In order to run easily and fast with our dogs in the spring of the year, when the weather is usually warm, we wear very light clothing; thus we do not perspire at midday and freeze at night. It chanced that I had recently opened a box of football garments which I had not seen for twenty years. I had found my old Oxford University running “shorts,” and a pair of Richmond Football Club stockings of red, yellow, and black, exactly as I wore them twenty years ago. These, with a flannel shirt and sweater, were all I now had left. Coat, hat, gloves, oilskins—everything else—were gone, and I stood there in that odd costume exactly as I stood in the old days on a football field. These garments, being very light, dried all the quicker until afternoon; then nothing would dry any more, everything freezing stiff.
My occupation till what seemed like midnight was unravelling rope, and with this I padded out my knickers inside and my shirt as well, though it was a clumsy job, for I could not see what I was doing. Now, getting my largest dog, as big as a wolf and weighing ninety-two pounds, I made him lie down in order that I could cuddle around him. I then piled the three skins so that I could lie on one edge, while the other came just over my shoulders and head.
My own breath, collecting inside the newly-flayed skin, must have had a soporific effect, for I was soon fast asleep. One hand I had plunged down inside the curled-up dog, but the other hand, being gloveless, had frozen, and I suddenly woke, shivering enough, I thought, to break my pan. What I took to be the sun was just rising, but I soon found it was the moon, and then I knew it was about half past twelve. The dog was having an excellent time; he had not been cuddled up so warmly all the winter. He resented my moving with low growls, till he found it wasn’t another dog.
The wind was steadily driving me now towards the open sea, where, short of a miracle, I could expect nothing but death.
Still I had only this hope—that my pan would probably be opposite another village, called Goose Cove, at daylight, and might possibly be seen from there. I knew that the komatiks would be starting at daybreak over the hills for a parade of Orangemen about twenty miles away. I might, therefore, be seen as they climbed the hills, though the cove does not open seaward. So I lay down and went to sleep again.
I woke some time later with a sudden thought in my mind that I must have a flag to signal with. So I set to work at once in the dark to disarticulate the legs of my dead dogs, which were now frozen stiff, and seemed to offer the only chance of forming a pole to carry a flag.
Cold as it was, I determined to sacrifice my shirt for that purpose with the first streak of daylight. It took a long time in the dark to get the legs off, and when I had patiently marled them together with old harness rope they formed the heaviest and crookedest flag-post it has ever been my lot to see. Still it had the advantage of not being so cold to hold, because the skin on the paws made it unnecessary to hold the frozen meat with my bare hands.
What had awakened me this time, I found, was that the pan had swung around and the shelter made by my dogs’ bodies was on the wrong side, for, though there was a very light air, the evaporation it caused from my wet clothes made quite a difference. I had had no food since six o’clock the morning before, when I had porridge and bread and butter. I had, however, a rubber band on instead of one of my garters, and I chewed that for twenty-four hours. It saved me from thirst and hunger, oddly enough. I did not drink from the ice of my pan, for it was salt-water snow and ice. Moreover, in the night the salt water had lapped up over the edges, for the pan was on a level with the sea. From time to time I heard the cracking and grinding of the newly formed “slob,” and it seemed that my little floe must inevitably soon go to pieces.
At last the sun really did rise, and the time came for the sacrifice of my shirt. I stripped, and, much to my surprise and pleasure, did not find it was half so cold as I had anticipated. I now reformed my dog-skins, with the raw side out, so that they made a kind of coat, quite rivalling Joseph’s. But with the rising of the sun the frost came out of the joints of my dogs’ legs, and the friction—caused, I suppose, by waving it—made my flag-pole almost tie itself in knots. Still, I could raise it three or four feet above my head, which seemed very important.
Now, however, I found that, instead of having drifted as far as I had reckoned, I was only off some cliffs called Ireland Head, near which there is a little village looking seaward, whence I should certainly have been seen had the time been summer. But as I had myself, earlier in the season, been night-bound at the place, I had learnt there was not a single soul living there in the winter. The people had all, as usual, migrated to their winter houses up the bay, where they get together for schooling and social purposes.