Chapter VII: Land at Last (3)

We then launched the kayaks, and put off to chase the young ones to land. As soon as ever they saw us on the water they became uneasy, and while we were still some way off one of them took to the water. The other hesitated for a while, as if afraid of the water, while the first waited impatiently; but at last they both went in. We made a wide circuit round them, and began to drive them towards the land, one of us on each side of them. It was easy to make them go in whatever direction we wanted, and Johansen could not say enough in praise of this simple method of getting bears from one place to another. We did not need to row hard to keep up with them; we went slowly and easily, but surely, towards land. We saw several walruses in the vicinity, but fortunately escaped being attacked by any of them. From the very first it was evident how much better the bear that first went into the water swam, although it was the smaller and thinner. It waited, however, patiently for the other, and kept it company; but at last the pace of the latter became too slow for its companion, who struck out for the shore, the distance between the two growing greater and greater. They had kept incessantly turning their heads to look anxiously at us, and now the one that was left behind looked round even more helplessly than before. While I set off after the first bear, Johansen watched the second, and we drove them ashore by our den, and shot them there.

We had thus taken three bears on that day, and this was a good set-off against our walruses, which had drifted out to sea, and, what was no less fortunate, we found the sunken walrus from the day before floating just at the edge of the shore. We lost no time in towing it into a place of safety in a creek and making it fast. It made a difference to our winter store.

It was late before we turned in that night after having skinned the bears, laid them in a heap, and covered them with the skins to prevent the gulls from getting at them. We slept well, for we had to make up for two nights.

It was not until September 2d that we could set to work on the skinning of our walrus, which still lay in the water. Close to our den there was an opening in the strand-ice, [61] connecting the inner channel between the strand-ice and the land with the outer sea. It was in this opening that we had made it fast, and we hoped to be able to draw it on land here; the glacier-ice went with a gentle incline right out into the water, so that it seemed to promise well. We rounded off the edge of the ice, made a tackle by drawing the rope through a loop we cut in the skin of the head, used our broken-off runner of a sledge as a handspike at the end of the rope, and cut notches in the ice up the beach as a fulcrum for the handspike. But work and toil as we might, it was all we could do to get the huge head up over the edge of the ice. In the midst of this Johansen cried, "I say, look there!" I turned. A large walrus was swimming straight up the channel towards us. It did not seem to be in any hurry, but only opened wide its round eyes, and gazed in astonishment at us and at what we were doing. I suppose that, seeing a comrade, it had come in to see what we were doing with him. Quietly, slowly, and with dignity it came right up to the edge where we stood. Fortunately we had our guns with us, and when I approached with mine it only rose up in the water and gazed long and searchingly at me. I waited patiently until it turned a little, and then sent a bullet into the back of its head. It was stunned for a time, but soon began to move, so that more shots were required. While Johansen ran for cartridges and a harpoon I had to fight with it as I best could, and try to prevent it, with a stick, from splashing out of the channel again. At last Johansen returned, and I did for this walrus. We were delighted over our good fortune; but what the walrus wanted in that narrow channel we have always wondered. These animals must be uncommonly curious. While we were skinning the bears two days before, a walrus with its young one came close in to the edge of the ice and gazed at us; it dived several times, but always returned, and at last drew the whole of the forepart of its body up on to the ice in order to see better. This it did several times, and my approaching to within a few yards of it did not drive it away; it was only when I went up close to it with my gun that it suddenly came to its senses and threw itself backward into the water again, and we could see it far below moving off with its young one by its side.

We now had two great walruses with enormous tusks floating in our channel. We tried once more to drag one of them up, but the attempt was as unsuccessful as before. At last we saw that our only course was to skin them in the water; but this was neither an easy nor an agreeable task. When at last, late in the evening, we had got one side of one animal skinned, it was low-water; the walrus lay on the bottom, and there was no possibility of turning it over, no matter how we toiled and pulled. We had to wait for high tide the following day, in order to get at the other side.

While we were busy with the walruses that day we suddenly saw the whole fjord white with white whales gambolling all round as far as the eye could see. There was an incredible number of them. In the course of an hour they had entirely disappeared. Where they came from and whither they went I was not able to discover.

