My Attainment of the Pole Part 26

THE RETURN--A BATTLE FOR LIFE AGAINST FAMINE AND FROST

TURNED BACKS TO THE POLE AND TO THE SUN--THE DOGS, SEEMINGLY GLAD AND SEEMINGLY SENSIBLE THAT THEIR NOSES WERE POINTED HOMEWARD, BARKED SHRILLY--SUFFERING FROM INTENSE DEPRESSION--THE DANGERS OF MOVING ICE, OF STORMS AND SLOW STARVATION--THE THOUGHT OF FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES TO LAND CAUSES DESPAIR

XXI

SOUTHWARD OVER THE MID-POLAR SEA

With few glances backward, we continued the homeward run in haste, crossing many new creva.s.ses and bound on a course along the one hundredth meridian.

The eagerness to solve the mystery had served its purpose. The memory of the adventure for a time remained as a reminder of reckless daring. As we now moved along, there came more and more strongly the realization of the prospective difficulties of the return. Although the mercury was still frozen and the sun's perpetual flush was lost in a frigid blue, the time was at hand in lower lat.i.tudes for the ice to break and drift southward.

With correct reasoning, all former expeditions had planned to return to land and a secure line of retreat by May 1. We could not hope to do this until early in June. It seemed probable, therefore, that the ice along the outskirts of the Polar sea would be much disrupted and that open water, small ice and rapid drifts would seriously interfere with our return to a sure footing on the sh.o.r.es of Fridtjof Nansen Sound. This and many other possible dangers had been carefully considered before, but the conquest of the Pole was not possible without such risks.

We had started earlier than all other Polar expeditions and no time had been lost en route. If misfortune came to us, it could not be because of wasted energies or unnecessary delay. In the last days of the onward rush to success there had been neither time nor opportunity to ponder over future dangers, but now, facing the southern skies, under which lay home and all for which we lived, the back trail seemed indescribably long. In cold, sober thought, freed of the intoxication of Polar enthusiasm, the difficulties increasingly darkened in color. We clearly saw that the crucial stage of the campaign was not the taking of the Pole. The test of our fitness as boreal conquerors was to be measured by the outcome of a final battle for life against famine and frost.

Figuring out the difficulties and possibilities of our return, I came to the conclusion that to endeavor to get back by our upward trail would not afford great advantage. Much time would be lost seeking the trail.

The almost continuous low drift of snow during some part of nearly every day would obliterate our tracks and render the trail useless as a beaten track in making travel easier. The advantage of previously constructed snow houses as camps did not appeal to us.

After one is accustomed to a new, clean, bright dome of snow every night, as we were, the return to such a camp is gloomy and depressing.

The house is almost invariably left in such a shape that, for hygienic reasons alone, it should not be occupied. Furthermore, the influence of sun and storm absolutely destroys in a few days two out of three of all such shelter places. Moreover, we were now camping in our silk tent and did not require other shelter. At the season of the year in which we were traveling, the activity of the pack farther south made back-tracking impossible, because of irregular lateral drift of individual fields. And to me the most important reason was an eager desire to ascertain what might be discovered on a new trail farther west. It was this eagerness which led to our being carried adrift and held prisoners for a year.

The first days, however, pa.s.sed rapidly. The ice fields became smoother.

On April 24 we crossed five creva.s.ses. With fair weather and favorable ice, long marches were made. On the 24th we made sixteen miles, on the 25th fifteen miles, on the 26th, 27th and 28th, fourteen miles a day.

The fire of the homing sentiment began to dispel our overbearing fatigue. The dogs sniffed the air. The Eskimos sang songs of the chase.

To me also there came cheering thoughts of friends and loved ones to be greeted. I thought of delightful dinners, of soul-stirring music. For all of us, the good speed of the return chase brought a mental atmosphere of dreams of the pleasures of another world. For a time we were blinded to ultimate dangers, just as we had been in the northward dash.

