Which is the way home? Why don't we start? How soon are we going to
have our suppers?"
The pan was sinking: it could not hold them all. They must get off it
at the earliest possible moment. This pan was nearer the shore than
the one they had left, but all the time an offshore wind was shoving
the entire ice-pack steadily out toward the open sea, so that, like
the frog in the well, for every foot they gained they were losing two
or three. All this time, Grenfell was longing for a chance to swim
ashore--and the dogs would have followed him in that. Grenfell doesn't
in the least mind a bath in icy waters. I remember one nipping day on
the _Strathcona_ I came out on deck to find that he had just been
taking his bath in the open by emptying the bucket over himself in
the biting wind. "You could have had one too," he said, "but I've just
lost the bucket overboard." I wonder that he didn't dive for it, as he
dived for the cricket-ball on that earlier occasion.
It was impossible to swim ashore from the pan--because there was that
slushy "sish" filling all the gaps. The tiny table-top on which they
were now crowded together measured about ten by twelve feet. It was
not even solid ice--it was more like a great snowball loosely packed
by the cold wind--and at any moment under the extra strain of the
weight of men and dogs it might break up and let them all down into a
watery grave. As the wind became more brisk and the sea grew rougher,
the pan rocked about and bent and swayed, and the risk of its parting
in the middle increased.
The pan headed toward a rocky point, where heavy surf was breaking:
and a hope sprang up in Grenfell's heart that he might get near enough
to swim ashore after all. But then the worst possible thing happened,
short of an utter break-up. The pan hit a rock, and a large piece of
it broke off. Then the rest of it swung round and the wind took hold
of it, like a fiend alive, and started to push it steadily out to sea
again.
The sea has been compared to a cat, which in calm weather purrs at
your feet and in a storm will reveal its true nature and crack your
bones and eat you. Now it was cruelly teasing Grenfell and his
four-footed comrades as a cat tortures a mouse before it kills. The
last hope seemed to have gone--unless someone by a miracle should pass
along the shore and spy that tiny object on the horizon, and summon
others to help him launch a boat to the rescue.
But no one lives on the shore of that huge bay. The other sled by now
was so far ahead that it would be a long time before those with it
could come back to make a search, even after they felt sufficiently
alarmed to do so.
Cold and keen and marrow-searching, the brutal west wind--the worst of
all in the spring of the year--moaned and whistled over the ice to the
benumbed Doctor, and an additional exasperation was the fact that the
komatik, from which he had been compelled to cut the dogs loose, had
bobbed up to the surface again, and could now be seen not fifty yards
away, but just as un-get-atable as if it were a mile off. There it
stood to tantalize him, in the slush, and he knew that it had aboard
everything he now wanted so acutely. There were dry clothes, wood and
matches to make a signal fire, food and even a thermos bottle with hot
tea!
The slender hope of being seen from the shore diminished as Grenfell
thought of how inconspicuous he was, nearly naked, his dogs about him.
Crusoe alone on his isle of solid ground was a king of space by
comparison. Should he escape it would be the first time that a man
adrift on the offshore ice had come ashore to tell the tale. Nearly
anybody gazing seaward--even if anybody saw--would say: "Oh, that's
just a piece of kelp or a bush!" The wiseacres refuse to be fooled by
such sights. They are like the Arabs of the desert, who refuse to get
excited over a mirage.
That he might not freeze to death before he drowned, Grenfell cut off
those long top boots down to their moccasin feet, split the legs, and
managed to tie them together into a makeshift for a jacket which at
least protected his back from the fiercest biting of the wind.
Presently as Grenfell watched the widening interval between himself
and the island he had left so comfortably a few hours before, he saw
the komatik with its load up-end and vanish through the ice, as though
it grew tired of waiting for him to make a try for it. The
disappearance was one more sign of the general break-up of the ice on
all sides of him, as his frail ice-pan neared the wide-open mouth of
the bay. The white plain over which he had trudged from the island
with the dogs had almost disappeared. The island was evidently
surrounded on all sides by water and "sish," so that even if he could
get back to it he would be cut off from the shore.
There were eight dogs on the pan. Slowly, slowly he was making up his
mind to the hardest of all decisions. It was a choice between his own
life and the lives of some of the animals he loved so well.
