“It Gazed Wickedly at Us”
Our hides were now so far softened in the sea that we could stretch them over the roof. They were so long that they reached from one side of the hut right over the ridge-piece down to the other side, and we stretched them by hanging large stones at both ends, attached by strips of hide, thus weighing them down over the edges of the wall, and we then piled stones upon them. By the aid of stones, moss, strips of hide, and snow to cover everything, we made the edges of the walls to some extent close-fitting. To make the hut habitable we still had to construct benches of stone to lie upon inside it, and also a door. This consisted of an opening in one corner of the wall, which led into a short passage dug out in the ground and subsequently roofed over with blocks of ice, on very much the same principle as the passage to an Eskimo’s house. We had not dug this passage so long as we wished before the ground was frozen too hard for our implements. It was so low that we had to creep through it in a squatting posture to get into the hut. The inner opening was covered with a bearskin curtain, sewed firmly to the walrus hide of the roof; the outer end was covered with a loose bearskin laid over the opening. It began to grow cold now, as low as -20° C. (4° below zero, Fahr.); and living in our low den, where we had not room to move, became more and more intolerable. The smoke, too, from the oil-lamp, when we did any cooking, always affected our eyes. We grew daily more impatient to move into our new house, which now appeared to us the acme of comfort. Our ever-recurring remark while we were building was, how nice and snug it would be when we got in, and we depicted to each other the many pleasant hours we should spend there. We were, of course, anxious to discover all the bright points that we could in our existence. The hut was certainly not large; it was 10 feet long and 6 feet wide, and when you lay across it you kicked the wall on one side and butted it on the other. You could move in it a little, however, and even I could almost stand upright under the roof. This was a thought which especially appealed to us. Fancy having a place sheltered from the wind where you could stretch your limbs a little! We had not had that since last March, on board the Fram. It was long, however, before everything was in order, and we would not move in until it was quite finished.
The day we had skinned our last walruses I had taken several tendons from their backs, thinking they might be very useful when we made ourselves clothes for the winter, for we were entirely without thread for that purpose. Not until a few days afterwards (September 26th) did I recollect that these tendons had been left on the ice beside the carcasses. I went out there to look for them, but found, to my sorrow, that gulls and foxes had long since made away with them. It was some comfort, however, to find traces of a bear, which must have been at the carcasses during the night, and as I looked about I caught sight of Johansen running after me, making signs and pointing out towards the sea. I turned that way, and there was a large bear, walking to and fro and looking at us. We had soon fetched our guns, and while Johansen remained near the land to receive the bear if it came that way, I made a wide circuit round it on the ice to drive it landward, if it should prove to be frightened. In the meantime, it had lain down out there beside some holes, I suppose to watch for seals. I stole up to it; it saw me and at first came nearer, but then thought better of it, and moved away again, slowly and majestically, out over the new ice. I had no great desire to follow it in that direction, and though the range was long I thought I must try it. First one shot; it passed over. Then one more; that hit. The bear started, made several leaps, and then in anger struck the ice until it broke, and the bear fell through. There it lay, splashing and splashing and breaking the thin ice with its weight as it tried to get out again. I was soon beside it, but did not want to sacrifice another cartridge; I had faint hopes, too, that it would manage to get out of the water by itself, and thus save us the trouble of dragging such a heavy animal out. I called to Johansen to come with a rope, sledges, and knives, and in the meantime I walked up and down waiting and watching. The bear labored hard, and made the opening in the ice larger and larger. It was wounded in one of its fore-legs, so that it could use only the other, and the two hind-legs. It kept on taking hold and pulling itself up. But no sooner had it got half up than the ice gave way, and it sank down again. By degrees its movements became more and more feeble, till at last it only lay still and panted. Then came a few spasms, its legs stiffened, its head sank down into the water, and all was still. While I was walking up and down I several times heard walruses round about, as they butted holes in the ice and put their heads through; and I was thinking to myself that I should soon have them here too. At that moment the bear received a violent blow from beneath, pushing it to one side, and up came a huge head with great tusks; it snorted, looked contemptuously at the bear, then gazed for a while wonderingly at me as I stood on the ice, and finally