CHAPTER XIII 

THE JOYS OF POLAR SLEDGING 

     Polar sledging is anything but a joy ride. The cold is not the worst part of it, that is, directly: so far as actually feeling the cold was concerned, we had no trouble, and a few frost­bites didn't count. Hardest to endure was the indirect effect of the cold, coupled with the ab­sence of a fire to dry things. The camping hour arrives. You have been working hard all day, pulling and tugging in a temperature ranging from twenty-five to forty-five degrees below zero, and perhaps with a nice cool wind blowing from the north. Outside you are a mass of frost, and inside your skin is wet with perspiration. 

     Be careful in pitching the tent that you do not leave your mittens off more than a few seconds, or you will not only freeze your fingers, but find the mittens frozen so hard you cannot get them on again. The best way is to put them inside your jacket till you want them. When the tent is pitched, one man goes to cut fresh ice—ice that is at the top of the hummocks, fifteen or eighteen feet above the sea—and break it up fine for melting over the petroleum-gas lamp. This is the only way to get water, and it is not an easy way, for the ice is almost as hard as a rock. 

     Another man feeds the hungry dogs their meager ration of frozen meat. Poor beasts, it is a small bit and swallowed at a single gulp, and then nothing more than snow for them to eat till the next night. It makes one very sad to see the hungry fellows sitting about watching with wide eyes their busy masters, and wagging their tails in expectancy of a crumb or two. But it is a hard life for both man and beast, and rations must be strictly adhered to, no matter how many good dogs go to sleep in the snow with empty stomachs. They'll jump into their work all right in the morning just the same. 

     Two men get the big sleeping-bag off the sledge and carry it into the tent. There they try to unroll it. Half an hour of tugging, yank­ing, pounding is needed to accomplish this feat, so fast is it frozen from the moisture of the previous night's use. When it is spread flat in the snow we begin getting in. Preliminary to this we beat and scrape some of the frost from one another's clothing, but it is impossible to get it all off. The remainder goes into the bag with us. We don't take off any clothing, not even our moccasins or our hats. Yes, we do take off our reindeer-skin shoes, but it is only for the purpose of turning them inside out that they may the better dry during the night, and that we may take out the senne grass or hay which we have worn in them to absorb the moisture and keep the feet dry. 

     The art of keeping warm feet is to keep dry feet, and three or four pairs of woolen stockings and a nicely packed bunch of this hay work to a charm. Whatever else we got in this excursion, we did not get cold feet. Scattered out to freeze, the hay can be shaken entirely free of frost next morning, and so will be fairly dry to put on again. But what a job it is to turn these frozen moccasins night and morning with our frost-nipped, tender fingers! More than once have I seen a big, brave fellow shedding tears and swearing together while at this job—it hurt so. 

     We start kicking our way into the sleeping-bag. It is frosty, icy, hard in there, and it takes a lot of kicking and shoving to straighten it out and work our way well down in. By the time this is done, supper is ready, and this brings in the only glorious hour of the day. Hot soup, hot coffee, biscuits; a piece of cheese; bacon, some­times, raw, sometimes boiled in the soup ; oat­meal porridge; a nice chunk of butter, hard as a rock, but it tastes good in the coffee; and a big drink of ice water when we are lucky enough to have any water left over. If there isn't any left over, we go thirsty, as we can't afford to use more oil. 

     We sit up in the bag like birdlings in a nest, and eat this supper with voracious appetites, and with mittens on our fingers. The steam is con­verted into frost and the white particles fall all over us; but we don't mind that as long as there is anything to eat. The saddest moment is when everything is gone and the ration exhausted. 

     Then a pipe for consolation—a pipe and the pleasant task of writing up one's journal in a temperature of seventy degrees or more below freezing. There was once a time when I didn't believe it possible for a man to write two or three hundred words in half an hour in such cold, with bare hands; but now I know it can be done, and, what is more surprising, the man can actually read what he has written. 

     The next thing is to push one's self all the way down into the now fairly-well thawed-out sleep­ing-bag, pull up the flap and button it tight, and get snuggled for the night. All this is easier said than done. The predominant idea of com­fort in a sleeping-bag prevailing among my Norwegian comrades was to slide down some­where near the bottom and telescope themselves together ; but I had always to have a smell of fresh air, no matter how cold it was.

     There were four of us in one bag, and none of us was small, and we had to lie "spoon-fashion." When one turned over all had to turn. As we were packed in like Smyrna figs in a box, and as I occupied one edge of the bag, where the coverlid was drawn down over me as tight as a drumhead, it sometimes took me a quarter of an hour to turn over. It was quite an athletic feat, but it had its advantage in that it helped one to warm up. The effort to turn about-face usually started perspiration, though the jacket I wore was so stiff with frost that on first getting into bed it was difficult to bend the arms. We always wore our mittens in bed, at least during the first part of the night, when we were struggling to get our blankets straightened out. These were like pieces of sheet metal to start with; but the heat of our bodies and the persistent bending and breaking of them finally licked them into shape. 

     Surprising, the power of this body heat of a vigorous man! In the course of a couple of hours it thawed most of our clothing into wet compresses, made the blankets limp and soggy, and even softened parts of the sleeping-bag it­self. Something like a hundred minutes after buttoning the flaps down over our heads we found ourselves lying with pools of water under our bodies, while frost still adhered to our trousers. By this time two or three of my Norwegian bed-fellows were snoring like thresh­ing-machines, trolley-cars, boiler-shops and bat­teries of artillery. Then, generally without much loss of time, I suppose I joined in the chorus. 

     All these and countless other annoyances are small matters when once you get accustomed to them, and as long as one is in full possession of his health and strength. But I cannot con­scientiously recommend an Arctic tent as a hospi­tal, nor a dog sledge in rough ice and bad weather as an ambulance.