. I was surprised to find that our companion knew nothing about cutting out snow blocks and that with the Siberian Eskimo building a snow igloo was evidently a lost art. On their travels from place to place along the coast they very seldom venture out unless the weather is fine, and they can always reach another aranga by the end of the day, so they have no need, I found,to build their own sleeping-place as we had been accustomed to do.
Our Eskimo had no dog food; he would get some at Cape North, he said. I still had some dog pemmican left; at his aranga he had fed our dogs so that night when I fed our dogs I gave some pemmican to his dog.
It was a great pleasure to sleep that night in our igloo. The air was not foul and close, as it had been in the aranga on the previous night, and we did not have the constant annoyance of coughing going on all around us. Our companion coughed a little when he first turned in but soon left off and we all fell asleep, not waking up until daylight.
The sky was overcast and the wind north when we broke camp at six o’clock the next morning. We could not see very far. As we proceeded along the tundra we found that it became narrower as we approached Cape North. Our Siberian companion was very kind and added his dog to the four still remaining to us. His sledge was hardly larger than a child’s sled in America and we carried it easily on our sledge. By travelling hard all day we found ourselves approaching the settlement at Cape North about sunset. We had made a good two days’ march in spite of the dubious weather and the extreme cold. Low temperatures werenot exactly new to me but for some reason or other I felt the cold along the Siberian coast more acutely than anywhere else in all my Arctic work. There were stretches of shore line, when the wind swept unobstructed across the ice fields from the north, where I was particularly sensitive; I had no thermometer, but judging from the condition of the coal oil and comparing the general effect of the air upon my skin and its particular tendency to freeze my face and hands, I should say that the temperature was at least sixty below zero.
When we were crossing the smooth ice at the entrance to the small harbor at Cape North our guide pointed to one of the arangas on the opposite shore and made signs that we were to go there. It was nearly dark but we could see that there were eleven arangas altogether and we made our way towards the one which he pointed out. Presently we met some natives. Without hesitation they seized my arm and conducted me over to the aranga towards which we had been heading. Outside of the aranga awaiting my coming, was a very tall man, muffled up in furs. I had an idea that he was a white man so I asked, “Do you speak English?”
“Some little,” he replied, and unwrapped the furs somewhat from around his face; I saw that he was a Russian.
“One man he speak more English,” he added.
In a moment another Russian came along; his ability to speak English intelligibly proved to be less than the first man’s. By paying careful attention to what he was saying I was able to tell approximately what he was trying to say, and thus we managed to surmount the barrier of language. I gathered that he had been a longshoreman in Seattle and that he knew that Mr. Taft had been president of the United States. He asked me, in fact, if I knew him.
While we were standing there Kataktovick came up and asked me what he should do.
“You take out the dogs,” I said, “and come with me.”
In the excitement at seeing a white stranger come along in this unexpected way no one thought for the moment of asking us to come into the aranga; there was no intentional inhospitality—they all simply forgot to do the honors.
After a few more attempts at conversation between the Russians and myself, a native came along and said, “You old man?”
His question puzzled me at first; presently it dawned on me that he was speaking in nautical parlance and wanted to know if I was a captain. “Yes,” I replied.
“You come below in my cabin, old man,” he said, meaning that I was to go into his aranga.
I followed him and we entered his aranga together. Cold as it was outside, the air inside was very warm, too warm for comfort. There were a good many people there. Talking with my host as best I could I learned that at one time he had lived at East Cape and had met some of the whalers there in the days when Arctic whaling was still a big industry; he had been aboard of them and knew their names.
“Me knowKarluk,” he said, in reply to a question of mine. “Me on boardKarlukwhen she whale.”
He was surprised to think that we were on a whaling voyage and I explained to him by the chart what we were trying to do and where we had been when the ship went down. He understood a good deal of what I told him and was able to understand a little of Kataktovick’s language, but I could see that he was much surprised when he realized that we had walked all the way from Shipwreck Camp to get to the land. He seemed to have an idea that this was a great feat. I explained to him that Kataktovick was with me and built our igloos and killed seal and bear, and that an Eskimo and a white man could live indefinitely on the ice.
