We fed the dogs on the Karluk on dried salmon which we obtained at Nome, together with rice and oatmeal and Indian meal, all cooked together. As long as we had steam on the main boiler we cooked the dog-food by letting the steam blow through a hose leading into a pork barrel filled with the ingredients. We always served the dogs with hot food—and it was quite good enough for a man to eat—and after the boiler was blown down we cooked it every night in the galley stove. Mr. Hadley looked after feeding the dogs, and no better man could have been found, for he understood not only how to feed them but also how important it was to have them well cared for. Whenever possible we kept the dogs on the ice, for the freedom was good for them. Even then, to prevent their fighting, we often had to chain them up to raftered ice.
It is a mistake to think that Arctic weather is characterized by unvarying cold; on the contrary it offers radical differences in temperature from day to day, and the seasons differ greatly from year to year. We were experiencing an extraordinarily early and severe winter and yet for the next few days now the weather was frequently mild and springlike, with temperatures above the freezing-point. This does not mean that there was any sudden thaw; the snow fell at intervals and the sky was overcast but the wind was not bitterly cold as it became later on in our drifting.
We busied ourselves, as we had from the beginning of the drift, in making preparations to leave the ship, an event which under the circumstances was probable at any moment. The Eskimo woman, Keruk, began making fur clothing for us. We put all the Jaeger underwear in large canvas bags placed where they could be reached conveniently at once. The whaleboats we provisioned each for eight persons for twenty days and we put supplies for a couple of months on deck ready to be thrown overboard. We fixed up the forward hold as a carpenter’s shop for Mr. Hadley and he started in to make a Peary sledge.
This was the kind of sledge that I had been accustomed to use on the ice on my various trips with Peary. He invented it himself, evolving it from the experience of his years of Arctic work and, in several important particulars, it was a marked improvement over the Eskimo sledge. We did not have the material to make an exact duplicate but we did the best we could.
The Peary sledge is thirteen feet long over all, with runners made each of a single piece of hickory or ash, three inches wide by an inch-and-a-half thick, bent up by steaming at each tip and shod the whole length with a steel shoe, like the tire of a wheel. The bow has a long, low rake and the stern turns up to make steering with the upstanders true as the runners slide along. The filling-in pieces are of oak, fastened with sealskin lashing, and the bed of the sledge is made of boards of soft wood, lashed to the filling-in pieces. In loading the Peary sledge we always put the bulk of the weight in the middle and left each end light; with its long rake fore and aft the sledge will swing as on a pivot, so that when you get into a position where you cannot go ahead you can back the sledge or turn it around and even go stern first if necessary, without lifting it. When, for instance, you come suddenly to a crack in the ice, when travelling with the Peary sledge, you can turn it around or steer it aside. Being constructed with lashings instead of bolts, it is flexible and adapted to the rough going over the sea ice, while in getting through young ice, on account of its turned-up rear end it can be easily dragged back on to firm ice with a rope.
CHAPTER VIII
WE DRIFT AWAY FROM THE LAND
The last day of September we got another glimpse of the land, seeing distinctly the low shore of Cooper Island, with its Eskimo houses. We were still to the eastward of Point Barrow, drifting slowly along in the pack. Mamen, the doctor and I went out to a ski-jump we had built and in trying a higher jump than usual I heeled over and, instead of landing on my ski, came down with a hard bump on my side. I didn’t let the doctor know how badly I was hurt because I didn’t want any one to know that I could be such a duffer but I was unable to lift my hand to comb my hair for several weeks.
October came in with a snowstorm and a strong northeast wind which drove us fast before it. On the morning of the first there came a crack in the ice about a foot wide, running east and west, two miles from the ship. It was too far away for us to dynamite our way to it even if it had been a likely lead for navigation and besides when you dynamite ice you must have open water for the broken fragments to overflow into or they will choke up around you and you are worse off than before. The heavy wind did not allow this crack to remain open more than a few hours.