During the succeeding days we toiled at our task of skinning and cutting up the walruses, and bringing all up into a safe place on the beach. It was disgusting work, lying on the animals out in the water and having to cut down as far as one could reach below the surface of the water. We could put up with getting wet, for one gets dry in time; but what was worse was that we could not avoid being saturated with blubber and oil and blood from head to foot; and our poor clothes, that we should have to live in for another year before we could change, fared badly during those days. They so absorbed oil that it went right through to the skin. This walrus business was unquestionably the worst work of the whole expedition, and had it not been a sheer necessity we should have let the animals lie where they were; but we needed fuel for the winter, even if we could have done without the meat. When at last the task was completed, and we had two great heaps of blubber and meat on shore, well covered by the thick walrus hides, we were not a little pleased.

During this time the gulls were living in luxury. There was abundance of refuse, blubber, entrails, and other internal organs. They gathered in large flocks from all quarters, both ivory and glaucus gulls, and kept up a perpetual screaming and noise both night and day. When they had eaten as much as they could manage they generally sat out on the ice-hummocks and chattered together. When we came down to skin they withdrew only a very little way from the carcasses, and sat waiting patiently in long rows on the ice beside us, or, led on by a few bold officers, drew continually nearer. No sooner did a little scrap of blubber fall than two or three ivory-gulls would pounce upon it, often at our very feet, and fight over it until the feathers flew. Outside the fulmars were sailing in their silent, ghost-like flight to and fro over the surface of the water. Up and down the edge of the shore flocks of kittiwakes moved incessantly, darting like an arrow, with a dull splash, towards the surface of the water, whenever a little crustacean appeared there. We were particularly fond of these birds, for they kept exclusively to the marine animals and left our blubber alone; and then they were so light and pretty. But up and down along the shore the skua (Stercorarius crepidatus) chased incessantly, and every now and again we were startled by a pitiful cry of distress above our heads; it was a kittiwake pursued by a skua. How often we followed with our eyes that wild chase up in the air, until at last the kittiwake had to drop its booty, and down shot the skua, catching it even before it touched the water! Happy creatures that can move with such freedom up there! Out in the water lay walruses, diving and bellowing, often whole herds of them; and high up in the air, to and fro, flew the little auks in swarms; you could hear the whir of their wings far off. There were cries and life on all sides. But soon the sun will sink, the sea will close in, the birds will disappear one after another towards the south, the polar night will begin, and there will be profound, unbroken silence.

It was with pleasure that we at last, on September 7th, set to work to build our hut. We had selected a good site in the neighborhood, and from this time forward we might have been seen daily going out in the morning like other laborers, with a can of drinking-water in one hand and a gun in the other. We quarried stones up among the débris from the cliff, dragged them together, dug out the site, and built walls as well as we could. We had no tools worth mentioning; those we used most were our two hands. The cut-off sledge-runner again did duty as a pick with which to loosen the fast-frozen stones, and when we could not manage to dig up the earth on our site with our hands we used a snow-shoe staff with an iron ferrule. We made a spade out of the shoulder-blade of a walrus tied to a piece of a broken snow-shoe staff, and a mattock out of a walrus tusk tied to the crosstree of a sledge. They were poor things to work with, but we managed it with patience, and little by little there arose solid walls of stone with moss and earth between. The weather was growing gradually colder, and hindered us not a little in our work. The soil we had to dig in hardened, and the stones that had to be quarried froze fast; and there came snow too. But great was our surprise when we crept out of our den on the morning of the 12th of September to find the most delightful thaw, with 4° (C.) of heat (39.2° Fahr.). This was almost the highest temperature we had experienced throughout the expedition. On every side streams were tumbling in foaming falls down from mountain and glacier, humming along merrily among the stones down to the sea. Water trickled and tinkled everywhere; as if by a stroke of magic, life had returned to frozen nature, and the hill looked green all over. One could fancy one's self far south, and forget that a long, long winter was drawing near. The day after, everything was changed again. The gentle gods of the south, who yesterday had put forth their last energies, had once more fled; the cold had returned, snow had fallen and covered every trace: it would not yield again. This little strip of bare ground, too, was in the power of the genii of the cold and darkness; they held sway now, right down to the sea. I stood looking out over it. How desolate and forsaken this spell-bound nature looked! My eye fell upon the ground at my feet. Down there among the stones, the poppy still reared its beautiful blossoms above the snow; the last rays of the departing sun would once more kiss its yellow petals, and then it would creep beneath its covering to sleep through the long winter, and awake again to new life in the spring. Ah to be able to do the same!

