CHAPTER XXII 



LAND AFTER NINETY-THREE DAYS ON DRIFTING ICE 



XT TE landed on June 25th at 8: 10 in the evening, ninety-six days 

 %/%/ out from the Alaska coast. Measured by a string laid on 

 ' * the surface of a globe the journey is a little over five hun- 

 dred miles, but a checking up of astronomical observations shows 

 that, counting the adverse drift, we had traveled about seven hun- 

 dred miles. But whether the trip be called five hundred miles or 

 seven hundred, neither figure measures its difficulty. If the same 

 journey were to be undertaken by a party equipped like ours each 

 year for ten years and were to be started a month or six weeks earlier 

 than we started, I believe it could be done, in at least nine seasons 

 out of the ten and perhaps in every one of the ten seasons, on the 

 average in about half the time that it took us. For our difficulties 

 were not the mileage but the warmth of the weather, with conse- 

 quent mobility of the ice and treacherous ice bridges that after 

 each gale formed all too slowly between the floes. If we were to 

 make the journey again we should also start with a lighter load 

 from Alaska, having now no longer a mere theory, but a theory veri- 

 fied by trial, to give us complete confidence in the food and fuel 

 supplied by the arctic high seas. 



On the last day we had camped on the sea ice a mile and three- 

 quarters from shore. We might have been impatient to reach the 

 land that lay green and close to us in the sun, but from the point of 

 view of the arctic traveler the fundamental difference is not between 

 sea and land, but between the moving ice on one hand and the land- 

 fast ice and land on the other. When we had left the moving pack 

 for the grounded shore floe, we had already counted ourselves ashore. 

 Still there was an interest all its own in stepping on the real 

 land. There was plant life, with a kind of academic interest to 

 the eyes, and there was the more practical importance of the animals 

 and birds. Whatever else these animals and birds might be, they 

 were potential food for us or food for the animals on which we feed. 

 For, according to the law of this grewsome world, the worm implies 

 the song-bird that feeds upon it, and the song-bird implies the owl 



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