80 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



the fact that after having "perished amid a wilderness of ice," in 

 the newspaper announcements of a year earher, I had now just 

 come dramatically to life in the front-page headlines. Apropos 

 of my resuscitation an interviewer had been sent to McConnell, 

 who then was in New York, with result in part as follows: 



"... Those down here who thought he was dead did not know 

 him. . . . You see the Stefansson they had met at banquets and 

 functions became another man entirely when he left civilization be- 

 hind him. I know because I traveled with him all one winter. He 

 is at home in the Arctic. , . . The secret of his long so-called impos- 

 sible trips is that he knows how to take care of his men and dogs. 

 His sense of direction seems almost intuitive. I have never seen him 

 become confused as to direction. On one occasion I followed his 

 lead through a blinding snowstorm for hours. . . . The last two 

 hours were made in darkness yet at the finish he was not over a 

 hundred yards off the trail. I say 'off the trail' but in fact there 

 was no trail. 



"At another time I followed him across a bay for forty miles. 

 He made his own trail and at the end of the forty miles we came to 

 . . . the small sandspit (he was aiming for)." 



These things seemed extraordinary to McConnell, and Wilkins 

 has told me that they appeared equally extraordinary to him, but 

 they were really very simple. To begin with, I knew the country. 

 It is a region where only three kinds of wind blow. The strongest 

 is from the southwest, the next strongest is from the northeast, and 

 the third is from east-northeast. Occasionally there is a little wind 

 from some other point but in general the snowdrifts are deposited 

 by one of these three winds. Commonly you know as a matter of 

 recent history which of the three winds it was that blew last, but 

 in any event an examination of the ground will easily show which 

 it was. On the same principles as are employed by stratigraphic 

 geologists, you can tell by size and other characteristics which driftg 

 were made by the strongest winds, and furthermore you can tell the 

 direction of the wind by the fact that the drift is lowest and narrow- 

 est to windward and gets higher and wider to leeward before finally 

 dropping down abruptly to the general level. After as many years 

 as I have had of arctic travel it would be strange if I could not 

 tell at a glance, where only three kinds of drift are involved 

 which was the S.W. drift, which the N.E. and which the E.N.E. 

 And if it was dark so I couldn't see I could tell the shapes of the 

 drifts by stopping and feeling them carefully with my feet, or if 

 necessary by dropping on all fours, crawling about and examining 



