Part 9 (1/2)
The early days of November were devoted to routine work about Annoatok.
Meat was gathered and dried in strips by Francke; a full force of men were put to the work of devising equipment; the women were making clothing and dressing skins; and then a traveling party was organized to go south to gather an additional harvest of meat and skins and furs. For this purpose we planned to take advantage of the November moon. Thus, in the first week of the month, we were ready for a five-hundred-mile run to the southern villages and to the night-hunting grounds for walrus.
A crack of whips explosively cut the taut, cold air. The raucous, weird and hungry howl of the wolf-dogs replied: ”_Ah-u-oo, Ah-u-oo, Ah-u-oo!_” rolled over the ice; ”_Huk-huk!_” the Eskimos shouted. There was a sudden tightening of the traces of our seven sledges; fifty lithe, strong bodies leaped forward; and, holding the upstanders, the rear upright framework of the native sledges, I and my six companions were off. In a few moments the igloos of the village, with lights s.h.i.+ning through windows where animal membranes served as gla.s.s, had sped by us.
The cheering of the natives behind was soon lost in the grind of our sledges on the irregular ice and the joyous, unrestrained barking of the leaping, tearing, restless dog-teams.
To the south of us, a misty orange flush suffused the dun-colored sky.
The sun, which we had not seen for an entire month, now late in November far below the horizon, sent to us the dim radiance of a far-away smile.
After its setting it had, about noon time of each day, set the sky faintly aglow, this radiance decreasing until it was lost in the brightness of the midday moon. Rising above the horizon, a suspended lamp of frosty, pearl-colored gla.s.s, the moon for ten days of twenty-four hours, each month, encircled about us, now lost behind ice-sheeted mountains, again subdued under colored films of frost clouds, but always relieving the night of its gloom, and permitting, when the wind was not too turbulent, outside activity.
A wonderful animal is the sea-horse, or whale-horse, as the Icelanders and Dutch (from whom we have borrowed ”walrus”) call it. In the summer its life is easy and its time is spent in almost perpetual sunny dreams, but in winter it would be difficult to conceive of a harder existence than its own. Finding food in shallow Polar seas, it comes to permanent open water, or to the creva.s.ses of an active pack for breath. With but a few minutes' rest on a storm-swept surface, it explores, without other relief for weeks, the double-night darkness of unknown depths under the frozen sea. At last, when no longer able to move its huge web feet, it rises on the ice or seeks ice-locked waters for a needed rest. In winter, the thump of its ponderous head keeps the young ice from closing its breathing place. If on ice, its thick skin, its blanket of blubber, and an automatic s.h.i.+ver, keep its blood from hardening. This is man's opportunity to secure meat and fuel, but the quest involves a task to which no unaided paleface is equal. The night hunt of the walrus is Eskimo sport, but it is nevertheless sport of a most engaging and exciting order.
So that I might not be compelled to start on my dash stintedly equipped, we now prepared for such an adventure by moonlight. Before this time there had not been sufficient atmospheric stability and ice continuity to promise comparative safety. My heart exulted as I heard the crack of the whips in the electric air and felt the earth rush giddily under my feet as I leaped behind the speeding teams. The fever of the quest was in my veins; its very danger lent an indescribable thrill, for success now meant more to me than perhaps hunting had ever meant to any man.
Not long after we started, darkness descended. The moon slowly pa.s.sed behind an impenetrable curtain of inky clouds; the orange glow of the sun faded; and we were surrounded on every side by a blackness so thick that it was almost palpable.
As I now recall that mad race I marvel how we escaped smas.h.i.+ng sledges, breaking our limbs, crus.h.i.+ng our heads. We tumbled and jumped in a frantic race over the broken, irregular pack-ice from Annoatok to Cape Alexander, a distance of thirty miles as the raven moves, but more than forty miles as we follow the sledge trail. Here the ice became thin; we felt cold mist rising from open water; and now and then, in an occasional breaking of the darkness, we could discern vast sheets or snaky leads of open sea ahead of us.
To reach the southern waters where the walrus were to be found, we now had to seek an overland route, which would take us over the frozen Greenland mountains and lead us through the murky clouds, a route of twisting detours, gashed glaciers, upturned barriers of rock and ice, swept by blinding winds, unmarked by any trail, and which writhed painfully beyond us for forty-seven miles.
