224 FOUR YEARS IN THE WHITE NORTH [Mar. 



common entry in my journal for the first seventeen days 

 of March, 1916. Wind and drift, man's two great an- 

 tagonists in the North, so thoroughly hated and cursed 

 by the Arctic explorer! "Hellish" is the only fittingly 

 descriptive word. Man hums to himself, calls cheerily 

 to his dogs, and laughs aloud in temperatures of fifty 

 and sixty below, clothed as he should be, like an Eskimo; 

 but wind at that temperature cuts like acid, blackens 

 the face, and whitens the fingers. 



Through the drift, swirling about our house and 

 across the fiord, I anxiously watched the harbor entrance 

 for crawling black dots — dog-teams coming from the 

 south, my Eskimo helpers who had promised to be at 

 Etah on March 15th. Carefully I had made out their 

 calendars; carefully I had instructed them, whenever 

 it grew dark, to cross out a day; then, when the last 

 day was gone, they were to come to me. I had abso- 

 lute faith in these black-haired Polar children. They 

 had not forgotten. Wind and drift would not stop 

 them. Open water was the cause of their delay, and 

 so it proved to be. 



Before breakfast on Sunday morning, March 19th, 

 there was the glad cry of ^' In-yuh-suit alla-kuk-a-yootr' 

 ("Eskimos are coming!"). Such an early arrival indi- 

 cated that open water and thin ice had been encountered 

 a few miles south the night before, both dangerous to 

 deal with in the darkness. One man only was missing, 

 and I could not wait for him. I decided to get away on 

 the 22d with six Eskimos with very light loads. Travel- 

 ing light and fast, we could round and map King Chris- 

 tian Island and Finlay Land (neither of which had 

 ever been visited), and return to Etah before the ice 

 of Smith Sound broke up in June. If too late in re- 



