The last voyage of the Karluk

by Bob Bartlett; Ralph T. Hale

Not long after I shot the bear I saw a white Arctic fox near by. At first I thought he was one of the dogs. I fired at him, but it was too dark to see to hit him and he got away. He, too, had evidently been attracted by the pieces of raw seal meat, which we had scattered around when we had eaten it earlier in the day, and had followed us. The dogs took no more notice of the fox than they had of the bear.

The next day the strong east wind continued. The sky was overcast and as there was much snow-drift the light was bad; we were shaping our course altogether by the compass. The temperature, I should guess, was about fifteen degrees below zero. We broke camp at seven o’clock and had not gone more than fifty yards when we found that during the night an open lead had made in the ice. We followed our usual method of procedure in such a case, Kataktovick going in one direction and I in the other, to find a better place to cross. We had no luck and returned to meet again at the sledge. We now made up our minds to try to cross here. There was a good deal of young ice in the lead, that had been smashed up against the edges of the heavier ice, and the snow that had been blown off the ice into the water had filled up the lead to some extent and ice and snow had all frozen together in a rough and irregular mass. I took two tent-poles, therefore, and got out on this young ice but I soon realized that it was not strong enough to hold me, so I hastily and carefully made my way back. Kataktovick, however, was lighter than I; he laid the poles on the ice and, with a rope fastened to him so that I could pull him back if he broke through, he crawled over on the young ice and reached the other side in safety. Then I unloaded the sledge and fastened another rope to it at the stern; Kataktovick drew it across with just a few articles on it and I pulled it back empty. We repeated this until we got everything on the farther side of the lead. The dogs got across by themselves, all but Kaiser; I could take no chances with him, on account of his propensity for running away, so he had to be tied and hauled across. I got over by lying face downward on the empty sledge and having Kataktovick, with the rope over his shoulder, run as fast as he could and pull me across. The ice, which was only a single night’s freezing, buckled and the runners broke through in places but Kataktovick got going so fast that they did not break through their full length and I got over in safety. Kataktovick’s safe passage was a relief to me. As far as physical endurance went I think he was as well able to survive a fall in the water as I would have been but his experience had been less than mine and if he had fallen through he would have been so completely terrified that I believe he would have died of fright.

The method by which he worked his way across with the poles was one which is followed among the Newfoundland sealers; many a time I had done the same thing when I was a youngster. You take bigger chances in sealing than we averaged to take in the Arctic. You leave the ship in the morning and go out on the ice to kill seals. You take no tea, no tent or shelter of any kind; perhaps all you have is a little food in your bag. The weather is fine and offers no indications of change. You get off eight or ten miles from the ship, which is perhaps the only one in that vicinity, a couple of hundred miles from land, when suddenly the ice cracks and open leads form between you and the ship. Your only chance of safety is that the men on the ship, who are constantly sweeping the horizon with powerful glasses, have foreseen what is going to happen and know where you are. If the ice is open near the ship they will steam over and pick you up. If not they will blow the whistle and let you know where the ship is, for the chances are that there is a storm breaking upon you with high winds and snow, so that you can see the ship only a short time. You have no dogs, no canvas, no snowshoes, no hot coffee, no stove. If the ship cannot reach you, or you cannot make your way across the leads and reach her, you freeze to death. I remember getting into a situation like this when I was a boy; fortunately I was rescued before things got too bad.

When we got our sledge, dogs, supplies and ourselves across the lead we had to load up again. The wind was still blowing hard and whirling the snow around, so that we lost a good deal of time hunting for things in the drifts and loading the sledge again. It was a slow job. Everything was white; boxes, bags, sleeping-robes, all the objects of our search, in fact, were blended into the one dead tone, so that the effect on the eye was as if one were walking in the dark instead of what passed technically for daylight. The drifts all looked level but the first thing we would know we would stumble into a gulch of raftered ice, heaped full of soft snow, or a crack in the ice, covered by a similar deceptive mass. Altogether we lost three hours and not until ten o’clock did we get under way again.

When we finally started we soon found the weather better. This was fortunate, for in crossing the lead and afterwards in picking up our things, we had got our clothes and our sleeping-robes more or less water-soaked and we were glad of a more moderate gale and a higher temperature, which as the afternoon wore on became almost springlike. This would mean open water, to be sure, but for the rest of the day we went along well over old floes of heavy ice where the going was good and the open leads few. About noon it came off clear and calm, and during the afternoon we made good progress. In fact, when, just at dark, we stopped and built our igloo, we had done the best day’s work since we had left the island.

For the first time, too, we built our igloo on a solid floe where we could sleep without the constant menace of a split in the ice beneath us during the night. We found a floe of fresh-water ice near by; up to this time we had found few of these, none at our stopping-places, and had had to use snow to make our tea. The dogs had worked well all day; it was a relief to go on for hour after hour without having to stop for open water.

The next morning, when we were still in our igloo, finishing our tea, we heard the dogs outside, sniffing and whining excitedly; something was up. We always kept our rifle in the igloo when we made camp, with the magazine full. Now, jabbing a hole in the side of the igloo, we looked out; the dogs were moving about restlessly. Kataktovick seized the rifle and jumped outside, with me close at his heels. A bear was just making off; he had evidently come close and had been frightened by the dogs. Kataktovick ran after him and fired twice, the first shot hitting the bear in the hind-quarter, the second in the fore-shoulder, bringing him down. Before I had our things out of the igloo and loaded on the sledge, he came back, bringing in a hind-quarter of bear-meat with him. We fed some to the dogs, though not too much, for if we let them overeat they would not work well. Some of it we took with us; we could not carry much, however.

At seven o’clock we finally got away but were soon held up by a lead of open water which in some places was half a mile wide. Looking from a high rafter we could see no chance to cross in either direction, east or west, so we took up our march eastward, the course of the lead gradually veering to the southeast.

As we went along we saw several seal in the water. One of these we shot and recovered after some difficulty. The Eskimo captured the seal in the usual way and towed it to the edge of the ice, which at this point was about five feet above the surface of the water. As the seal came alongside, I reached down to haul it up. Braced against a hummock, Kataktovick held my feet to keep me from sliding down into the water and I caught hold of the seal by the flipper and held it. The seal was not quite dead and made some resistance. On account of my position I could get no purchase on the ice to pull up with my arms and the seal weighed about a hundred pounds. I managed to lift it out of the water far enough to get its hind flipper in my teeth, and then Kataktovick hauled us back. When I got up a little way he passed me a rope and I jabbed a hole in the flipper and passed the rope through. I was then able to let go with my teeth, sprang up with the rope in my hand and dragged the seal up on to the level ice. We skinned it and cut it up and put as much of the meat on the sledge as we could carry, giving the dogs a very little. We could have got more seal here but one was all we could take. Our food consisted very largely of frozen bear meat and seal meat now, eaten raw because we had no time to cook it. This saved our pemmican.

About noon we ferried over the lead and found the going so good on the other side that when, travelling as long as possible to make the most of it, we built our igloo after dark, we had made at least nine miles south of the point where we started our day’s march, though the long tramp along the lead had made our total distance travelled considerably more than that.