X
A FIGHT WITH THE SEA
No boat could come out from the shore through the sort of sea that was
now running. The great pans of ice, rising and falling on the waves,
were crashing and charging into the cliffs alongshore "like medieval
battering-rams," and the white spray dashed high against the rocks
with a sullen roar as of artillery. It would be necessary to skin some
of the dogs and use their pelts for blankets, in order to escape
freezing in the terrible cold of the oncoming night. Imagine how hard
it was for their master to choose which should be slain!
He had the sealskin traces wound about his waist, to keep the hungry
animals from devouring them. He now undid them, and made a hangman's
noose. This he slipped over the head of one of the dogs. Then he threw
the animal on his back, put his foot on his neck, and stabbed him to
the heart. The struggling creature bit his master--a deep gash--in
the leg, but Grenfell kept the knife in the dog till the poor beast
lay still, that the blood might not spurt out and freeze on the skin.
Two more animals were put to death in the same fashion, and one of
them bit him again in the death throes. So violent was the battle that
the Doctor fully expected the pan to break up as they fought, and let
them all into the sea.
With the strange indifference that "huskies" generally show to the
fate of their fellows, the other dogs were licking their coats and
trying to dry themselves. The Doctor had done his best to stifle the
cries of the slain animals, for these would have roused them to a
frenzy and led them to fall upon the under dog, and upon one another
as well, and a general fight at such close quarters would have been
disastrous.
He found himself envying the dead dogs, and wondering whether, when
they came to the open sea, it would not be better to use his knife on
himself than to die, inch by agonizing inch, in the freezing water.
When the dogs were skinned, and the harness had been used to lash the
skins together, it was nearly dark, and they were fully ten miles out
at sea.
To the north he spied a solitary light, twinkling from the village he
had left in the morning. He thought of the fishermen sitting down to
their tea: and he knew they would not think of him as in danger, for
he had told them he would not be back for three days. And all the
"liveyeres" think of Grenfell as a man who knows the coast so well,
and the ways of getting about, that he is far more likely to give help
than to ask it of them.
He had unraveled a small piece of rope, and soaked this in fat from
the entrails of a dog, thinking he might make a torch of it. But his
match-box, which he wore on a chain, had leaked. Fishermen will tell
you how hard it is to find a match-box that will not let in water: I
prize one I have carried a great many years, which seems to be
waterproof. I wish Grenfell had had it then. The matches were a pulp.
Nevertheless Grenfell kept them, thinking that they might be dried and
usable by morning. Every now and then, by a sort of mechanical
instinct, the Doctor would rise to his full height and wave his hands
toward the land, in the forlorn hope of being seen through a powerful
glass.
There was nothing but his hands to wave. He dared not let his shirt
fly as a flag: it would not do to take it off too long at any time,
because of the piercing cold.
Nor would it be safe to pile up snow from the pan to break the force
of the wind, for the pan might give way if it were thinned out
anywhere. So he placed the dog-skins in a pile, sat on them, and
changed his clothes, wringing them out, and flapping them in the wind,
then putting them by turns against his body. The exercise at least
postponed the coming of the last hour of all.
The moccasins let the water through so easily that it was impossible
for him to dry his feet. Then he remembered a trick of the Lapps, who
had been brought over to care for the reindeer which Grenfell was
striving to introduce at St. Anthony in place of the dogs. The Lapps
have a way of tying grass in pads about their feet. On the harness of
the dogs there was flannel, to make it soft where it rubbed against
the flanks. The Doctor cut off the flannel, raveled out the rest of
the rope, stuffed his shoes with the fragments of rope, and wound the
flannel about his legs like puttees. If the situation were not so
serious, he might have laughed at the outfit in which he faced the
night wind, for the Oxford University running trunks and the Richmond
Football Club red, yellow and black stockings were garments he had
worn twenty years before and had recently found in a box of old
clothes.
What was left over of the rope was stuffed inside the flannel shirt
and the trunks, which with the stockings and sweater vest made up the
Doctor's complete costume. Then he made "Doc," his biggest dog, lie
down, so that he might curl up beside him and use him as a kind of
fireless stove. He wrapped the three skins round his body,
and--strange to say--fell asleep. One hand kept warm against "Doc's"
hide, but the other froze,--since the Doctor had lost his gloves. Even
so, Edward Whymper camping out on the volcano Cotopaxi in Ecuador
found his tent too hot on the side next the volcano and too cold on
the other side.
