224 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



miles from the Banks Island coast. When the thaw winds come in 

 the spring and summer, the warmest are from the east and south- 

 east. The stronger the east winds the lower the ''tide," so that the 

 ridges which have been heaped up with a high tide are solidly- 

 aground and immovable to any effort of the east wind. For this 

 reason a typical summer condition on the west coast of Banks 

 Island is that the moving pack to seaward is driven far out of 

 sight to the west, and a lane of open water along the land is pro- 

 duced by the warm rivers from the interior, while there remains a 

 belt extending from half a mile to fifteen miles offshore where the 

 ice still lies unbroken and immovable. Occasionally a west wind 

 brings a high tide and then drops suddenly enough to allow an east 

 wind to start before the tide has fallen. Then the entire mass of 

 shore ice may go abroad in two or three hours. 



Our first sight of land had been from a distance of nearly twenty 

 miles. The going from this point was exceedingly bad. We waded 

 sometimes through water nearly up to our waists, while the dogs 

 had to swim and the sled floated behind like a log of wood towed 

 across a river. A far worse condition was when the miniature lakes 

 on top of the ice were filled not with water only but with slush 

 snow. Though your feet went straight to the bottom, real wading 

 was not possible and either walking or swimming was quite impos- 

 sible to the dogs. In places like this you had to force your way 

 back and forth through the slush several times, making a sort of 

 ditch or canal preliminary to taking hold of the leading dog and 

 dragging the team after you while the other two men pushed the 

 sled from behind. The hardest kind of work gave us only six 

 miles per day. 



Our first sleep on the land floe had a comfort and security 

 about it that we had not known for over ninety days. No drift 

 could now take away from us in the night whatever distance we had 

 won during the day. No crack would open under us, no cake would 

 tip on edge to spill us into the water. Later years brought us 

 thorough familiarity and confidence in the ocean ice, but the relief 

 and at-home-ness of the land ice then were beyond description. 

 Besides the uncertainty of reaching Norway Island in order to meet 

 the Star in the fall, we had also the unacknowledged doubt of 

 whether we could reach land at all. No matter how sound the 

 reasons for your confidence in a theory, it seems to be part of a 

 somewhat irrational human nature that you never feel quite sure 

 of being able to do anything unless you know that some one has 

 done it before. The universal skepticism on the Alaska coast 