disappeared again. This had the effect of making me think the old solid ice a little farther in a pleasanter place of sojourn than the new ice. My suspicion that the walrus entertains no fear for the bear was more than ever strengthened. At last Johansen came with a rope. We slipped a running noose round the bear’s neck and tried to haul it out, but soon discovered that this was beyond our power; all we did was to break the ice under the animal, wherever we tried. It seemed hard to have to give it up; it was a big bear and seemed to be unusually fat; but to continue in this way until we had towed up to the edge of the thick ice would be a lengthy proceeding. By cutting quite a narrow crack in the new ice, only wide enough to draw the rope through, up to the edge of a large piece of ice which was quite near, we got pretty well out of the difficulty. It was now an easy matter to draw the bear thither under the ice, and after breaking a sufficiently large hole we drew it out there. At last we had got it skinned and cut up, and, heavily laden with our booty, we turned our steps homeward late in the evening to our den. As we approached the beach where our kayaks were lying upon one of our heaps of walrus blubber and meat, Johansen suddenly whispered to me, “I say, look there!” I looked up, and there stood three bears on the heaps, tearing at the blubber. They were a she-bear and two young ones. “Oh dear!” said I; “shall we have to set to at bears again?” I was tired, and, to tell the truth, had far more desire for our sleeping-bag and a good potful of meat. In a trice we had got our guns out, and were approaching cautiously; but they had caught sight of us, and set off over the ice. It was with an undeniable feeling of gratitude that we watched their retreating forms. A little later, while I was standing cutting up the meat and Johansen had gone to fetch water, I heard him whistle. I looked up, and he pointed out over the ice. There in the dusk were the three bears coming back—our blubber-heap had been too tempting for them. I crept with my gun behind some stones close to the heap. The bears came straight on, looking neither to right nor left, and as they passed me I took as good an aim at the she-bear as the darkness would allow, and fired. She roared, bit her side, and all three set off out over the ice. There the mother fell, and the young ones stood astonished and troubled beside her until we approached, when they fled, and it was impossible to get within range of them. They kept at a respectful distance, and watched us while we dragged the dead bear to land and skinned it. When we went out next morning, they were standing sniffing at the skin and meat; but before we could get within range they saw us, and were off again. We now saw that they had been there all night, and had eaten up their own mother’s stomach, which had contained some pieces of blubber. In the afternoon they returned once more; and again we attempted, but in vain, to get a shot at them. Next morning (Saturday, September 28th), when we crawled out, we caught sight of a large bear lying asleep on our blubber-heap. Johansen crept up close to it under cover of some stones. The bear heard something moving, raised its head, and looked round. At the same instant Johansen fired, and the bullet went right through the bear’s throat, just below the cranium. It got slowly up, looked contemptuously at Johansen, considered a little, and then walked quietly away with long, measured steps, as if nothing had happened. It soon had a couple of bullets from each of us in its body, and fell out on the thin ice. It was so full of food that, as it lay there, blubber and oil and water ran out of its mouth on to the ice, which began gradually to sink under its weight, until it lay in a large pool, and we hastily dragged it in to the shore, before the ice gave way beneath it. It was one of the largest bears I have ever seen, but also one of the leanest; for there was not a trace of fat upon it, neither underneath the skin nor among the entrails. It must have been fasting for a long time and been uncommonly hungry; for it had consumed an incredible quantity of our blubber. And how it had pulled it about! First it had thrown one kayak off, then it had scattered the blubber about in all directions, scraping off the best of the fat upon almost every single piece; then it had gathered the blubber together again in another place, and then, happy with the happiness of satiety, had lain down to sleep upon it, perhaps so as to have it handy when it woke up again. Previous to attacking the blubber-heap it had accomplished another piece of work, which we only discovered later on. It had killed both the young bears that had been visiting us; we found them not far off, with broken skulls and frozen stiff. We could see by the footprints how it had run after them out over the new ice, first one and then the other, and had dragged them on land, and laid them down without touching them again. What pleasure it can have in doing this I do not understand, but it must have regarded them as competitors in the struggle for food. Or was it, perhaps, a cross old gentleman who did not like young people? “It is so nice and quiet here now,” said the ogre, when he had cleared the country.
Our winter store now began quite to inspire confidence.