After a week's work the walls of our hut were finished. They were not high, scarcely 3 feet above the ground; but we had dug down the same distance into the ground, so we reckoned that it would be high enough to stand up in. Now the thing was to get it roofed, but this was not so easy. The only materials we had towards it were, as before mentioned, the log we had found and the walrus hides. The log, which was quite 12 inches across, Johansen at last, after a day's work, succeeded in cutting in two with our little axe, and with no less labor we rolled it up over the talus and on to the level, and it was laid on the roof as the ridgepiece. Then there were the hides; but they were stiff and frozen fast to the meat and blubber heaps which they covered. With much difficulty we at length loosened them by using wedges of walrus tusks, stone, and wood. To transport these great skins over the long distance to our hut was a no less difficult matter. However, by rolling them, carrying them, and dragging them we accomplished this too; but to get the frozen skins stretched over the hut was the worst of all. We got on pretty well with three half-skins, just managing to bend them a little; but the fourth half was frozen quite stiff, and we had to find a hole in the ice, and sink it in the sea, to thaw it.

It was almost a cause for anxiety, I thought, that all this time we saw nothing of any bears. They were what we had to live upon all through the winter, and the six we had would not go far. I thought, however, that it might easily be accounted for, as the fjord-ice, to which the bear prefers to keep, had taken its departure on the day when we had nearly drifted out to sea with the walruses, and I thought that, when the ice now formed again, bears would appear once more. It was therefore a relief when one morning (September 23d) I caught sight of a bear in front of me, just as I came round the promontory to look at the skin that we had in soak in the sea. It was standing on the shore close by the skin. It had not seen me, and I quickly drew back to let Johansen, who was following with his gun, pass me, while I ran back to fetch mine. When I returned, Johansen lay on the same spot behind a stone, and had not fired. There were two bears, one by the hut and one by the shore; and Johansen could not get up to the one without being seen by the other. When I had gone after my gun the bear had turned its steps towards the hut; but just as it reached it Johansen suddenly saw two bear's paws come quickly over the edge of the wall and hit out at the first bear, and a head followed immediately after. This fellow was busily gnawing at our roof hides, which he had torn down and bent, so that we had to put them into the sea too, to get them thawed. The first bear had to retreat to the shore once more, where we afterwards discovered it had drawn up our hide and had been scraping the fat off it. Under cover of some hummocks we now ran towards it. It noticed us, and set off running, and I was only able to send a bullet through its body from behind. Shouting out to Johansen that he must look after the other bear, I set off running, and after a couple of hours' pursuit up the fjord I at last chased it up under the wall of a glacier, where it prepared to defend itself. I went right up to it, but it growled and hissed, and made one or two attacks on me from the elevation on which it stood before I finally put an end to its existence. When I got back Johansen was busy skinning the other bear. It had been alarmed by us when we attacked the first, and had gone a long way out over the ice; it had then returned to look for its companion, and Johansen had shot it. Our winter store was increasing.

