Aneguin and Alexey, our two Indians, were primarily responsible for our forty dogs. Each day in the forenoon watch, they fed them, bringing up from the forehold from the cargo of dried fish we had taken aboard at Unalaska, the necessary amount for issue, one dried fish per dog per day being the authorized ration. Ordinarily, the wise dogs immediately crushed their fish in their powerful jaws and swallowed them in one gulp; the otherwise dogs (a pun I fear almost worthy of Collins) found themselves fighting for the remains of their fish with their mates who were quicker on the swallow, a habit which always made feeding time alongside ship a bedlam. Without particularly paying any attention as to why, I noted vaguely that as December drew on, this daily snarling of the dogs over their food subsided. As a minor blessing I was duly grateful, until one day coming aboard a little late after my prescribed exercise period, I saw Alexey on the quarterdeck performing an autopsy on a dog which following a brief illness the afternoon before had died during the night. As I approached, Alexey removed from the dog’s stomach a wad of oakum as big as a baseball, the very evident cause of his death. I squeezed the ball, incredulous. Oakum, all right. But why should even an Eskimo dog eat that? I asked Alexey. Between pantomime and Indian English he explained it to me,
“Fish in hold freeze, chief. Verr hard. Dog chew. Verr hard. Lak iron. No good chew.” He seized a marlinspike, went through the motions of a dog trying to chew a fish frozen presumably as hard as iron, and very plainly breaking his teeth on it. He laid down the marlinspike. “No good. No chew fish, no swallow. Dog get ongry. Bym bye eat oakum. Bym bye die.” Sadly he waved at the deceased dog.
That explained the cessation of our daily dog fights at feeding time. The fish stowed in our hold had frozen so hard there that no dog, no matter how energetically he chewed, was now able to masticate his own fish quickly and get it down. As a consequence, all the dogs being in the same boat, too busily engaged trying to chew their own dinners to bother about stealing each other’s, there were no fights. But this poor devil, his teeth apparently unable to make any impression on the fish, had been driven in desperation to something softer and had unwittingly committed suicide by gobbling the oakum.
I grunted sympathetically. A dog’s life, all right. But I could fix it. Motioning Alexey to follow me inside the deckhouse, I had him bring up from the hold one day’s issue of fish, only thirty-nine now. They were frozen hard, no question; even with a crowbar, it would take a strong man to make a visible impression on one of those glaciated fish. Sizing up their approximate volume, I had Lee make a sheet iron box large enough to hold the lot, and fit inside it a few turns of pipe which I connected to the blowdown from our evaporator, the Baxter boiler. Alexey tossed in the frozen fish, and Lee put on the cover.
“That’ll thaw ’em out, Alexey,” I informed him. “Every time we blow down the hot brine from that boiler, it’ll heat the fish, and in a few hours, they’ll be so soft, even a dog with false teeth won’t have any trouble with ’em. Now don’t forget; fill the box every night, and by morning dinner for the dogs will be all ready.”
Alexey, a very good Indian and deeply concerned for the well-being of his charges, thanked me profusely, and judging by the resumption of the snarling over dinner next day, I guessed the dogs had reason to also.
But the dogs had still one more cross to bear that I could not ease. Their instinctive habit in cold weather was to bed themselves down at night in soft snow, keeping themselves as comfortable that way as an Eskimo inside his igloo of ice. But if we had reason to regret the absence of snow because it deprived us of a source of fresh water, the dogs lamented its absence even more because it robbed them of their natural beds. Night after night they wandered round the ship disconsolately looking for drifts, and finding none, were forced at last to turn in on the bare ice. For some time, we had noticed each morning here and there hair imbedded in the ice, but when the December cold snap hit us, we were surprised to find several dogs with so much hair frozen to the ice that they just could not tear themselves free. There was, however, nothing we could do about that except to make it Aneguin’s regular detail to go out before feeding time each morning with a shovel and break out from the floe all the dogs that had been frozen down the night before, a job which required great finesse with the shovel on Aneguin’s part lest all our dogs soon become as bald as Mexican hairless poodles.
CHAPTER XVIII
Monotonously the dreary days drifted by. In darkness we ate our food, took our exercise, thawed out our frozen noses afterward, and vaguely wished we could “go somewheres.” December 22, the shortest day of the year came, bringing with it, aside from the most brilliant display of auroras we had yet witnessed, only the knowledge that with the sun at its extreme southern declination, half of our seventy-one day long night was gone. But the day itself was further marked by the fact that Mr. Dunbar, that veteran whaler and the only member of our mess who had ever before wintered inside either the Arctic or the Antarctic Circles, came down with a bad cold. His tough hide had according to his own claim always before resisted illness, so this made him doubly miserable, and he moped around the wardroom very low in spirit. Finally, as if to make sure that we remembered the day, Danenhower also complained that his left eye pained him, and after a session with the doctor, big Dan completed our picture of wardroom woe by coming in with a black patch over the ailing optic, explaining that Ambler had found it somewhat inflamed and had advised him to give it a rest by shielding it even from the poor glow of our oil lamps for several days.
Two days later we came to Christmas Eve, which for us, except for plenty of ice around, was everything that traditionally Christmas Eve is not. No children about, eagerly excited over hanging up their stockings; no friends dropping in; no families, no wives, no sweethearts—nothing of these for any of us, but instead only the memories of bygone Christmases under happier circumstances, and the hope (clouded by gnawing doubts) that another Christmas might see us out of the ice and restored home.