Grenfell awoke, his teeth chattering and his body shivering. He
thought for an instant he was looking at the sunrise, but it was the
moon, and he guessed it must be about half an hour after midnight.
"Doc" didn't at all relish having his slumber disturbed. He was warm
and comfortable, and he growled his remonstrance, deep down in his
throat, till he discovered that it was his master and not another dog
against his cushioned ribs.
For a great mercy, the wind died down, and stopped pushing the ice-pan
out into the dreaded North Atlantic. Just out yonder, not sixty feet
away, was a cake of ice much bigger than his own. It would have made a
fine raft for them all: and if only they could have reached it,
Grenfell was sure he could have held out for two or three days. He
could have killed off the dogs one by one, eaten the flesh, and drunk
the warm blood. The Eskimo would think such a meal luxury. On his
little pan, the effort to kill each dog would mean the risk of
drowning every time.
At daybreak, Grenfell remembered, men would be starting from Goose
Cove with their sleds to go twenty miles to a parade of Orangemen.
With this thought in his mind he fell asleep again. Then he woke with
a sharp realization of the fact that he must have some kind of flag
with which to signal them. He made up his mind that as soon as it was
daylight he would use his shirt for a flag--but the pole was lacking.
So in the dark he wrenched the bodies of the dead dogs apart--an
extremely difficult task with the tough, frozen muscles and fibres.
But he made what he says was "the heaviest and crookedest flagpole it
has ever been my lot to see," lashing the bones together with his bits
of rope and the remains of the seal traces.
By this time he was almost starving, since he had not yet been able to
bring himself to the point of devouring his comrades. His last meal
had been porridge and bread and butter, nearly twenty-four hours
before. Round one leg was a rubber band which had replaced a broken
garter. He chewed on this constantly, and somehow it seemed to help
him from being overcome with hunger and thirst.
No more welcome sight--except that of men to the rescue--could there
have been than the face of the rising sun. When he took off his shirt
to run it up as a flag, he found that it was not so cold as it had
been. His skeleton flagpole as he tried to wave it bent and
buckled--but he found that by means of it he could raise his
shirt-flag three or four feet over his head, and the least additional
height meant much to his slim chance of being spied from the shore.
The wind, too, had been carrying him back toward the shore, at a
rugged point called Ireland Head. Unhappily for the man at sea, the
little fishing-village there was deserted in winter: the people had
shifted, bag and baggage, to another settlement where they could get
teaching for their children and see more of other people.
Now it settled down to a severe endurance test. If Grenfell had been
fresh with comfortable sleep, and well-fed, it might not have been so
serious a business to keep that gruesome "flag" of his waving aloft to
attract the keen eye of someone ashore. But as it was, he must keep
the terribly heavy banner of dog-pelts swinging to and fro with his
strength at a low ebb, and hope barely alive in his heart. Again, his
imagination began to play cruel tricks with him. He thought he saw men
moving: but they were trees blown by the wind. Then to his joy it
seemed that a boat was approaching: he thought he saw it rising and
falling on the waves, as the oars drove it onward. He wanted the boat
to come so much that the wish was father to the thought. Instead--it
was only the glitter of the sun on a block of ice bobbing up and down.
Whenever the Doctor sat down to rest, faithful old "Doc" would lick
his face, and then roam about the ice-pan, coming back again and again
to where the Doctor sat, his eyes and his ears asking: "Well, why
aren't we starting? What is the matter? Isn't it time to be under
way?" On a sunny day on the trail amid ice and snow the "husky" seeks
some good reason for not being in the traces, tugging and hauling with
his mates. The other dogs, following his example, were roaming about,
and sometimes they would bite at the bodies of the slain dogs,
wondering, no doubt, how soon their master would hand out to them the
square meal of fish or seal-meat to which they were accustomed.
For his own midday meal, Grenfell had begun to plan another
killing--that of one of the bigger dogs, whose blood he would drink.