The next day (September 24th), as we were setting out to work at our hut, we saw a large herd of walruses lying out on the ice. We had both had more than enough of these animals, and had very little inclination for them. Johansen was of candid opinion that we had no need for them, and could let them lie in peace; but I thought it was rather improvident to have food and fuel lying at one's very door and make no use of them so we set off with our guns. To steal up to the animals, under cover of some elevations on the ice, was a matter of small difficulty, and we had soon come within 40 feet of them, and could lie there quietly and watch them. The point was to choose one's victim, and make good use of one's shot, so as not to waste cartridges. There were both old and young animals, and, having had more than enough of big ones, we decided to try for the two smallest that we could see; we thought we had no need of more than two. As we lay waiting for them to turn their heads and give us the chance of a good shot, we had plenty of opportunity to watch them. They are strange animals. They lay incessantly poking one another in the back with their huge tusks, both the big old ones and the little young ones. If one of them turned over a little, so as to come near and disturb his neighbor, the latter immediately raised itself, grunting, and dug its tusks into the back of the first. It was by no means a gentle caress, and it is well for them that they have such a thick hide; but, as it was, the blood ran down the backs of several of them. The other would, perhaps, start up too, and return the little attention in the same manner. But it was when another guest came up from the sea that there was a stir in the camp; they all grunted in chorus, and one of the old bulls that lay nearest to the new arrival gave him some well-meant blows. The new-comer, however, drew himself cautiously up, bowed respectfully, and little by little drew himself in among the others, who also then gave him as many blows as time and circumstances would permit, until they finally composed themselves again, and lay quiet until another interruption came. We waited in vain for the animals we had picked out to turn their heads enough to let us get a good shot; but as they were comparatively small we thought that a bullet in the middle of the forehead might be enough for them, and at last we fired. They started up, however, and turned over, half stunned, into the water. Then there was a commotion! The whole herd quickly raised their ugly heads, glared at us, and one by one plunged out over the edge of the ice. We had hastily loaded again, and as it was not difficult now to get a good shot we fired, and there lay two animals, one young and one old. Most of the others dived, only one remaining quietly lying, and looking wonderingly, now at its two dead companions, and now at us as we came up to it. We did not quite know what to do; we thought that the two that were now lying there would give us more than enough to do, but nevertheless it was tempting to take this great monster as well, while we were about it. While Johansen was standing with his gun, considering whether he should fire or not, I took the opportunity of photographing both him and the walrus. It ended, however, in our letting it go unharmed; we did not think we could afford to sacrifice more cartridges upon it. Meantime the water beyond was seething with furious animals, as they broke up the ice round about and filled the air with their roaring. The big bull himself seemed especially anxious to get at us; he kept returning to the edge of the ice, getting half up on to it to grunt and bellow at us and look long at his dead comrades, whom he evidently wished to take with him. But we would not waste more cartridges upon them, and he threw himself back, only to return again immediately. Gradually the whole herd departed, and we could hear the big bull's grunting becoming more and more distant; but suddenly his huge head appeared again at the edge of the ice, close to us, as he challenged us with a roar, and then disappeared again as quickly as he had come. This was repeated three or four times after our having in the intervals heard him far out; but at last he disappeared entirely, and we continued our work of skinning in peace. We very quickly skinned the smaller of the walruses; it was easy to manipulate compared to those we were accustomed to. The other, however, was a great fellow that could not be easily turned over in the hollow in the snow where he lay; so we contented ourselves with skinning one side from head to tail, and then went home again with our blubber and skins. We now thought we should have blubber enough for winter fuel, and had also abundance of skins for covering the roof of our hut.

The walruses still kept near us for some time. Every now and then we would hear some violent blows on the ice from beneath, two or three in succession, and then a great head would burst up with a crash through the ice. It would remain there for a time panting and puffing so that it would be heard a long way off, and then vanish again. On September 25th, while we were pulling our roof hides out of the water at a hole near the shore, we heard the same crashing in the ice a little farther out, and a walrus came up and then dived again. "Look there! It won't be long before we have him in this hole." The words were scarcely spoken, when our hide in the water was pushed aside and a huge head, with bristles and two long tusks, popped up in front of us. It gazed fixedly and wickedly at us standing there, then there was a tremendous splash and it was gone.