In our return along the one hundredth meridian, there were three important objects to be gained by a route somewhat west of the northward march. The increasing easterly drift would thus be counterbalanced. We hoped to get near enough to the new lands to explore a part of the coast. And a wider belt would be swept out of the unknown area. On April 30 the pedometer registered one hundred and twenty-one miles, and by our system of dead reckoning, which was usually correct, we should have been at lat.i.tude 87, 59', longitude 100. The nautical observations gave lat.i.tude 88, 1', longitude 97, 42'. We were drifting eastward, therefore, with increasing speed. To counterbalance our being moved by this drift, we turned and bounded southward in a more westerly course.

The never-changing sameness of the daily routine was again felt. The novelty of success and the pa.s.sion of the run for the goal were no longer operative. The scenes of shivering blue wearied the eye, and there was no inspiration in the moving sea of ice to gladden the heart.

The thermometer rose and fell between 30 and 40 below zero, Fahrenheit, with a ceaseless wind. The first of May was at hand, bringing to mind the blossoms and smiles of a kindly world. But here all nature was narrowed to lines of ice.

May 1 came with increasing color in the sunbursts, but without cheer.

The splendor of terrestrial fire was a cheat. Over the horizon, mirages displayed celestial hysterics. The sun circled the skies in lines of glory, but its heat was a sham, its light a torment. The ice was heavy and smooth. On May 2, clouds obscured the sky, fog fell heavily over the ice, we struck our course with difficulty but made nineteen miles. On May 3 snow fell, but the end of the march brought clear skies, and, with them, the longing for my land of blossoming cherry and apple trees.

With weary nerves, and with compa.s.s in hand, my lonely march ahead of the sledges continued day by day. Progress was satisfactory. We had pa.s.sed the eighty-ninth and eighty-eighth parallels. The eighty-seventh and the eighty-sixth would soon be under foot, and the sight of the new lands should give encouragement. These hard-fought times were days long to be remembered. The lack of cerebral stimulation and nutrition left no cellular resource to aid the memory of those fateful hours of chill.

The long strain of the march had established a brotherly sympathy amongst the trio of human strugglers. The dogs, though still possessing the savage ferocity of the wolf, had taken us into their community. We now moved among them without hearing a grunt of discord, and their sympathetic eyes followed until we were made comfortable on the cheerless snows. If they happened to be placed near enough, they edged up and encircled us, giving the benefit of their animal heat. To remind us of their presence, frost-covered noses were frequently pushed under the sleeping bag, and occasionally a cold snout touched our warm skin with a rude awakening.

We loved the creatures, and admired their superb brute strength. Their superhuman adaptability was a frequent topic of conversation. With a pelt that was a guarantee against all weather condition, they threw themselves down to the sweep of winds, in open defiance of death-dealing storms. Eating but a pound of pemmican a day, and demanding neither water nor shelter, they willingly did a prodigious amount of work and then, as bed-fellows, daily offered their fur as shelter and their bones as head-rests to their two-footed companions. We had learned to appreciate the advantage of their beating b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The bond of animal fellowship had drawn tighter and tighter in a long run of successive adventures. And now there was a stronger reason than ever to appreciate power, for together we were seeking an escape from a world which was never intended for creatures with pulsating hearts.

Much very heavy ice was crossed near the eighty-eighth parallel, but the endless unbroken fields of the northward trails were not again seen. Now the weather changed considerably. The light, cutting winds from the west increased in force, and the spasmodic squalls came at shorter intervals.

The clear purples and blues of the skies gradually gave place to an ugly hue of gray. A rush of frosty needles came over the pack for several hours each day.

The inducement to seek shelter in cemented walls of snow and to wait for better weather was very great. But such delay would mean certain starvation. Under fair conditions, there was barely food enough to reach land, and even short delays might seriously jeopardize our return. We could not, therefore, do otherwise than force ourselves against the wind and drift with all possible speed, paying no heed to unavoidable suffering. As there was no alternative, we tried to persuade ourselves that existing conditions might be worse than they were.

The hard work of igloo building was now a thing of the past--only one had been built since leaving the Pole, and in this a precious day was lost, while the atmospheric fury changed the face of the endless expanse of desolation. The little silk tent protected us sufficiently from the icy airs. There were still 50 of frost, but, with hardened skins and insensible nerve filaments, the torture was not so keenly felt. Our steady diet of pemmican, tea and biscuits was not entirely satisfactory.

