CHAPTER XVIII 



WE BURN THE LAST BRIDGE BEHIND US 



|HE distance covered April 25th was twenty-four miles, a good 

 day with a bad ending, for towards camping timt the wind 

 made the dreaded shift to the east, with fog and a light fall of 

 snow. This meant probably drifting west, so that if we desired to 

 travel east we should meet leads of open water running north and 

 south parallel to the distant coasts of Banks and Prince Patrick 

 Islands, and making a landing on either of them more difficult. 



Now that the east wind was upon us the temperature rose, and 

 the leads formed by the ice motion refused to freeze over. When 

 the temperature is twenty or forty degrees below zero, as in Feb- 

 ruary or March, the opening of a lead is not a serious matter. It 

 may stop you one day, but the next it has been bridged and you 

 can cross it if it happens to lie athwart your course. Occasionally 

 luck is such that it lies almost in the direction you are going. In 

 that case the ice traveler can have no better fortune than to meet 

 with a lead. If he finds it already frozen over, it is as if he had 

 come out of the woods upon a paved road, and if it is still open 

 he knows that a little wait and a night's encampment will convert 

 it into a boulevard for fast and easy traveling next day. But at 

 the end of April, even though the lead may be running in your 

 direction and though it may be a week old and the ice six or ten 

 inches thick, still, it is so soft and treacherous from the weakness 

 of the frost that it does not form a safe road and a bridge of older 

 ice must be found. 



A day with the east wind as well as our theoretical knowledge 

 of ice conditions decided us at this point to alter our course. We 

 were in the vicinity of north latitude 73° and west longitude 141°. 

 With a week or two more of cold weather (or, as we used to say 

 "Had we started two weeks earlier") we could have kept on north 

 for two degrees of latitude and then turned east for a landing on 

 the southwest corner of Prince Patrick Island. But clearly the 

 season was too late for that. So we decided to take roughly a great 

 circle course for Cape Alfred, on the northwest corner of Banks 



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