Our hides were now so far softened in the sea that we could stretch them over the roof. They were so long that they reached from one side of the hut right over the ridge-piece down to the other side, and we stretched them by hanging large stones at both ends, attached by strips of hide, thus weighing them down over the edges of the wall, and we then piled stones upon them. By the aid of stones, moss, strips of hide, and snow to cover everything, we made the edges of the walls to some extent close-fitting. To make the hut habitable we still had to construct benches of stone to lie upon inside it, and also a door. This consisted of an opening in one corner of the wall, which led into a short passage dug out in the ground and subsequently roofed over with blocks of ice, on very much the same principle as the passage to an Eskimo's house. We had not dug this passage so long as we wished before the ground was frozen too hard for our implements. It was so low that we had to creep through it in a squatting posture to get into the hut. The inner opening was covered with a bearskin curtain, sewed firmly to the walrus hide of the roof; the outer end was covered with a loose bearskin laid over the opening. It began to grow cold now, as low as -20° C. (4° below zero, Fahr.); and living in our low den, where we had not room to move, became more and more intolerable. The smoke, too, from the oil-lamp, when we did any cooking, always affected our eyes. We grew daily more impatient to move into our new house, which now appeared to us the acme of comfort. Our ever-recurring remark while we were building was, how nice and snug it would be when we got in, and we depicted to each other the many pleasant hours we should spend there. We were, of course, anxious to discover all the bright points that we could in our existence. The hut was certainly not large; it was 10 feet long and 6 feet wide, and when you lay across it you kicked the wall on one side and butted it on the other. You could move in it a little, however, and even I could almost stand upright under the roof. This was a thought which especially appealed to us. Fancy having a place sheltered from the wind where you could stretch your limbs a little! We had not had that since last March, on board the Fram. It was long, however, before everything was in order, and we would not move in until it was quite finished.

