The last voyage of the Karluk

by Bob Bartlett; Ralph T. Hale

The next morning we were up and away at dawn, in a howling gale from the west and blinding snowdrift. Open water and young ice across our path sent us off at right angles to our true course. Several times during the day the sledge broke through the young ice and before we could whip up the dogs to rush across we got some of our sleeping gear wet. The dogs were badly frightened and huddled together in their terror and of course immensely increasing the danger of breaking through the ice. We saw a number of bear-tracks during the day. Somewhere along the trail we lost the little hatchet which we had for opening pemmican tins. When we missed it, we left the dogs, thinking that it might have been dropped only a short distance away, and walked back to look for it, but we found the ice changing materially and were afraid to go far from our sledge, so we had to abandon the search, and thereafter had to use a knife in its place. At half past five, when we stopped and built our igloo, a job that always took about three quarters of an hour at the end of our day’s march, we had advanced during the day not over four miles. At this rate the journey from shore to shore would be a long one. The wind was moderating somewhat, however, when we turned in, and we hoped for better weather next day.

Sure enough when we broke camp the following morning we found the wind a light easterly and the weather fine. It looked as if good going must now be in store for us; we had had almost continuously stormy weather from the moment of our departure from Icy Spit. Another encouraging thing was that shortly after we started on our way, we shot a seal in a wide lead of water. The Eskimo used a native device for retrieving the seal. This device consists of a wooden ball, as large as a man’s fist, made something like a stocking darner, with hooks projecting from it on all sides; there is a handle eight or ten inches long, with a white cotton fishing line attached to it about fifty fathoms long. The Eskimo would whirl this ball around and around by the handle, sometimes first putting lumps of ice on the slack line near the handle to add to the weight and thus increase the momentum, and would then let it fly out beyond where the body of the seal was floating. By carefully drawing in the line he would hook the seal and pull it along to the edge of the ice. On this occasion Kataktovick had to lie down and worm his way out on thin ice to get near enough to the water’s edge to make his cast, which he made when he found a piece of heavier ice on which he could stand. I had him fastened to me by a rope, so that when he finally hooked the seal, he hauled it in hand over hand to the place where he was standing and then, while he kept his feet firmly together and slid, I hauled him back on to the solid ice where I was, while he in turn was towing the seal.

Our hope of better weather proved to be short-lived, for as the day wore on the wind increased to a living gale from the east. The ice was constantly in motion and we had many wide leads to negotiate. With the open water the air was filled with condensation and the light was very bad. When it came time to build our igloo we had made only about five miles to the good.

Shortly after midnight the wind veered sharply around until it blew from the west, without diminishing. We had a small tent with us and to save time we were in the habit of using this as the roof for our igloo, weighting it down with snow-blocks and a rifle, pemmican tins and snowshoes, and covering the whole with snow to make it tight. When the wind changed it whipped off this canvas roof and the first thing we knew we were covered with snow. We turned out in the darkness and looked for our things which were almost completely buried.

It was not a restful night and when daylight came we were glad to be on the march again. Shortly after we started one of the dogs broke his trace and got away. Fortunately we caught him before he had gone far. Some of the dogs were docile and when we unharnessed them would not stray away but would let us harness them up again when the time came; others would try to evade us and we had to coax them in with pemmican before we could catch them.

Being so often adrift on running ice, as we were, is really a wild experience that is hard on dogs and ours were so tired that with two exceptions they did not work well. When we came to open water it took a great deal of urging to get them to jump across; often we had to unharness them and throw them across, one after another. I had a bamboo pole, split at one end; I would shake this over the dogs when we were on the march and the rattling of the loose ends would serve as a stimulus for them to buckle down to work.

On one occasion the whole team broke away from sledge and started back over the trail. I was very much afraid that they might run all the way back to Wrangell Island, leaving us with the sledge half way to Siberia, so I took a pemmican tin and went through all the motions of opening it to feed them and then started to walk back towards them. I dared not run after them, for the more I ran the faster they would go. After I had walked back half a mile I got near enough to attract their attention. They pricked up their ears, looked around, saw the tins of pemmican and finally came back slowly towards me. When they got near enough I seized the rope. They evidently were afraid they were in for a licking, for they stayed on their good behavior for several hours.

One great trouble that we had with them was their habit of chewing their harness, though it was made of hemp canvas instead of sealskin to prevent that very thing. In the night they would free themselves in this way and we would have difficulty in catching them, for although they had collars we had no chains left. Food, clothing and sledge-lashings had to be kept away from the dogs or they would chew any of them. One of the dogs was called Kaiser. He got away one morning and I could not catch him, even though I tried to tempt him with pemmican. We harnessed up the others and started on our way. All day he came along behind us, sometimes in sight, sometimes not. When we stopped to camp and I fed the other dogs, at dark, he finally came sulkily in and hung around; I paid no attention to him. I saved out his ration of pemmican, however, and when he finally could hold out no longer, he came up to be fed and as I gave him the pemmican I caught him. He never got away again; sometimes we had to tie his mouth so that he could not chew his harness.

At ten o’clock on the morning after our miserable midnight hunt in the snow, we were stopped by an open lead of water about three hundred yards wide. The lead ran east and west across our way and we had to follow along the northern edge for some distance before we found a solid piece of ice for our ferry-boat. It was frozen to the edge of the main floe by thin ice, but we chopped away with our tent poles and jumped on it until we split it off. Then we put the dogs and the sledge aboard and with our snowshoes for paddles made our way across the lead. The ice cake was about ten feet square and one end of the sledge projected out over the water, but with the dogs huddled in the middle and ourselves paddling on either side we managed to get along and landed safely on the other shore.

About five we stopped to camp for the night. I was engaged in brushing the snow off the sleeping-robes and Kataktovick was cutting out snow-blocks for the igloo when suddenly he shouted. I looked up and saw right beside us the largest polar bear I have ever seen. I seized the rifle and fired. The first shot missed but the second hit him in the fore-shoulder and the third in the hind-quarter and down he went. As he fell he stretched out his four paws and I had a chance to get a good idea of his length; I should judge that he was twelve or thirteen feet from tip to tip. His hair was snow white and very long but not very thick; evidently he was old. I cut off a hind-quarter—all we could carry—to take along with us the next day; we ate some of the meat—raw, because we had no time to cook it—and made a broth out of another piece by boiling it in water, made by melting the snow, just as we made our tea. We gave the dogs all they could eat. They had not noticed the bear; they were too tired. Evidently he had come upon the place where we had cut up the seal we had killed the day before and had followed the scent all day.