Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North

by Fullerton L. Waldo

When the dogs were skinned, and the harness had been used to lash the skins together, it was nearly dark, and they were fully ten miles out at sea.

To the north he spied a solitary light, twinkling from the village he had left in the morning. He thought of the fishermen sitting down to their tea: and he knew they would not think of him as in danger, for he had told them he would not be back for three days. And all the "liveyeres" think of Grenfell as a man who knows the coast so well, and the ways of getting about, that he is far more likely to give help than to ask it of them.

He had unraveled a small piece of rope, and soaked this in fat from the entrails of a dog, thinking he might make a torch of it. But his match-box, which he wore on a chain, had leaked. Fishermen will tell you how hard it is to find a match-box that will not let in water: I prize one I have carried a great many years, which seems to be waterproof. I wish Grenfell had had it then. The matches were a pulp. Nevertheless Grenfell kept them, thinking that they might be dried and usable by morning. Every now and then, by a sort of mechanical instinct, the Doctor would rise to his full height and wave his hands toward the land, in the forlorn hope of being seen through a powerful glass.

There was nothing but his hands to wave. He dared not let his shirt fly as a flag: it would not do to take it off too long at any time, because of the piercing cold.

Nor would it be safe to pile up snow from the pan to break the force of the wind, for the pan might give way if it were thinned out anywhere. So he placed the dog-skins in a pile, sat on them, and changed his clothes, wringing them out, and flapping them in the wind, then putting them by turns against his body. The exercise at least postponed the coming of the last hour of all.

The moccasins let the water through so easily that it was impossible for him to dry his feet. Then he remembered a trick of the Lapps, who had been brought over to care for the reindeer which Grenfell was striving to introduce at St. Anthony in place of the dogs. The Lapps have a way of tying grass in pads about their feet. On the harness of the dogs there was flannel, to make it soft where it rubbed against the flanks. The Doctor cut off the flannel, raveled out the rest of the rope, stuffed his shoes with the fragments of rope, and wound the flannel about his legs like puttees. If the situation were not so serious, he might have laughed at the outfit in which he faced the night wind, for the Oxford University running trunks and the Richmond Football Club red, yellow and black stockings were garments he had worn twenty years before and had recently found in a box of old clothes.

What was left over of the rope was stuffed inside the flannel shirt and the trunks, which with the stockings and sweater vest made up the Doctor's complete costume. Then he made "Doc," his biggest dog, lie down, so that he might curl up beside him and use him as a kind of fireless stove. He wrapped the three skins round his body, and—strange to say—fell asleep. One hand kept warm against "Doc's" hide, but the other froze,—since the Doctor had lost his gloves. Even so, Edward Whymper camping out on the volcano Cotopaxi in Ecuador found his tent too hot on the side next the volcano and too cold on the other side.

Grenfell awoke, his teeth chattering and his body shivering. He thought for an instant he was looking at the sunrise, but it was the moon, and he guessed it must be about half an hour after midnight. "Doc" didn't at all relish having his slumber disturbed. He was warm and comfortable, and he growled his remonstrance, deep down in his throat, till he discovered that it was his master and not another dog against his cushioned ribs.

For a great mercy, the wind died down, and stopped pushing the ice-pan out into the dreaded North Atlantic. Just out yonder, not sixty feet away, was a cake of ice much bigger than his own. It would have made a fine raft for them all: and if only they could have reached it, Grenfell was sure he could have held out for two or three days. He could have killed off the dogs one by one, eaten the flesh, and drunk the warm blood. The Eskimo would think such a meal luxury. On his little pan, the effort to kill each dog would mean the risk of drowning every time.

At daybreak, Grenfell remembered, men would be starting from Goose Cove with their sleds to go twenty miles to a parade of Orangemen. With this thought in his mind he fell asleep again. Then he woke with a sharp realization of the fact that he must have some kind of flag with which to signal them. He made up his mind that as soon as it was daylight he would use his shirt for a flag—but the pole was lacking. So in the dark he wrenched the bodies of the dead dogs apart—an extremely difficult task with the tough, frozen muscles and fibres. But he made what he says was "the heaviest and crookedest flagpole it has ever been my lot to see," lashing the bones together with his bits of rope and the remains of the seal traces.