Walrus was the first essential, for the hide would afford a covering for the roof, the blubber would furnish fuel for the stove, and the meat would be useful as food. They spied two lying at the edge of a piece of ice, and approaching with the utmost caution, succeeded in shooting both. Their weight, however, as they fell over, caused them to slide from the ice, and they were in the water before the men could reach them. They secured the carcases, so as to prevent them from either sinking or drifting away, and essayed to haul them up on to the ice again so as to remove the hides and blubber. But the combined strength of the two men was insufficient to pull one of the huge carcases up on to the ice again, and they were compelled to strip the skin and blubber off as the walrus lay in the water. This necessitated their lying upon the floating carcases, and by the time the operation was completed, their already travel-stained clothing was rendered still more uncomfortable by being saturated with blood and fat.
Returning to the camp with their walrus hides and blubber, they explored the ridge lying behind the spot, and were fortunate in finding some moss, which they carefully gathered and carried away to assist in the building of the hut. The walls they had made of the stones allowed for an internal space of about ten feet long by not quite six feet wide. The crevices between the stones they filled in with moss and gravel, and then stretching the walrus hides over the ridge-pole, they weighted them down with more stones. Over all of it they heaped snow and ice, and in order to avoid suffocation by the smoke of their blubber cooking stove, they constructed an ice-chimney, which, however, did not always carry off the smoke, while it frequently thawed at the base, and made the interior very draughty. Their guns, ski, and other articles and stores, they placed inside the hut, leaving the kayaks outside; and when everything was stored conveniently, they built a wall as a screen to keep the wind from out of the door, and hung a curtain of skins across the doorway. The floor of the hut was composed of stones which no ingenuity of theirs could render smooth or even, and upon it their sleeping-bag, the fur of which was almost worn entirely away, was stretched.
As soon as the hut was finished the two set out on foot in search of bears for winter provisions, and were happy in finding sufficient to enable them to fill their larder with enough meat to last them well into the following summer. This they stored on the top of the hut, and during the long winter night they often heard foxes over their heads gnawing at the frozen mass. They had not enough cartridges to waste on shooting them, and as there was more meat than they would want, they let the foxes feed in peace. Bear's meat, fried at night and boiled in the morning, was the only food they had; when the long dark night set in, with the temperature inside the hut barely above freezing point, they lay in their sleeping-bag side by side, generally for twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four. The inside of the walrus-hide roof became covered with frost and ice, upon which the black from the blubber-fed stove settled; the stone floor was so uneven that they gave up trying to make it smooth, and lay as comfortably as they could under the circumstances, with their feet nearly touching one side of the hut and their heads the other. From November until the following March they were undisturbed, except by the sounds of the foxes on the roof and the howling of the wind, and a picturesque glimpse is given by Nansen of their life in his diary entry made on December 24, 1895, when the temperature inside the hut was 11° below zero.
"And this is Christmas Eve; cold and blowy out of doors, and cold and draughty indoors. How desolate it is here! We have never had such a Christmas before. The bells are now ringing in the Christmas festival at home; I can hear the sound of them swinging out through the air from the church towers. How beautiful it sounds! Now the candles are being lit on the Christmas trees, and flocks of children are let in and dance round in exuberant glee. Must have a Christmas party for children when I get home. We, too, are keeping the festival in our little way. Johansen has turned his shirt, and has put the outer one inside. I have done the same, and have changed my drawers as well, and put on the others which I had wrung out in warm water. And then I have washed myself in a quarter of a cup of warm water, using the discarded drawers as sponge and towel. I feel like a new being; my clothes do not stick to my body as much as they did. Then for supper we had fish 'gratin,' made of potted fish and Indian meal, with train-oil for butter—fried or boiled both equally dry—and as sweets we had bread fried in train-oil. To-morrow morning we are going to have chocolate and bread."
Where a turned shirt and a bath in a tea-cup formed the physical luxuries, and bread fried in train-oil and chocolate comprised the feast, in celebration of Christmas Day, it is not difficult to picture the amount of enjoyment available for every-day use, nor is it difficult to understand that they sighed even for a railway time-table to peruse. But yet they kept their health, their spirits, and their tempers. The rough stones under their sleeping-bag seem to have been the only thing they could not turn into a jest. When one snored too loudly to allow the other to sleep, it was only necessary for the victim to move; they lay so close together for warmth that a movement was equal to a dig in the back, and that meant waking the snorer by changing his position on the knobbly boulders from ease to discomfort.
At length the approach of the sun became manifest by the gradually brightening twilight, and the arrival of a flock of little auks reminded them that spring was at hand. They celebrated the occasion by boiling their clothes, one article at a time, in the only pot they possessed, and then scraping the grease and dirt from them by the aid of a knife, so as to render them soft enough for travelling, as it was beyond the question to get them clean. The sooty smoke from the winter's cooking had thoroughly begrimed their faces, and all they could do to get clean was first to try and scrape the dirt off with the knife, and then rub themselves all over with bear's grease and wipe it off with moss.
By the middle of May the water along the shore was sufficiently open to permit of their starting in the kayaks on the journey which they expected would end at Spitzbergen. On May 19, 1896, they bade adieu to their winter camp, having packed everything on the kayaks, which they fastened together for convenience and stability. Sometimes they had to get out on to the ice which blocked the channel and drag the kayaks over to the open water on the other side; sometimes they sailed and sometimes they paddled. They passed numbers of walrus lying on the ice, the great monsters paying no heed to them whatever. Once they landed on a mass of ice which rose high out of the water, in order to climb to the top of it and examine the coast line, for they were still in very great doubt whether they were off the shore of a hitherto undiscovered island or not.
They made the kayaks fast to a projecting piece of ice, and together climbed up to the top of the hummocks. As they reached the summit they looked back to the spot where they had left the kayaks, and were horrified to see them adrift. Already they were some distance away from the ice, and, being tied together, they were going rapidly down the channel. For a moment the sight held the two men motionless, for the kayaks represented their only means of escape. Everything beyond the clothes in which they stood was stored on board, and to be left on the ice without food, arms, or shelter, was almost certain death.
There was only one desperate means of salvation, and that Nansen took. Dashing down the hummock, he plunged into the ice-cold water and struck out after the retreating kayaks.