148 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



pressure, crossing from one cake to another by the corners where 

 they touch. If we find ourselves upon a weak cake a few acres in 

 area that is surrounded on all sides by stronger cakes, its edges 

 crumple up if the pressure is steady, and a ring of ice ridges begins 

 to form around. As the pressure continues the ridges get higher 

 and the area of our cake gets smaller. It is a rather uncomfortable 

 thing to have these ridges marching towards you slowly from all 

 sides, with a noise that is anything between a slight rumble and a 

 deafening roar, and the ice shivering where you stand. The worst 

 thing is that the shivering and the crashing will paralyze the dogs 

 with fear and make them worse than useless. This is where we need 

 several men for each sled. The thing to do is to select some rather 

 low place in one of the advancing ridges where the motion is slower 

 and there is a solid floe beyond. To find such a place is difficult, 

 more difficult because the weight of the forming ridgQ depresses the 

 edge of your floe and causes a moat of sea water to separate it 

 from you. 



At twenty or thirty degrees below zero the dogs are even more 

 afraid of putting their feet in the water than of putting them upon 

 moving pieces of ice. If there are four or five men with two sledges, 

 as has been the case in some of our trips, we take the teams one at 

 a time and usually have little trouble in dragging dogs and sleds 

 over the ridge, for the tumbling motion of the cakes is slow enough 

 to cause a sure-footed man no great trouble. When there are only 

 three of us there is the advantage of only one sled, with no return 

 trips necessary. But there is the disadvantage that with one man 

 at the handle-bars to keep it from upsetting, the other two men are 

 scarcely stronger than the six dogs, and we should be unable to 

 move the sled at all were it not that the scared dogs seldom balk 

 in unison, and two or three will be pulling ahead when the others 

 are pulling back. In an emergency of this sort the style of harness- 

 ing is important, and it is especially here that I favor the tandem 

 system where each dog is kept in his place between the two traces. 

 In harness such as is used in Nome the dogs have too much freedom 

 and are able to turn completely around and face the sled. The fan 

 system used in Greenland and which we have used in Victoria Is- 

 land is even worse, for there each dog has complete freedom and 

 can pull in any direction he likes. 



Breaking ice would mean a greatly complicated danger during 

 darkness. For this reason we frequently camp an hour or two ear- 

 lier when we come upon an exceptionally firm ice cake that promises 

 a night without a break-up, or travel three or four hours longer 