The day we had skinned our last walruses I had taken several tendons from their backs, thinking they might be very useful when we made ourselves clothes for the winter, for we were entirely without thread for that purpose. Not until a few days afterwards (September 26th) did I recollect that these tendons had been left on the ice beside the carcasses. I went out there to look for them, but found, to my sorrow, that gulls and foxes had long since made away with them. It was some comfort, however, to find traces of a bear, which must have been at the carcasses during the night, and as I looked about I caught sight of Johansen running after me, making signs and pointing out towards the sea. I turned that way, and there was a large bear, walking to and fro and looking at us. We had soon fetched our guns, and while Johansen remained near the land to receive the bear if it came that way, I made a wide circuit round it on the ice to drive it landward, if it should prove to be frightened. In the meantime, it had lain down out there beside some holes, I suppose to watch for seals. I stole up to it; it saw me and at first came nearer, but then thought better of it, and moved away again, slowly and majestically, out over the new ice. I had no great desire to follow it in that direction, and though the range was long I thought I must try it. First one shot; it passed over. Then one more; that hit. The bear started, made several leaps, and then in anger struck the ice until it broke, and the bear fell through. There it lay, splashing and splashing and breaking the thin ice with its weight as it tried to get out again. I was soon beside it, but did not want to sacrifice another cartridge; I had faint hopes, too, that it would manage to get out of the water by itself, and thus save us the trouble of dragging such a heavy animal out. I called to Johansen to come with a rope, sledges, and knives, and in the meantime I walked up and down waiting and watching. The bear labored hard, and made the opening in the ice larger and larger. It was wounded in one of its fore-legs, so that it could use only the other, and the two hind-legs. It kept on taking hold and pulling itself up. But no sooner had it got half up than the ice gave way, and it sank down again. By degrees its movements became more and more feeble, till at last it only lay still and panted. Then came a few spasms, its legs stiffened, its head sank down into the water, and all was still. While I was walking up and down I several times heard walruses round about, as they butted holes in the ice and put their heads through; and I was thinking to myself that I should soon have them here too. At that moment the bear received a violent blow from beneath, pushing it to one side, and up came a huge head with great tusks; it snorted, looked contemptuously at the bear, then gazed for a while wonderingly at me as I stood on the ice, and finally disappeared again. This had the effect of making me think the old solid ice a little farther in a pleasanter place of sojourn than the new ice. My suspicion that the walrus entertains no fear for the bear was more than ever strengthened. At last Johansen came with a rope. We slipped a running noose round the bear's neck and tried to haul it out, but soon discovered that this was beyond our power; all we did was to break the ice under the animal, wherever we tried. It seemed hard to have to give it up; it was a big bear and seemed to be unusually fat; but to continue in this way until we had towed up to the edge of the thick ice would be a lengthy proceeding. By cutting quite a narrow crack in the new ice, only wide enough to draw the rope through, up to the edge of a large piece of ice which was quite near, we got pretty well out of the difficulty. It was now an easy matter to draw the bear thither under the ice, and after breaking a sufficiently large hole we drew it out there. At last we had got it skinned and cut up, and, heavily laden with our booty, we turned our steps homeward late in the evening to our den. As we approached the beach where our kayaks were lying upon one of our heaps of walrus blubber and meat, Johansen suddenly whispered to me, "I say, look there!" I looked up, and there stood three bears on the heaps, tearing at the blubber. They were a she-bear and two young ones. "Oh dear!" said I; "shall we have to set to at bears again?" I was tired, and, to tell the truth, had far more desire for our sleeping-bag and a good potful of meat. In a trice we had got our guns out, and were approaching cautiously; but they had caught sight of us, and set off over the ice. It was with an undeniable feeling of gratitude that we watched their retreating forms. A little later, while I was standing cutting up the meat and Johansen had gone to fetch water, I heard him whistle. I looked up, and he pointed out over the ice. There in the dusk were the three bears coming back--our blubber-heap had been too tempting for them. I crept with my gun behind some stones close to the heap. The bears came straight on, looking neither to right nor left, and as they passed me I took as good an aim at the she-bear as the darkness would allow, and fired. She roared, bit her side, and all three set off out over the ice. There the mother fell, and the young ones stood astonished and troubled beside her until we approached, when they fled, and it was impossible to get within range of them. They kept at a respectful distance, and watched us while we dragged the dead bear to land and skinned it. When we went out next morning, they were standing sniffing at the skin and meat; but before we could get within range they saw us, and were off again. We now saw that they had been there all night, and had eaten up their own mother's stomach, which had contained some pieces of blubber. In the afternoon they returned once more; and again we attempted, but in vain, to get a shot at them. Next morning (Saturday, September 28th), when we crawled out, we caught sight of a large bear lying asleep on our blubber-heap. Johansen crept up close to it under cover of some stones. The bear heard something moving, raised its head, and looked round. At the same instant Johansen fired, and the bullet went right through the bear's throat, just below the cranium. It got slowly up, looked contemptuously at Johansen, considered a little, and then walked quietly away with long, measured steps, as if nothing had happened. It soon had a couple of bullets from each of us in its body, and fell out on the thin ice. It was so full of food that, as it lay there, blubber and oil and water ran out of its mouth on to the ice, which began gradually to sink under its weight, until it lay in a large pool, and we hastily dragged it in to the shore, before the ice gave way beneath it. It was one of the largest bears I have ever seen, but also one of the leanest; for there was not a trace of fat upon it, neither underneath the skin nor among the entrails. It must have been fasting for a long time and been uncommonly hungry; for it had consumed an incredible quantity of our blubber. And how it had pulled it about! First it had thrown one kayak off, then it had scattered the blubber about in all directions, scraping off the best of the fat upon almost every single piece; then it had gathered the blubber together again in another place, and then, happy with the happiness of satiety, had lain down to sleep upon it, perhaps so as to have it handy when it woke up again. Previous to attacking the blubber-heap it had accomplished another piece of work, which we only discovered later on. It had killed both the young bears that had been visiting us; we found them not far off, with broken skulls and frozen stiff. We could see by the footprints how it had run after them out over the new ice, first one and then the other, and had dragged them on land, and laid them down without touching them again. What pleasure it can have in doing this I do not understand, but it must have regarded them as competitors in the struggle for food. Or was it, perhaps, a cross old gentleman who did not like young people? "It is so nice and quiet here now," said the ogre, when he had cleared the country.

Our winter store now began quite to inspire confidence.

