From the time we left Storm Camp on the upward march the wind had blown with greater or less force, but without interruption, from a little south of true west. Now as we retraced our steps it blew quartering in our faces, and accompanied by a fine drift of snow, cut like red-hot needles. We had already made a good day’s march. Now we had to duplicate it without rest or food. When at last we stumbled into camp I was nearly blind from the effects of the cutting snow and wind, and completely done up with the long continued exertion. The interest and excitement of the advance were gone, the reaction had come, and my feet dragged like lead. As a matter of fact the return journey, after the eagerness and excitement of pushing ahead is over, is always the hardest part of the work. Of the fourteen cracks and narrow leads passed in this last forced march, all but three had changed pronouncedly in the few hours elapsing between our outward and return march, and two or three of them had moved to such an extent that we had some difficulty in picking up our trail on the southern side of them. Once inside the igloo and the oil stove started to make our tea, I rolled on the sleeping platform in agony, with my burning eyes, and let Ahngmalokto make the tea. For an hour or more I feared that the cutting wind and snow, together with the strain upon my eyes in taking the observations, had given me an acute attack of snow-blindness, but I repeatedly buried my eyes in the freezing snow until the eyelids were numb, and after a time experienced sufficient relief, so that my utter weariness sent me to dreamless sleep. All regrets and disappointment had to yield temporarily to the imperious demand of the overworked body.
At this camp we took a full sleep, the last for several days, then hurried on at top speed. Deep in my heart I still had a lingering hope, fathered of course by the wish, that Marvin might have crossed the big lead before the storm came on, might have found Storm Camp, and left provisions there for us in accordance with my instructions left at the Storm Camp igloos. I was very anxious, therefore, to keep our outward trail, as far as Storm Camp, and now that the number of my dogs had been reduced, and some of my sledges discarded, I had spare men, and selecting two of the most experienced trailers among my Eskimos, I brought them alongside of me a few hundred yards in advance of the sledges. Thus we travelled, the three of us, with our eyes fixed upon the ice ahead, noting each faintest indication of the trail. Whenever the trail was faulted by the movement of the ice, we spread out in skirmish line and veered to the right, to the southwest, until we found it again. When we came to a crack or lead too wide to jump the sledges across, one of my Eskimos started to the right at once on the run, the other to the left, and the one first finding a practicable crossing signalled to the sledges in the rear, in the usual Eskimo way, with waving arm, and the sledges made directly for him, we crossed the lead, picked up the trail on the southern side and went on. In this way the sledges lost no time, and we were able to keep as rapid a pace on the return as on the outward march, in spite of the movement of the ice and the necessity of keeping the trail. The three of us frequently ran for considerable distances, in order to keep a sufficient space between us and the sledges to enable us to reconnoitre the leads before the sledges came up. At the end of every march we stumbled into our old igloos utterly exhausted, with eyes aflame from the wind and driving snow, but thanking God that we did not have to put ourselves to the additional effort of building igloos.
As in our outward so in our return journey, scarcely for an hour did the wind cease its infernal rush and hiss and assault upon our faces. The last march into Storm Camp, which we reached God only knows how, was in the teeth of another blinding western blizzard with driving snow, through which none but an Eskimo, and a very good one at that, could have kept the trail for five minutes. Of course I found no provisions here. Our igloos were lined with frost crystals and nearly filled with drifting snow, but they were havens of refuge from the howling elements outside, which were more than appreciated. Ootah was the happiest man in the party. Just before reaching the igloos he had spied a small fragment of pemmican, a crumb from somebody’s lunch dropped off the last sledge when we started north from Storm Camp, and he had pounced upon it and swallowed it just as if he were an Eskimo dog. At Storm Camp we were held twenty-four hours by the continuance of the gale, the ice groaning and grinding in the familiar way, then resumed our march with the number of my dogs still further reduced. From here I set a “bee-line” course for the nearest part of the Greenland coast. I alone of the party knew how far we had drifted and that our salvation now lay in the direction of the Greenland coast and its musk-oxen. My Eskimos thought we were coming down on the Grant Land coast which we had left; in fact, by some strange perversion of ideas, they were all fixed in their belief that we had been drifting westward. The only reason for this was that the ice on the northern side of the “big lead” had (so they said) before I joined them at the lead, been drifting pronouncedly westward.
When we reached the region where my two Eskimos had been stopped in their attempt to bring up the cache from the “big lead,” I was not surprised at the expressions of amazement and almost horror with which they had returned to me. There was no open water now, but the chaos of shattered and upheaved ice which stretched away to the southward was indescribable. Through this our progress was naturally slow, but one grim and exhausting march, during which the pickaxes were constantly in use, carried us through.
In the third march from Storm Camp we crossed the scar of the “big lead.” By scar I mean where the edges of the “big lead” had been driven together and had frozen fast. There was no mistaking it, and I foolishly allowed myself to be encouraged by the thought that this obstacle was at last behind us and no longer to be feared. I should have known better than to feel this way, for I certainly had sufficient Arctic experience to know that one should never feel encouraged at anything nor ever expect anything in these regions except the worst. On the second march south of the scar we came upon a region of huge pressure ridges running in every direction. It was an ominous sign, and I was not surprised a few hours later when an Eskimo whom I had sent in advance to reconnoitre a trail for the sledges, signalled to me from the summit of a pinnacle “open water.” When I climbed to his side there was our friend the “big lead,” a broad band of black water, perhaps half a mile in width, lying across our path and reaching east and west farther than I could see. The lead here was thirty to forty miles farther south than where we had crossed it on the upward journey, but it was the same lead.
I turned east keeping an Eskimo scouting close to the lead in search of a practicable crossing while the sledges advanced parallel to the lead but at some distance from it, where the going was a little better.
Once he raised our hopes by signalling that he had found it: but when the sledges came up the place was impracticable. The next day we continued eastward and found a mixture of half-congealed rubble ice, barely sufficient to support us, spanning the lead. The sledges were hurried on to this and we were within a few yards of firm ice on the south side, when our bridge failed us, and the ice under us began to go apart. It was a rapid and uncertain but finally successful scramble to get back. We camped on a piece of big floe bounded on one side by the steadily widening lead, and on the other three by rafters of Alpine character. Here we remained, drifting steadily eastward, watching the lead slowly widen, as it had done on the upward march.
On the upward march, when we were delayed at the “big lead,” in the brilliant, bitter, March days, and the ice on the distant northern side appeared to my eager eyes like the promised land, I had given it the name “The Hudson.” Now as we lay in this dismal camp, watching the distant southern ice beyond which lay the world, all that was near and dear, and perhaps life itself, while on our side was only the wide-stretching ice and possibly a lingering death, there was but one appropriate name for its black waters—“the Styx.”
Each day the number of my dogs dwindled and sledges were broken up to cook those of the animals that we ate ourselves. But here let me say that personally I have no objection whatever to dog, if only there is enough of it. Serious Arctic work quickly brings a man to consider quantity only in connection with the food question. One day leads formed entirely around the ice on which we were, making it an island of two or three miles’ diameter.
Later, two Eskimo scouts whom I had sent east to reconnoitre the lead came hurrying back breathless, with the report that a few miles from camp there was a film of young ice extending clear across the lead—now something over two miles wide—which they thought might support us on snowshoes. No time was lost in hurrying to the place when it was evident to us all that now was our chance or never, and I gave the word to put on snowshoes and make the attempt. I tied mine on more carefully than I had ever done before. I think every other man did the same, for we felt that a slip or stumble would be fatal. We had already tested the ice and knew it would not support us an instant without snowshoes.