"The next day they only made five miles. The storm was so bad that the man breakin' trail couldn't stand up an' had to crawl on his hands and knees. Even the reindeer wouldn't travel in a straight line, wantin' to turn their tails to the blast. This would have taken the party straight out to sea over the ice. After three days' delay, Jarvis insisted on travel, an' he nearly had a mutiny on his hands. But he put it through. He's one of the kind of men that always keeps on going!
"Then came the time for diplomacy. Jarvis had to persuade 'Charlie' Artisarlook, just on his say-so, to give up his whole herd, his entire wealth, promisin' that the same number of deer should be returned. As a small village had grown up around this herd of Artisarlook's—which made him quite the most prominent member of his race for miles around—an' as they depended entirely for their food and clothing on the reindeer herd, it was like askin' a city to empty its houses of everything for the sake of men they'd never even seen. I think it says a lot for the Eskimos that they agreed."
"It's bully!"
"That's me, too. It's something to give up every penny you own merely on a promise that it will be returned, to leave your wife, family an' neighbors starving, an' go eight hundred miles from home in an Arctic winter over a terrible road to help a party of white men in distress.
"When Artisarlook agreed, Jarvis and he went on ahead, leaving Surgeon Call to follow with the herd to Cape Prince of Wales. This, Jarvis told me, was one of the worst bits of road on the entire trip. Here's what Jarvis said himself about it:
"'As I remember it, the thermometer was over thirty below zero and there was a tidy blizzard blowing when we started for Cape Prince of Wales. The going was rough beyond words. In the afternoon, suddenly Artisarlook wanted to camp, but I thought he was trying to work on my fears, so I made him go on. But the boy was right, for shortly after it got dark we struck the bluffs near Cape York and our road was over the ice crushes that lined the shore.
"'I have never seen such a road. Artisarlook went ahead to try and pick out the way, if indeed it could be called a way, which was nothing but blocks of ice heaped in confusion and disorder. I stayed behind to manage the heavy sled which was continually capsizing in the rough ice. By eight o'clock I was done out and quite willing to camp. But this time Artisarlook would not stop. It was too cold to camp on the ice without shelter or wood—the ice we were on was in danger of breaking away from the bluffs at any minute, and then it might be the end of us. We must get on beyond the line of bluffs before stopping.
"'To make matters worse I stepped through a crack in the ice into the water, and, almost instantaneously, my leg to the knee was a mass of ice. I was now compelled to go on to some place where the foot-gear could be dried. As though in a dream, suffering the most horrible tortures of fatigue, we pushed on dispiritedly until midnight, when we came to a small hut about ten by twelve, in which fifteen people were already sleeping. It was the most horrible place I have ever been in, but, at the same time, I was never so happy to be under a roof before. Though I had eaten nothing all day, I was too tired to do more than to crawl into my sleeping-bag and sleep.
"'The blizzard raged as fiercely outside as on the day before, but I could not stay in that pestilential and filthy hut. Even Artisarlook—and an Eskimo is not over-particular—found difficulty in eating his breakfast. For my part—I could not breathe. The air was horrible and it was refreshing to get outside and to be going through the storm and over the rough ice. Fortunately there was another village about ten miles further on and we stopped there and had a good meal to fortify ourselves against the battle around the mountains of the Cape York.
"'At last I had struck the worst road in the world. All the tremendous pressure of the Polar Seas forcing the ice to the southward was checked by the land masses of Siberia and Alaska. The ice, twisted and broken, crushed and mangled, piled in a welter of frozen confusion along the shore. Darkness set in before we came to the worst of it, and a faint moon gave little light for such a road. For fifteen miles there was not ten feet of level ground. Though the temperature was thirty below zero, Artisarlook and I were wet to the skin with perspiration from the violence of the work. We would have to get under the heavy sled and lift it to the top of an ice hummock sometimes as high as our shoulders or even higher and then ease it down on the other side. Three times out of four it would capsize.