As we were breakfasting on May 9th we again heard a bear’s footstep outside, and being afraid that it was going to eat up our blubber, we had no other resource than to shoot it. We now had far more meat than we required, and did not care to use more cartridges on these animals for the present; but what grieved us most was the thought of all the beautiful bearskins which we should leave behind us. The time was now drawing near when we should break up our camp, and we worked eagerly at our preparations. Our clothes were now ready. The entry for Tuesday, May 12th, runs thus: “Took leave to-day of my old trousers. I was quite sad at the thought of the good service they had done; but they are now so heavy with oil and dirt that they must be several times their original weight, and, if they were squeezed, oil would ooze out of them.” It was undeniably pleasant to put on the new, light, soft trousers of blanket, which were, to some extent, free from grease. As, however, this material was loose in texture, I was afraid it might wear out before we reached Spitzbergen, and we had therefore strengthened it both inside and outside with pieces of an old pair of drawers and of a shirt to protect it from wear.
While I was taking some observations outside the hut on Saturday, May 16th, I saw a bear with quite a small young one out on the ice. I had just taken a turn out there, and they were examining my tracks. The mother went first, going up on to all the hummocks I had been upon, turning round and sniffing and looking at the tracks, and then descending again and going on. The tiny young one trotted along behind, exactly repeating the movements of its mother. At last they grew tired of this, and turned their steps towards the shore, disappearing behind the promontory to the north of us. Shortly after Johansen came out, and I told him about it, and said: “I expect we shall soon see them in the cleft up there, as the wind is that way.” I had scarcely said it, when, looking across, we saw them both standing, stretching their necks, sniffing, and looking at us and the hut. We did not want to shoot them, as we had abundance of food; but we thought it would be amusing to go nearer and watch them, and then, if possible, frighten them sufficiently to keep them from visiting us in the night, so that we could sleep in peace. When we approached, the mother snorted angrily, turned several times as if to go, pushing the young one on first, but turned back again to observe us more closely. At last they jogged slowly off, continually hesitating and looking back. When they got down to the shore, they again went quite slowly among the hummocks, and I ran after them. The mother went first, the young one trotting after exactly in her footsteps. I was soon close to them, the mother saw me, started, and tried to get the young one to go with her; but I now discovered that it could run no faster than I could follow it. As soon as the mother saw this, she turned round, snorted, and came storming right at me. I halted, and prepared to shoot in case she should come too near, and in the meantime the little one tramped on as fast as it could. The mother halted at the distance of a few paces from me, snorted and hissed again, looked round at the young one, and when the latter had got a good way on trotted after it. I ran on again and overtook the young one, and again the mother went through the same manœuvres; she seemed to have the greatest possible desire to strike me to the earth, but then the young one had again got ahead a little, and she did not wait to do it, but trotted after. This was repeated several times, and then they began to clamber up the glacier, the mother in front, the young one after. But the latter did not get on very fast; it trudged along as well as it could in its mother’s footprints in the deep snow. It reminded me exactly of a child in trousers, as it clambered up and kept looking round, half frightened, half curious. It was touching to see how incessantly the mother turned round to hasten it on, now and then jogging it with her head, hissing and snorting all the while at me standing quietly below and looking on. When they reached the crest the mother stopped and hissed worse than ever, and when she had let the young one pass her, they both disappeared over the glacier, and I went back to continue my work.
For the last few weeks a feverish activity had reigned in our hut. We had become more and more impatient to make a start; but there was still a great deal to be done. We realized in bitter earnest that we had no longer the Fram’s stores to fall back upon. On board the Fram there might be one or two things lacking; but here we lacked practically everything. What would we not have given even for a single box of dog-biscuits—for ourselves—out of the Fram’s abundance? Where were we to find all that we needed? “For a sledge expedition one must lay in light and nourishing provisions, which at the same time afford as much variety as possible; one must have light and warm clothing, strong and practical sledges,” etc., etc.—we knew by heart all these maxims of the Arctic text-book. The journey that lay before us, indeed, was not a very great one; the thing was simply to reach Spitzbergen and get on board the sloop; but it was long enough, after all, to make it necessary for us to take certain measures of precaution.
When we dug up the stores which we had buried at the beginning of the winter, and opened the bags, we found that there were some miserable remains of a commissariat which had once, indeed, been good, but was now for the most part mouldy and spoiled by the damp of the previous autumn. Our flour—our precious flour—had got mildewed, and had to be thrown away. The chocolate had been dissolved by the damp, and no longer existed; and the pemmican—well, it had a strange appearance, and when we tasted it—ugh! It too had to be thrown away. There remained a certain quantity of fish flour, some aleuronate flour, and some damp half-moulded bread, which we carefully boiled in train-oil, partly to dry it, as all damp was expelled by the boiling oil, partly to render it more nutritious by impregnating it with fat. We thought it tasted delightful, and preserved it carefully for festal occasions and times when all other food failed us. Had we been able to dry bear’s flesh we should have managed very well; but the weather was too raw and cold, and the strips of flesh we hung up became only half dry. There was nothing for it but to lay in a store of as much cut-up raw flesh and blubber as we could carry with us. Then we filled the three tin boxes that had held our petroleum with train-oil, which we used as fuel. For cooking on the journey we would use the pot belonging to our cooking apparatus; and our lamp we used as a brazier in which to burn blubber and train-oil together. These provisions and this fuel did not constitute a particularly light equipment; but it had this advantage, that we should probably be able to replace what we consumed of it by the way. It was to be hoped that we should find plenty of game.
