166 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



warm as we care to have it. Then if the camp gets a little too cool 

 we light it again. Whenever the kerosene we leave home with 

 gives out a seal will supply us with blubber; and that blubber we 

 burn freely because we know there is another seal to be had where 

 the last one came from. 



One result of this comfortable life is that our diary entries are 

 voluminous on days of idleness. We use fountain pens, and sit 

 lightly clad while we write of everything seen or thought of since the 

 last preceding idle day. April 8th was such a day. The lead that 

 had stopped us the day before had indeed closed, but when we 

 crossed it we were able to travel for a mile only before we were 

 stopped by another lead and had to make camp. After supper had 

 been cooked and the dogs fed, I noted in my diary that for the fifty 

 miles since leaving shore we had never seen a cake of ice of a 

 probable area of over ten square miles, and most had been only a 

 few acres in extent. As they were in sluggish motion a great deal 

 of open water was visible between, and in this water there com- 

 monly had been seals. 



We had seen very little ice more than a year old. We have 

 already pointed out that ice which has weathered one or more sum- 

 mers is easy to distinguish from that of the current winter by sight 

 and by taste. When sea ice forms it is salty, although perhaps not 

 quite so salty as the water from which it is made, and probably 

 during the winter it loses a certain amount of its salt, although 

 even in April or May ice formed the previous October is still too 

 salty for ordinary cooking uses. But in June and July when rains 

 begin and snow melts and little rivulets trickle here and there over 

 the ice, forming in the latter part of summer a network of lakes con- 

 nected by channels of sluggishly flowing water, the saltiness dis- 

 appears, or at least that degree of it which is perceptible to the 

 palate, and the following year this ice is the potential source of the 

 purest possible cooking or drinking water. The ponds on top of 

 the ice are also fresh. During the melting of summer the pressure- 

 ridges and the projecting snags of broken ice change in outline. 

 When the ice has been freshly broken it may well be compared with 

 the masses of rock in a granite quarry just after the blast, or if it is 

 thinner, with the broken-bottle glass on top of an English stone 

 wall. But during the summer all the sharp outlines are softened on 

 the pressure-ridges, so that at the end of the first summer they are 

 no more jagged than a typical mountain range, and at the end of 

 two or three years they resemble the rolling hills of a western 

 prairie. The old ice is easily recognizable at a distance by its out- 



