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 the _Karluk_. 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 moderately successful, 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 the water 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 the _Fram_ to 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 we had 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 does freeze 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.