At length, on the evening of that day, we moved into our new hut; but our first night there was a cold one. Hitherto we had slept in one bag all the time, and even the one we had made by sewing together our two blankets had been fairly adequate. But now we thought it would not be necessary to sleep in one bag any longer, as we should make the hut so warm by burning train-oil lamps in it that we could very well lie each in our own berth with a blanket over us, and so we had unpicked the bag. Lamps were made by turning up the corners of some sheets of German silver, filling them with crushed blubber, and laying in this, by way of a wick, some pieces of stuff from the bandages in the medicine-bag. They burned capitally, and gave such a good light, too, that we thought it looked very snug; but it neither was nor ever would be sufficient to warm our still rather permeable hut, and we lay and shivered with cold all night. We almost thought it was the coldest night we had had. Breakfast next morning tasted excellent, and the quantity of bear-broth we consumed in order to put a little warmth into our bodies is incredible. We at once decided to alter this by making along the back wall of the hut a sleeping-shelf broad enough for us to lie beside one another. The blankets were sewed together again, we spread bearskins under us, and were as comfortable as we could be under the circumstances; and we made no further attempt to part company at night. It was impossible to make the substratum at all even, with the rough, angular stones which, now that everything was frozen, were all we had at our disposal, and therefore we lay tossing and twisting the whole winter to find something like a comfortable place among all the knobs. But it was hard, and remained so; and we always had some tender spots on our body, and even sores on our hips, with lying. But, for all that, we slept. In one corner of the hut we made a little hearth to boil and roast upon. In the roof above we cut a round hole in the walrus hide, and made a smoke-board up to it of bearskin. We had not used this hearth long before we saw the necessity of building a chimney to prevent the wind from beating down, and so filling the hut with smoke as to make it sometimes intolerable. The only materials we had for building this were ice and snow; but with these we erected a grand chimney on the roof, which served its purpose, and made a good draught. It was not quite permanent, however; the hole in it constantly widened with use, and it was not altogether guiltless of sometimes dripping down on to the hearth; but there was abundance of this building material, and it was not difficult to renew the chimney when it was in need of repair. This had to be done two or three times during the course of the winter. On more exposed spots we employed walrus flesh, bone, and such-like materials to strengthen it.
Our cookery was as simple as possible. It consisted in boiling bear’s flesh and soup (bouillon) in the morning and frying steak in the evening. We consumed large quantities at every meal, and, strange to say, we never grew tired of this food, but always ate it with a ravenous appetite. We sometimes either ate blubber with it or dipped the pieces of meat in a little oil. A long time might often pass when we ate almost nothing but meat, and scarcely tasted fat; but when one of us felt inclined for it again he would, perhaps, fish up some pieces of burnt blubber out of the lamps, or eat what was left of the blubber from which we had melted the lamp-oil. We called these cakes, and thought them uncommonly nice, and we were always talking of how delicious they would have been if we could have had a little sugar on them.
We still had some of the provisions we had brought from the Fram, but these we decided not to use during the winter. They were placed in a depot to be kept until the spring, when we should move on. The depot was well loaded with stones to prevent the foxes from running away with the bags. They were impudent enough already, and took all the movable property they could lay hold of. I discovered, for instance, on October 10th, that they had gone off with a quantity of odds and ends I had left in another depot during the erection of the hut; they had taken everything that they could possibly carry with them, such as pieces of bamboo, steel wire, harpoons and harpoon-lines, my collection of stones, mosses, etc., which were stored in small sail-cloth bags. Perhaps the worst of all was that they had gone off with a large ball of twine, which had been our hope and comfort when thinking of the time when we should want to make clothes, shoes, and sleeping-bags of bearskin for the winter; for we had reckoned on making thread out of the twine. It was fortunate that they had not gone off with the theodolite and our other instruments which stood there; but these must have been too heavy for them. I was angry when I made this discovery, and, what made it more aggravating, it happened on my birthday. And matters did not improve when, while hunting about in the twilight on the beach above the place where the things had been lying, to see if I could at any rate discover tracks to show which way those demons had taken them, I met a fox that stopped at a distance of 20 feet from me, sat down, and uttered some exasperating howls, so piercing and weird that I had to stop my ears. It was evidently on its way to my things again, and was now provoked at being disturbed. I got hold of some large stones and flung them at it. It ran off a little way, but then seated itself upon the edge of the glacier and howled on, while I went home to the hut in a rage, lay down, and speculated as to what we should do to be revenged on the obnoxious animals. We could not spare cartridges to shoot them with, but we might make a trap of stones. This we determined to do, but nothing ever came of it; there were always so many other things to occupy us at first, while we still had the opportunity, before the snow covered the talus, and while it was light enough to find suitable stones. Meanwhile the foxes continued to annoy us. One day they had taken our thermometer,[23] which we always kept outside the hut, and gone off with it. We searched for it in vain for a long time, until at last we found it buried in a heap of snow a little way off. From that time we were very careful to place a stone over it at night, but one morning found that the foxes had turned over the stone, and had gone off with the thermometer again. The only thing we found this time was the case, which they had thrown away a little way off. The thermometer itself we were never to see again; the snow had unfortunately drifted in the night, so that the tracks had disappeared. Goodness only knows what fox-hole it now adorns; but from that day we learned a lesson, and henceforward fastened our last thermometer securely.
At Our Winter Quarters