Our short sledges were a greater trouble to us, for of course we could not get them lengthened now. If we failed to find open water all the way over to Spitzbergen, and were compelled to drag them over the uneven drift-ice, we could scarcely imagine how we should get on with the kayaks lying on these short sledges, without getting them knocked to pieces on hummocks and pressure-ridges; for the kayaks were supported only at the middle, while both ends projected far beyond the sledge, and at the slightest inequality these ends hacked against the ice, and scraped holes in the sail-cloth. We had to protect them well by lashing bearskins under them; and then we had to make the best grips we could contrive out of the scanty wood we had to fix on the sledges. This was no easy matter, for the great point was to make the grips high in order to raise the kayaks as much as possible and keep them clear of the ice; and then they had to be well lashed in order to keep their places. But we had no cord to lash them with, and had to make it for ourselves of raw bearskin or walrus hide, which is not the best possible material for lashings. This difficulty, too, we overcame, and got our kayaks to lie steadily and well. We of course laid the heaviest part of their cargo as much as possible in the middle, so that the ends should not be broken down by the weight. Our own personal equipment was quite as difficult to get in order. I have mentioned that we made ourselves new clothes, and this took a long time, with two such inexpert tailors; but practice made us gradually more skilful, and I think we had good reason to be proud of the results we finally achieved. When we at last put them on, the clothes had quite an imposing appearance—so we thought, at any rate. We saved them up, and kept them hanging as long as possible, in order that they might still be new when we started; Johansen, I believe, did not wear his new coat before we fell in with other people. He declared he must keep it fresh till we arrived in Norway; he could not go about like a pirate when he got among his countrymen again. The poor remains of underclothes that we possessed had, of course, to be thoroughly washed before we started, so that it should be possible to move in them without their rasping too many holes in our skin. The washing we accomplished as above described. Our foot-gear was in anything but a satisfactory condition. Socks, indeed, we could make of bearskin; but the worst of it was that the soles of our “komager” were almost worn out. We managed, however, to make soles of a sort out of walrus hide, by scraping about half its thickness away and then drying it over the lamp. With these soles we mended our “komager,” after the fashion of the Finns; we had plenty of “senne” thread (sedge thread), and we managed to get our “komagers” pretty well water-tight again. Thus, in spite of everything, we were tolerably well off for clothes, though it cannot be said that those we had were remarkable for their cleanliness. To protect us against wind and rain we had still our wind clothes, which we had patched and stitched together as well as we could; but it took a terrible time, for the whole garments now consisted of scarcely anything else but patches and seams, and when you had sewed up a hole at one place they split at another the next time you put them on. The sleeves were particularly bad, and at last I tore both sleeves off my jacket, so that I should not have the annoyance of seeing them perpetually stripped away.
It was very desirable, too, that we should have a tolerably light sleeping-bag. The one we had brought with us no longer existed, as we had made clothes out of the blankets; so the only thing was to try and make as light a bag as possible out of bearskin. By picking out the thinnest skins we possessed, we managed to make one not so much heavier than the reindeer-skin bag which we had taken with us on leaving the Fram. A greater difficulty was to procure a practicable tent. The one we had had was out of the question. It had been worn and torn to pieces on our five months’ journey of the year before, and what was left of it the foxes had made an end of, as we had had it lying spread over our meat and blubber heap in the autumn to protect it against the gulls. The foxes had gnawed and torn it in all directions, and had carried off great strips of it, which we found scattered around. We speculated a great deal as to how we could make ourselves a new tent. The only thing we could think of was to put our sledges, with the kayaks upon them, parallel to each other at the distance of about a man’s height, then pile snow around them at the sides until they were closed in, lay our snowshoes and bamboo staffs across, and then spread our two sails, laced together, over the whole, so that they should reach the ground on both sides. In this way we managed to make ourselves a quite effective shelter, the kayaks forming the roof ridges, and the sails the side walls of the tent. It was not quite impervious to drifting snow, and we had usually a good deal of trouble in stopping up cracks and openings with our wind clothes and things of that sort.
But the most important part of our equipment was, after all, our firearms, and these, fortunately, we had kept in tolerably good order. We cleaned the rifles thoroughly and rubbed them with train-oil. We had also a little vaseline and gun-oil left for the locks. On taking stock of our ammunition, we found, to our joy, that we still had about 100 rifle cartridges and 110 small-shot cartridges. We had thus enough, if necessary, for several more winters.
[1] These rumblings in the glacier are due to rifts which are formed in the mass of ice when the cold causes it to contract. New rifts seemed to be formed only when the temperature sank lower than it had previously been in the course of that winter; at least, it was only then that we heard the rumblings.
[2] It proved afterwards that the distance was about 56 miles.