Nansen had to do the same thing, according to the story told in his
book "Farthest North," which Grenfell had been reading only a few days
before. It might be a hard battle to conquer one of the big dogs, as
he himself grew weaker. But fear had not once entered the Doctor's
mind. His uppermost sensation now was a desire to sleep--and if death
came after that, it would only be the answer to a question he had many
times asked himself.
He looked at the precious matches, to see if they were dry. The heads
were a paste, except the blue tips of three or four wax matches. If
the latter could be dried, they might be used. Once I gave Dr.
Grenfell a bottle of the same kind of matches, and he said: "I'd
rather have those than a five-dollar bill." If no air is stirring they
will burn with a tall, strong flame for a minute or more, clean down
to the bottom.
He laid the matches out to dry, and looked about for a piece of
transparent ice which would do for a burning glass. With the tow he
had stuffed into his leggings, and the fat from the slain dogs, he
thought he could produce a plume of smoke to be seen from the land,
if he could get a light. He found a piece of ice which he thought
would serve his purpose, and was just about to wave his "flag" again
when he saw something that made his heart stand still for an instant.
Was it--could it be--the glitter of an oar-blade rising and falling?
But no--it could not be. It was not clear water, but the "slob ice,"
probably too heavy for a rowboat to pierce, which lay between the pan
and the beach. There had been no smoke-signal from the land, no gun
discharged, no fire kindled: one of these things would be sure to
happen, had anybody caught sight of him or of the unwieldy banner that
he had raised aloft so many times.
By this time Grenfell was partly snow-blind, for he had lost his dark
glasses. As he raised his "flag" again, however, it seemed to him that
the glitter was more distinct. It seemed to be coming nearer. With his
hopes now mounting, he lifted the skins as high as he could, and waved
with all his might. Now he could see not only a white oar-blade, but a
black hull. If the pan would hold together an hour more, his rescue
was assured.
Queer tricks the mind of a man will play at such a time. Our boys in
the war thought so much of saving helmets, pistols and belt-buckles
from the battlefields that it has been said the war was fought for
souvenirs. Even in the hospital where they lay suffering with the most
dreadful wounds, they were more anxious for those precious relics than
they were for their own recovery.
And so, coming back out of the jaws of icy death, Grenfell was
thinking: "I wonder what trophies I can save, to take home and put up
in my study." He had a picture in his mind's eye of the dog-bone
flagstaff, hanging over the big fireplace in the living-room at St.
Anthony. (Later, the dogs "beat him to it," and devoured the bones
with relish, as a child would eat candy.) Then he thought how
picturesque those queer puttees would look, hanging on the wall with
snowshoes and lynx-skins. The "burning-glass" was forgotten where it
lay. As a reception-committee of one, rehearsing the speech of
welcome, Grenfell roamed to and fro, with the restlessness of a caged
leopard in the Zoo at feeding-time. They couldn't very well miss him
now--but he could remember harrowing tales he had read when he was a
boy, of a man on a desert island who scanned the horizon many days for
a sail. Then a ship came along, missed the frantic watcher, and sailed
away, leaving him to utter despair. He did not intend that this should
happen to him now. To his delight, he could see that the rescuers by
this time were waving back, in answer to his signals. Presently he
could hear them shouting: "Don't get excited! Keep on the pan where
you are!"
They were far more excited than he was: for it now seemed as natural
to Grenfell to be saved as, a little while before, it had seemed to
perish where so many good men had been swallowed up before him as they
went to their business in great waters. Nearer and nearer they came,
plying the oars valiantly, till the snub nose of the boat was thrust
into the soft edge of the pan, as a dog's muzzle is thrust into a
man's hand.
The man in the bow jumped from the boat and took both of the Doctor's
hands. Neither said a word. At such moments men do not care much to
speak. You remember how Stanley hunted Africa for Livingstone, and in
the thrilling moment when at last the two men came together Stanley
simply walked up to the missionary, put out his hand, and said: "Dr.
Livingstone, I presume?"
But the tears rolled down the cheeks of the honest fisherman, despite
his silence.
The boatmen had brought a bottle of warm tea, and one can imagine how
much good it did Grenfell after going without food and drink so long a
time. The dogs were put in the boat, and strong arms drove the vessel
shoreward. Five big, stalwart Newfoundlanders were at the oars,--all
of them devoted to the Doctor, and rejoicing that they had come in
time to save him. How often, in a dark hour, he had proved himself
their friend! He had turned out in the dead of night to help them and
their families: they knew he was on his way to aid one of their number
now. There was nothing they would not do for him: it would be a small
return for all he had done to earn their gratitude already.