While we were talking and I was having some tea and seal meat the first of the two Russians thatwe had met came in and at his invitation I went with him back to his aranga. Here we had a genuine meal—Russian bread, salmon, tea and milk. I explained to him what we were doing and how the ship was lost. At East Cape, he said, he had a brother who would look after us and make us comfortable; he gave me a letter of introduction to his brother. Their name was Caraieff. As for himself he was bound further westward on a trading trip to Cape Jakan. In ten days he would be back again at Cape North and he urged me to wait until then; he had two fine teams of dogs that would be of great assistance to us. I declined his invitation, however, for I was anxious to get on and had an idea that after I got to East Cape I should go to Anadyr and send my message to Ottawa from the Russian wireless station there, mentioned on my chart. If I had known enough about the Siberian coast I could have gone direct from Cape North to Anadyr southeast across the Chukchi Peninsula in about the time that it took me to get from Cape North to East Cape.
I spent a very comfortable night in the aranga occupied by Mr. Caraieff. It was rather warm but I shed some of my clothing and lay down on a deer-skin, spread out on the bed-platform. Mr. Caraieff and I attempted to converse before dropping off to sleep but he spoke very little English andI no Russian whatever, so I am afraid neither gathered much information about the other.
I have often wondered at the courteous willingness of the Russians and Chukches whom we met along our way to take entirely for granted our presence among them. They showed no impertinent curiosity and did not subject us to any unpleasant inquisition; they required no custom-house examination, no passports, no letters of recommendation! We were not traders, yet we were obviously strangers with strange travelling gear, and it was hardly likely that we were taking a walk for our health. In more than one semicivilized country shipwrecked mariners have from the earliest times been considered fair prey for the natives. We had our charts, to be sure, but shipwrecked mariners who go ashore driving a team of dogs are not common, even in the Arctic. Yet all the way along we were received without question, greeted hospitably, made comfortable and guided on our way with no consideration of payment; we might have been city cousins visiting around among country relatives.
Cape North, which was first seen and named by the famous English voyager, Captain Cook, in theResolution, in 1778, is a point of considerable importance on the Siberian coast. Of the eleven arangas several were occupied by deer men, themen who look after herds of reindeer in the interior and come out to the coast at intervals to exchange their reindeer meat for seal and walrus meat, and for blubber for their oil lamps. Baron Kleist, whom I met later on at East Cape, told me that he had been in reindeer camps where two men owned four thousand reindeer. He had seen these men out in the open, under the necessity of looking after their herds constantly day and night for thirty-six hours, without shelter of any kind, and their faces, he said, were literally burned black from the frost and wind.
Before we went to sleep that night, Mr. Caraieff made tea, and as he had sugar and milk for it and some Russian bread to eat we had a very pleasant supper party. The Chukch who owned the aranga had a four-year-old grandson who ate his share of decayed walrus meat and drank his full allowance of tea with four lumps of sugar for each small cupful.
My eyes were affected a good deal by the irritation of the overheated atmosphere, with its almost complete lack of ventilation. I found occasional relief by lifting the edge of the curtain and letting the cold air play upon my eyes. The temperature out-of-doors was about fifty below zero and bitterly cold, much more so, Mr. Caraieff said, than we should find it nearer East Cape.
When I put my head outside of the aranga, about seven o’clock the next morning, I found that the wind was blowing almost a hurricane from the west and sweeping the snow into heavy drifts. Mr. Caraieff told me that he would be unable to travel against it but as it would be at our backs I decided to start. For breakfast I went around to the aranga occupied by the other Russian and made a first rate meal of frozen bear meat, flapjacks and cocoa, topping off with three pipefuls of American tobacco. About ten o’clock we started on our way. We had not gone far before the weather cleared and the wind died down, so that we had a beautiful, clear, cold day and made good progress along the tundra. At sunset we built our igloo, had our pemmican and some deer meat that Kataktovick had procured at Cape North and turned in. Long since we had used up our supply of ship’s biscuit, most of which had got damaged beyond use by salt water on the way across the ice from Wrangell Island.
At daylight on April 10 we left our igloo and by the time we got away the sun had risen. It was a fine, clear day, with a light easterly wind, which was very cold. Kataktovick complained of his hands and feet and I suffered a good deal of pain in my arms. The dogs were working badly and were able to travel only with the greatest difficulty,though our sledge-load was getting lighter and lighter as the days went by.
At noon we came to a place where there were two arangas. The men were all away, gathering driftwood. I tried to make the women understand that I wanted a dog. I pointed to our dogs and held up four fingers, then I took one of the dogs and held its head down as if to indicate that three of our dogs were practically dead. I held up one finger and pointed to show that I wanted one more dog. The women failed to understand this lucid pantomime, for which I could hardly blame them, and we proceeded on our way, hopeful that we could find another aranga where we could make our needs intelligible.