We longed for enough to give a real filling sense, but the daily ration had to be slightly reduced rather than increased. The change in life from winter to summer, which should take place at about this time of the year, was, in our case, marked only by a change in shelter, from the snow house to the tent, and our beds were moved from the soft snow shelf of the igloo to the hard, wind-swept crust.

In my watches to get a peep of the sun at just the right moment, I was kept awake during much of the resting period. For pastime, my eyes wandered from snorting dogs to snoring men. During one of these idle moments there came a solution of the utility of the dog's tail, a topic with which I had been at play for several days. It is quoted here at the risk of censure, because it is a typical phase of our lives which cannot be ill.u.s.trated otherwise. Seeming trivialities were seized upon as food for thought. Why, I asked, has the dog a tail at all? The bear, the musk ox, the caribou and the hare, each in its own way, succeeds very well with but a dwarfed stub. Why does nature, in the dog, expend its best effort in growing the finest fur over a seemingly useless line of tail bones? The thing is distinctive, and one could hardly conceive of the creature without the accessory, but nature in the Arctic does not often waste energy to display beauties and temperament. This tail must have an important use; otherwise it would soon fall under the knife of frost and time. Yes! It was imported into the Arctic by the wolf progenitor of the dog from warmer lands, where its swing served a useful purpose in fly time. A nose made to breathe warm air requires some protection in the far north and the dog supplied the need with his tail. At the time when I made this discovery a cold wind, charged with cutting crystal, was brushing the pack. Each dog had his back arched to the wind and his face veiled with an effective curl of his tail. Thus each was comfortably shielded from icy torment by an appendage adapted to that very purpose.

In the long tread over snowy wastes new lessons in human mechanism aroused attention. At first the effort to find a workable way over the troublesome pack surface had kept mind and body keyed to an exciting pitch, but slowly this had changed. By a kind of unconscious intuition, the eye now found easy routes, the lower leg mechanically traveled over yards and miles and degrees without even consulting the brain, while the leg trunk, in the effort to conserve energy, was left in repose at periods during miles of travel, thus saving much of the exertion of walking.

The muscles, thus schooled to work automatically, left the mind free to work and play. The maddening monotone of our routine, together with the expenditure of every available strain of force, had left the head dizzy with emptiness. Something must be done to lift the soul out of the boreal bleach.

The power of the mind over the horse-power of the body was here shown at its best. The flesh proved loyal to the gray matter only while mental entertainment was encouraged. Thus aching muscles were persuaded to do double duty without sending up a cry of tired feeling. The play of the mind with topics of its own choosing is an advantage worth seeking at all times. But, to us, it multiplied vital force and increased greatly the daily advance. Science, art and poetry were the heights to which the wings of thought soared. Beginning with the diversion of making curious speculations on subjects such as that of the use of the dog's tail and the Arctic law of animal coloring, the first period of this mental exercise closed with my staging a drama of the comedies and tragedies of the Eskimos.

In the effort to frame sentiment in measured lines, a weird list of topics occupied my strained fancy. In more agreeable moods I always found pleasure in imagining a picture of the Polar sunrise, that budding period of life when all Nature awakens after its winter sleep. It was not difficult to start E-tuk-i-shook and Ah-we-lah on similar flights of fancy. A mere suggestion would keep up a flow of agreeable thought for several days.

By such forced mental stimuli the centers of fatigue were deluded into insensibility. The eighty-seventh parallel was crossed, the eighty-sixth was neared, but there came a time when both mind and body wearied of the whole problem of forced resolution.

On May 6 we were stopped at six in the morning by the approach of an unusual gale. The wind had been steady and strong all night, but we did not heed its threatening increase of force until too late. It came from the west, as usual, driving coa.r.s.e snow with needle points. The ice about was old and hummocky, offering a difficult line of march, but some shelter. In the strongest blasts we threw ourselves over the sled behind hummocks and gathered new breath to force a few miles more.