It wasn't all plain rowing, by any means. Now and then the boat would
get jammed in the ice-pack so that they all must clamber out and lift
the stout vessel over the pans. Sometimes men had to stand in the bows
and force the pans apart, using their oars after the fashion of
crowbars. For a long time as they fought onward very little was said.
They were saving their breath for their work. But as they rested on
their oars and mopped their brows with their tattered sleeves,
Grenfell asked: "How under the sun did you happen to be out in the ice
in this boat?"
They said that on the night before four men had gone out on a headland
to get some harp seals which they had left to freeze there during the
winter. As they were starting home, one of them thought he saw an
ice-pan with something on it, drifting out to sea. When they got back
to the village, and told their neighbors, the latter said it must be
just the top of a tree. There was one man in the village who had a
good spy-glass.
He left his supper instantly, and ran out to the edge of the cliffs.
Yes, he said, there was a man out yonder on the ice. He could see him
wave his arms--and he declared it must be the Doctor, who had started
out that morning.
Even though night was falling, and the wind was coming on, they wanted
to launch a boat, but it would have been no use: and they decided to
wait until morning. The sea was taking up the blocks of ice and
hurling them on the beach, just as it used to throw the little
fishing-smacks over the sea-wall at Grenfell's boyhood home.
Messengers went up and down the coast: look-outs were stationed: many
were watching, and some were weeping, all the while that Grenfell
thought nobody saw him and that he was waving in vain.
Before daybreak, these five volunteers had manned the boat. They took
an awful risk in such seething waters. Just a little while before, a
fisherman's wife said good-by to her husband and three sons when they
started to row out toward a ship that was signaling with flags for a
pilot. All four were drowned in spite of their cool and skilful
seamanship.
The people had come from far and near to see the landing. They rushed
into the surf to be the first to shake the Doctor's hands. They seized
them and shook them so heartily that he did not find out till later
that they had been badly frost-bitten. It was not a pretty object the
villagers greeted. Says the Doctor: "I must have been a weird sight as
I stepped ashore, tied up in rags, stuffed out with oakum, wrapped in
the bloody skins of dogs, with no hat, coat, or gloves besides, and
only a pair of short knickers. It must have seemed to some as if it
were the old man of the sea coming ashore."
[Illustration: WHO SAID "HALT"?]
Copious draughts of hot tea, and almost equally liquid Irish stew went
to the right spot. Grenfell as a veteran was wise enough not to eat
too much all at once. That is the danger, after one has been without
food so long.
They dressed Grenfell in the warm clothes fishermen wear, and hauled
him back to the St. Anthony hospital. That ride was no fun at all. The
jolting racked his weary bones and his feet were so frozen that he
could not walk. There, two days later, they brought to him the boy on
whom he was to have operated at his own home. The operation was a
complete success.
The other dogs lived long and pulled the Doctor many leagues on
errands of mercy: but he mourned the loss of the three who perished
that he might survive. I have seen on the glass-enclosed veranda of
the Doctor's home at St. Anthony the brass tablet with its
inscription:
_TO THE MEMORY OF
Three Noble Dogs
MOODY
WATCH
SPY
Whose Lives Were Given
For Mine on the Ice
April 21st, 1908
Wilfred Grenfell
St. Anthony_
The men who came to the rescue wanted no reward. To have the Doctor
back in their midst again was all they desired. But the Doctor
insisted on giving them tokens of his gratitude. As George Andrews
said:
"'E sent us watches, an' spy-glasses, an' pictures o' himself made
large an' in a frame. George Read an' me 'ad th' watches an' th'
others 'ad th' spy-glasses. 'Eere's th' watch. It 'as 'In memory o'
April 21st' on it, but us don't need th' things to make we remember
it, though we're wonderful glad t' 'ave 'em from th' Doctor."
XI
THE KIDNAPPERS
One day, as Grenfell was about to leave northern Labrador in his
little steamer the _Strathcona_, a man came aboard with trouble in his
eyes. It was the good-hearted Hudson's Bay agent.