“Because we shall be nearer the center of the earth.”
We took on coal at the Corwin mines and resumed our progress northward in the still unimpeded lane of open water, with porridge ice forming fast along the outer pack but the shore rim intact, and bucking against a strong northeast current setting along shore. We passed Point Lay and Icy Cape the second day, and reached Point Barrow on the tenth of July.
How well I recall our landing on the low beach of this tip-top point of the continent, and wondering, in a dreary dream of coming hardships and dangers, at its desolation, a low barren sandbank forty to one hundred yards across. At Cape Smythe a small promontory raises a faint remonstrance against the encroachments of the sea in a bluff of about thirty feet elevation, and here we found the village of Uglaamie, a cluster of twenty or more huts, inhabited by a boreal tribe, the Nuwukmeun. Life however, in the plants and animals revived our feelings, and the Professor’s exultation over the traces of old beach lines inspirited us. Here on the land, in propitious spots, sprang up buttercups, dandelions and a peculiar poppy; over our heads flew flocks of eider ducks, a butterfly danced gayly in its wavering flight by our side, and Captain Coogan reported a school of whale running to the northeast, “in a hurry.”
We found some standing portions of the United States meteorological station placed here in 1902, and Goritz stumbled upon a dismantled graveyard where saint and sinner, rich and poor had promiscuously suffered from the inroads of the Eskimo dog. It offered a mournful commentary upon the transitoriness of human greatness.
But reflections were out of place; we had reached the point of departure, and the Great Unknown sternly invited us to begin our quest. Under such circumstances the long subdued instincts of the primal man reassert themselves, and an augury of good fortune befell us that was droll enough, unrelieved by the nervous solemnity of our feelings, but which so connected itself with these as to give it an absurd stateliness of meaning.
An angora goat was the queer and unexpected waif we found here, left by an unlucky whaler the previous year; a long haired, pugnacious billy goat, whose property or power as a mascot had failed to save the “Siren” from being “nipped, pooped and swamped,” and lost in the remorseless ice. The resident Eskimos in Uglaamie had imbibed respect for the goat (which had been somewhat summarily abandoned by its former devotees) and its influence with the unseen agencies that control destiny. But they were logical enough to conclude that its intimacy was with bad—tuna—rather than with good spirits. This omnivorous beast furnished us with a favorable omen, all the more auspicious because he embodied the very genius of destruction.
Now this expatriated goat rejected the prostrations and worship of the Nuwukmeun, like a capricious deity, and perversely clung to us with embarrassing insistence. The launch had been put in the water; it seemed almost ideal in its qualities, it shot through the water, it turned at a suggestion; its mobility, its steadiness, its comfortable size, its ample deck room, the large capacity of its storage tanks, its strength and sinewy stiffness delighted us. With this, and with propitious chances, we could follow leads, narrow and crooked, mount the ice, and make of it a giant sled, to resume at an instant’s notice its natural home and so circumvent all treacheries of ice or water, with protean ease sailing on each.
Lost in his admiration of his creation, as it rose and rocked in a low swell at the side of the whaler, Goritz stood on the shore and forgot his priceless chronometer which, wrapped in a red flannel rag, he had for a moment placed on the sand. The rest of us were not far from him, but might have failed to detect the imminent danger, when suddenly the Professor clapping his hands together in vigorous whacks, shouted,
“Antoine! Antoine! The goat, the goat; the chronom—”
The sentence remained incomplete. Like a flash Goritz had wheeled about, to see his hircine holiness, with insufferable assurance, pick up in his tremulous lips the precious watch. If Goritz turned like lightning, his attack on the offender was even a trifle quicker. He caught the beast by the throat, determined to intercept the descent of the timekeeper into the intricate passages of the god’s intestines. There was a struggle, the goat falling over on its back and kicking with might and main, while Goritz inexorably tightened his constricting grip on the animal’s wind-pipe. There could be but one of two results—a dead goat or the recovered chronometer, and, of course, it was the latter.