Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North

by Fullerton L. Waldo

"What does this mean, master? What are you going to do with us now? Which is the way home? Why don't we start? How soon are we going to have our suppers?"

The pan was sinking: it could not hold them all. They must get off it at the earliest possible moment. This pan was nearer the shore than the one they had left, but all the time an offshore wind was shoving the entire ice-pack steadily out toward the open sea, so that, like the frog in the well, for every foot they gained they were losing two or three. All this time, Grenfell was longing for a chance to swim ashore—and the dogs would have followed him in that. Grenfell doesn't in the least mind a bath in icy waters. I remember one nipping day on the Strathcona I came out on deck to find that he had just been taking his bath in the open by emptying the bucket over himself in the biting wind. "You could have had one too," he said, "but I've just lost the bucket overboard." I wonder that he didn't dive for it, as he dived for the cricket-ball on that earlier occasion.

It was impossible to swim ashore from the pan—because there was that slushy "sish" filling all the gaps. The tiny table-top on which they were now crowded together measured about ten by twelve feet. It was not even solid ice—it was more like a great snowball loosely packed by the cold wind—and at any moment under the extra strain of the weight of men and dogs it might break up and let them all down into a watery grave. As the wind became more brisk and the sea grew rougher, the pan rocked about and bent and swayed, and the risk of its parting in the middle increased.

The pan headed toward a rocky point, where heavy surf was breaking: and a hope sprang up in Grenfell's heart that he might get near enough to swim ashore after all. But then the worst possible thing happened, short of an utter break-up. The pan hit a rock, and a large piece of it broke off. Then the rest of it swung round and the wind took hold of it, like a fiend alive, and started to push it steadily out to sea again.

The sea has been compared to a cat, which in calm weather purrs at your feet and in a storm will reveal its true nature and crack your bones and eat you. Now it was cruelly teasing Grenfell and his four-footed comrades as a cat tortures a mouse before it kills. The last hope seemed to have gone—unless someone by a miracle should pass along the shore and spy that tiny object on the horizon, and summon others to help him launch a boat to the rescue.

But no one lives on the shore of that huge bay. The other sled by now was so far ahead that it would be a long time before those with it could come back to make a search, even after they felt sufficiently alarmed to do so.

Cold and keen and marrow-searching, the brutal west wind—the worst of all in the spring of the year—moaned and whistled over the ice to the benumbed Doctor, and an additional exasperation was the fact that the komatik, from which he had been compelled to cut the dogs loose, had bobbed up to the surface again, and could now be seen not fifty yards away, but just as un-get-atable as if it were a mile off. There it stood to tantalize him, in the slush, and he knew that it had aboard everything he now wanted so acutely. There were dry clothes, wood and matches to make a signal fire, food and even a thermos bottle with hot tea!

The slender hope of being seen from the shore diminished as Grenfell thought of how inconspicuous he was, nearly naked, his dogs about him. Crusoe alone on his isle of solid ground was a king of space by comparison. Should he escape it would be the first time that a man adrift on the offshore ice had come ashore to tell the tale. Nearly anybody gazing seaward—even if anybody saw—would say: "Oh, that's just a piece of kelp or a bush!" The wiseacres refuse to be fooled by such sights. They are like the Arabs of the desert, who refuse to get excited over a mirage.

That he might not freeze to death before he drowned, Grenfell cut off those long top boots down to their moccasin feet, split the legs, and managed to tie them together into a makeshift for a jacket which at least protected his back from the fiercest biting of the wind.

Presently as Grenfell watched the widening interval between himself and the island he had left so comfortably a few hours before, he saw the komatik with its load up-end and vanish through the ice, as though it grew tired of waiting for him to make a try for it. The disappearance was one more sign of the general break-up of the ice on all sides of him, as his frail ice-pan neared the wide-open mouth of the bay. The white plain over which he had trudged from the island with the dogs had almost disappeared. The island was evidently surrounded on all sides by water and "sish," so that even if he could get back to it he would be cut off from the shore.