CHAPTER XXI
IN SIGHT OF LAND
March 30—the thirteenth day of our journey from Icy Spit—was the first fine day we had had. We broke camp at dawn. Almost at once we encountered open water and from that time until dark crossed lead after lead. One of them was half a mile wide. It was filled with heavy pieces of ice, frozen into precarious young ice, the whole mass only solid enough to enable us to get a few things at a time over on the sledge. We had to unharness our dogs and haul the lightly loaded sledge across, picking our way from one heavy piece to another as a man zigzags his way across a creek on stepping-stones. It took a good many trips to get everything over.
The sunset was clear and all around the horizon there was not a cloud in the sky. Looking to the southwest I saw what I was inclined to believe was land. Perhaps the wish might be father to the thought, and the days of travel over the white surface of the ice, with the constant effort to find a place to cross the innumerable leads had brought my eyes to a state of such acute pain that I could not see as well as usual. I turned my binoculars on the cloudlike mass on the horizon but still I remained in doubt.
So I called to the Eskimo and, pointing, asked him, “That land?”
He answered that it might be.
Then I gave him the glasses and sent him up on a high rafter to look more carefully. After a moment he came back and said that it might be an island like Wrangell Island but that it would be of no use to us. He seemed depressed by the hard day we had had, crossing so many leads. Finally he turned to me and said:
“We see no land, we no get to land; my mother, my father, tell me long time ago Eskimo get out on ice and drive away from Point Barrow never come back.”
I tried to hearten him by telling him that Eskimo out on the ice did not have to get back by themselves but that the white men would bring them back and that I had been a long distance out on the ice with Eskimo and we had all got back safely. He still seemed pretty much discouraged, so I took the glasses and went up on the rafter to see for myself, though his eyes were in a better condition than mine. I made every effort to see as well as I could and was convinced that I was looking at the land. When I called Kataktovick up to look again he was still very dubious.
That night in our igloo when we were making our tea, he asked me to show him the chart. I did so and pointed out the course we had taken and where we were bound. He appeared somewhat encouraged, though still of the opinion that the land was not Siberia but merely an island, not set down on the chart. When I tried to brace him up, however, by saying, “If you ’fraid, you no reach land,” he did not respond very enthusiastically and slept less soundly than usual that night.