Finally, when no longer able to force the dogs through the blinding drift we sought the lee of an unlifted block of ice. Here suitable snow was found for a snow house. A few blocks were cut and set, but the wind swept them away as if they were chips. The tent was tried, but it could not be made to stand in the rush of the roaring tumult. In sheer despair we crept into the tent without erecting the pole. Creeping into bags, we then allowed the flapping silk to be buried by the drifting snow. Soon the noise and discomfort of the storm were lost and we enjoyed the comfort of an icy grave. An efficient breathing hole was kept open, and the wind was strong enough to sweep off the weight of a dangerous drift.

A new lesson was thus learned in fighting the battle of life, and it was afterwards useful.

Several days of icy despair now followed one another in rapid succession. The wind did not rise to the full force of a storm, but it was too strong and too cold to travel. The food supply was noticeably decreasing. The daily advance was less. With such weather, starvation seemed inevitable. Camp was moved nearly every day, but ambition sank to the lowest ebb. To the atmospheric unrest was added the instability of broken ice and the depressing mystery of an unknown position. For many days no observations had been possible. Our location could only be guessed at.

Through driving storms, with the wind wailing in our ears and deafening us to the dismal howling of the hungry dogs, we pushed forward in a daily maddening struggle. The route before us was unknown. We were in the fateful clutch of a drifting sea of ice. I could not guess whither we were bound. At times I even lost hope of reaching land. Our bodies were tired. Our legs were numb. We were almost insensible to the mad craving hunger of our stomachs. We were living on a half ration of food, and daily becoming weaker.[17]

Sometimes I paused, overcome by an almost overwhelming impulse to lie down and drift through sleep into death. At these times, fortunately, thoughts of home came thronging, with memories as tender as are the memories of singing spring-time birds in winter time. And, although the stimulating incentive of reaching the Pole on going north was gone, now, having accomplished the feat, there was always the thought that unless I got home no one should ever learn of that superhuman struggle, that final victory.

Empty though it was, I had, as I had hoped, proved myself to myself; I had justified the three centuries of human effort: I had proven that finite human brain and palpitating muscle can be victorious over a cruel and death-dealing Nature. It was a testimony that it was my duty to give the world of struggling, striving men, and which, as a father, I hoped with pride to give to my little children.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PTARMIGAN]

BACK TO LIFE AND BACK TO LAND

THE RETURN--DELUDED BY DRIFT AND FOG--CARRIED ASTRAY OVER AN UNSEEN DEEP--TRAVEL FOR TWENTY DAYS IN A WORLD OF MISTS, WITH THE TERROR OF DEATH--AWAKENED FROM SLEEP BY A HEAVENLY SONG--THE FIRST BIRD--FOLLOWING THE WINGED HARBINGER--WE REACH LAND--A BLEAK, BARREN ISLAND POSSESSING THE CHARM OF PARADISE--AFTER DAYS VERGING ON STARVATION, WE ENJOY A FEAST OF UNCOOKED GAME

XXII

SOUTHWARD INTO THE AMERICAN ARCHIPELAGO

On May 24 the sky cleared long enough to permit me to take a set of observations. I found we were on the eighty-fourth parallel, near the ninety-seventh meridian. The new land I had noted on my northward journey was hidden by a low mist. The ice was much creva.s.sed, and drifted eastward. Many open s.p.a.ces of water were denoted in the west by patches of water sky. The pack was sufficiently active to give us considerable anxiety, although pressure lines and open water did not at the time seriously impede our progress.

Scarcely enough food remained on the sledges to reach our caches unless we should average fifteen miles a day. On the return from the Pole to this point we had been able to make only twelve miles daily. Now our strength, even under fair conditions, did not seem to be equal to more than ten miles. The outlook was threatening, and even dangerous, but the sight of the cleared sky gave new courage to E-tuk-i-shook and Ah-we-lah.

Our best course was to get to Fridtjof Nansen Sound as soon as possible.

The new land westward was invisible, and offered no food prospects. An attempted exploration might cause a fatal delay.

Still depending upon a steady easterly drift of the pack, a course was set somewhat west of Svartevoeg, the northern point of Axel Heiberg Land. In pressing onward, light variable winds and thick fogs prevailed.

The ice changed rapidly to smaller fields as we advanced. The temperature rose to zero, and the air really began to be warm. Our chronic shivering disappeared. With light sledges and endurable weather, we made fair progress over the increasing pack irregularities.