456 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



would necessarily be fatal, would try to keep awake indefinitely. 

 Their only means of doing it was to continue walking up and 

 down. Through a semi-panic brought on by the fear of freezing, 

 these men have walked faster than they should, becoming grad- 

 ually more fatigued and frequently perspiring violently enough to 

 make their clothes wet, thus changing the clothes into "good con- 

 ductors of heat" no longer of much value as protection from the 

 weather. Eventually the point of exhaustion has been reached, 

 when sleep has been resisted as long as possible and has conquered 

 at last. It is under such circumstances that a person may go to 

 sleep never to wake again. But he who lies down without panic 

 as soon as he feels tired or sleepy and especially before his clothing 

 gets wet with perspiration is safer and better off the more naps 

 he can take. 



I spent perhaps an hour on my knoll, standing up every ten or 

 fifteen minutes to shake myself and restore circulation before lying 

 down again. Before daylight, flickers of aurora through the clouds 

 showed that they were getting thinner and the snowfall was less- 

 ening, although on the ground everything was still thick with 

 drift. I started south at six o'clock. Between four and six the 

 wind had shifted from northwest to northeast and had partly died 

 down, but by seven o'clock it was again moderately high, blowing 

 thirty-five or forty miles an hour with visibility of dark objects 

 about five hundred yards. With this visibility I made good prog- 

 ress, searching the mainland not so much for the ship which I 

 now knew must be at an island, but for traces of people who prob- 

 ably would have been ashore abreast of her and for probable sledge 

 trails leading from the land towards the camp. I zigzagged about 

 half a mile out on the ice without having to make the angles 

 nearly so sharp as the night before, so that I was now proceeding 

 perhaps a mile and a half per hour. 



At half past eleven in one of my several half-mile detours off- 

 shore I picked up a sled track going south. It was not over a week 

 old, so I took it to come from Natkusiak's hunting camp at Cape 

 Alfred. Much to my surprise this trail did not run parallel to the 

 land but presently curved and took me inland. After half a mile 

 of going I came to a campsite where two or three men had ap- 

 parently spent the night. I could see that the dogs had been not 

 over five in number and had been hitched to the sled tandem. This 

 told me which of our teams it was, for we were driving about half 

 of the dogs in inland tandem fashion, preferable, I think, for 

 heavy freighting with large dogs. The others were driven in pairs 