Arriving at the limit of traversable sea-ice, we now paused before sloping cliffs of glacial land-ice which we had to climb. Picture to yourself a vast glacier rising precipitously, like a gigantic wall, thousands of feet above you, and creeping tortuously up its gla.s.sy, purple face, if such that surface could be called, formed by the piling of one glacial formation upon the other in the descent through the valleys, a twisting, retreating road of jagged ice strata, of earth and stone, blocked here and there by apparently impa.s.sable impediments, pausing at almost unscalable, frozen cliffs, and at times no wider than a few yards. Imagine yourself pausing, as we suddenly did, and viewing the perilous ascent, the only way open to us, revealed in the pa.s.sing glimmer of the pale, circling moon, despair, fear and hope tugging at your heart. Whipped across the sky by the las.h.i.+ng winds, the torn clouds, pa.s.sing the face of the moon, cast magnified and grotesquely gesticulating shadows on the glistening face of the icy Gibraltar before us. Some of these misty shapes seemed to threaten, others shook their rag-like arms, beckoning forward. Upon the face of the towering, perpendicular ice-wall, great hummocks like the gnarled black limbs of a huge tree twisted upwards.
I realized that the frightful ascent must be made. The goal of my single aim suddenly robbed the climb of its terrors. I dropped my whip. Six other whips cracked through the air. Koo-loo-ting-wah said, ”_Kah-Kah!_”
(Come, come!) But Sotia said, ”_Iodaria-Iodaria!_” (Impossible, impossible!) The dogs emitted shrill howls. Holding the rear upstanders of the sledges, we helped to push them forward.
Before us, the fifty dogs climbed like cats through narrow apertures of the ice, or took long leaps over the serried battlements that barred our way. We stumbled after, sometimes we fell. Again we had to lift the sledges after the dogs.
From the top of the glacier a furious wind brushed us backwards. We felt the steaming breath of the laboring dogs in our faces. My heart thumped painfully. Now and then the moon disappeared; we followed the unfailing instinct of the animals. I realized that a misstep might plunge me to a horrible death in the ice abysm below. With a howl of joy from drivers, the dogs finally leaped to the naked surface of the wind-swept glacier.
Panting in indescribable relief, we followed. But the worst part of the journey lay before us. The sable clouds, like the curtain of some cyclopean stage, seemed suddenly drawn aside as if by an invisible hand.
Upon the illimitable stretch of ice rising before us like the slopes of a gla.s.s mountain, the full rays of the moon poured liquid silver. Only in dreams had such a scene as this been revealed to me--in dreams of the enchanted North--which did not now equal reality. The spectacle filled me with both awed delight and a sense of terror.
Beyond the fan-shaped teams of dogs the eyes ran over fields of night-blackened blue, gashed and broken by bottomless canyons which twisted like purple serpents in every direction. Vast expanses of smooth surface, polished by the constant winds, reflected the glow of the moon and gleamed like isles of silver in a motionless, deep, sapphire sea; but all was covered with the air of night. In the moonlight, the jagged irregular contours of the broken ice became touched with a burning gilt.
A constant effect like running quicksilver played about us as the moon sailed around the heavens.
Above us the ice pinnacles were lost in the clouds, huge billowy ma.s.ses that were blown in the wind troublously, like the heavy black tresses of some t.i.tan woman. I thrilled with the beauty of the magical spectacle, yet, when I viewed the perilous pathway, I felt the grip of terror again at my heart.
I was aroused from my brief reverie by the familiar ”_Huk-huk! Ah-gah!
Ah-gah!_” of the Eskimos, and placing our hands upon the sledges, we leaped forward into the purple-gashed sea, with its blinding sheets of silver. I seemed carried through a world such as the old Nors.e.m.e.n sang of in the sagas.
Of a sudden, as though extinguished, the moonlight faded, huge shadows leaped onto the ice before us, frenziedly waved their arms and melted into the pitch-black darkness which descended. I had read imaginative tales of wanderings in the nether region of the dead, but only now did I have a faint glimmering of the terror (with its certain, exultant intoxication) which lost souls must feel when they wander in a darkness beset with invisible horrors.
Over the ice, cut with innumerable chasms and neck-breaking irregularities, we rushed in the dark. The wind moaned down from the despairing cloud-enfolded heights above; it tore through the bottomless gullies on every side with a hungry roar. Beads of perspiration rolled down my face and froze into icicles on my chin and furs. The temperature was 48 below zero.
Occasionally we stopped a moment to gasp for breath. I could hear the panting of my companions, the labor of the dogs. A few seconds' inaction was followed by convulsive s.h.i.+vering; the pain of stopping was more excruciating than that of climbing. In the darkness, the calls of the invisible Eskimos to the dogs seemed like the weird appeals of disembodied things. I felt each moment the imminent danger of a frightful death; yet the dogs with their marvelous intuition, twisting this way and that, and sometimes retreating, sensed the open leads ahead and rushed forward safely.
At times I felt the yawning depth of ice canyons immediately by my side--that a step might plunge me into the depths. Desperately I held on to the sledges, and was dragged along. Such an experience might well turn the hair of the most expert Alpinist white in one night; yet I did not have time to dwell fully upon the dangers, and I was carried over a trip more perilous than, later, proved the actual journey on sea-ice to the Pole.