At length, on the evening of that day, we moved into our new hut; but our first night there was a cold one. Hitherto we had slept in one bag all the time, and even the one we had made by sewing together our two blankets had been fairly adequate. But now we thought it would not be necessary to sleep in one bag any longer, as we should make the hut so warm by burning train-oil lamps in it that we could very well lie each in our own berth with a blanket over us, and so we had unpicked the bag. Lamps were made by turning up the corners of some sheets of German silver, filling them with crushed blubber, and laying in this, by way of a wick, some pieces of stuff from the bandages in the medicine-bag. They burned capitally, and gave such a good light, too, that we thought it looked very snug; but it neither was nor ever would be sufficient to warm our still rather permeable hut, and we lay and shivered with cold all night. We almost thought it was the coldest night we had had. Breakfast next morning tasted excellent, and the quantity of bear-broth we consumed in order to put a little warmth into our bodies is incredible. We at once decided to alter this by making along the back wall of the hut a sleeping-shelf broad enough for us to lie beside one another. The blankets were sewed together again, we spread bearskins under us, and were as comfortable as we could be under the circumstances; and we made no further attempt to part company at night. It was impossible to make the substratum at all even, with the rough, angular stones which, now that everything was frozen, were all we had at our disposal, and therefore we lay tossing and twisting the whole winter to find something like a comfortable place among all the knobs. But it was hard, and remained so; and we always had some tender spots on our body, and even sores on our hips, with lying. But, for all that, we slept. In one corner of the hut we made a little hearth to boil and roast upon. In the roof above we cut a round hole in the walrus hide, and made a smoke-board up to it of bearskin. We had not used this hearth long before we saw the necessity of building a chimney to prevent the wind from beating down, and so filling the hut with smoke as to make it sometimes intolerable. The only materials we had for building this were ice and snow; but with these we erected a grand chimney on the roof, which served its purpose, and made a good draught. It was not quite permanent, however; the hole in it constantly widened with use, and it was not altogether guiltless of sometimes dripping down on to the hearth; but there was abundance of this building material, and it was not difficult to renew the chimney when it was in need of repair. This had to be done two or three times during the course of the winter. On more exposed spots we employed walrus flesh, bone, and such-like materials to strengthen it.

Our cookery was as simple as possible. It consisted in boiling bear's flesh and soup (bouillon) in the morning and frying steak in the evening. We consumed large quantities at every meal, and, strange to say, we never grew tired of this food, but always ate it with a ravenous appetite. We sometimes either ate blubber with it or dipped the pieces of meat in a little oil. A long time might often pass when we ate almost nothing but meat, and scarcely tasted fat; but when one of us felt inclined for it again he would, perhaps, fish up some pieces of burnt blubber out of the lamps, or eat what was left of the blubber from which we had melted the lamp-oil. We called these cakes, and thought them uncommonly nice, and we were always talking of how delicious they would have been if we could have had a little sugar on them.

We still had some of the provisions we had brought from the Fram, but these we decided not to use during the winter. They were placed in a depot to be kept until the spring, when we should move on. The depot was well loaded with stones to prevent the foxes from running away with the bags. They were impudent enough already, and took all the movable property they could lay hold of. I discovered, for instance, on October 10th, that they had gone off with a quantity of odds and ends I had left in another depot during the erection of the hut; they had taken everything that they could possibly carry with them, such as pieces of bamboo, steel wire, harpoons and harpoon-lines, my collection of stones, mosses, etc., which were stored in small sail-cloth bags. Perhaps the worst of all was that they had gone off with a large ball of twine, which had been our hope and comfort when thinking of the time when we should want to make clothes, shoes, and sleeping-bags of bearskin for the winter; for we had reckoned on making thread out of the twine. It was fortunate that they had not gone off with the theodolite and our other instruments which stood there; but these must have been too heavy for them. I was angry when I made this discovery, and, what made it more aggravating, it happened on my birthday. And matters did not improve when, while hunting about in the twilight on the beach above the place where the things had been lying, to see if I could at any rate discover tracks to show which way those demons had taken them, I met a fox that stopped at a distance of 20 feet from me, sat down, and uttered some exasperating howls, so piercing and weird that I had to stop my ears. It was evidently on its way to my things again, and was now provoked at being disturbed. I got hold of some large stones and flung them at it. It ran off a little way, but then seated itself upon the edge of the glacier and howled on, while I went home to the hut in a rage, lay down, and speculated as to what we should do to be revenged on the obnoxious animals. We could not spare cartridges to shoot them with, but we might make a trap of stones. This we determined to do, but nothing ever came of it; there were always so many other things to occupy us at first, while we still had the opportunity, before the snow covered the talus, and while it was light enough to find suitable stones. Meanwhile the foxes continued to annoy us. One day they had taken our thermometer, [62] which we always kept outside the hut, and gone off with it. We searched for it in vain for a long time, until at last we found it buried in a heap of snow a little way off. From that time we were very careful to place a stone over it at night, but one morning found that the foxes had turned over the stone, and had gone off with the thermometer again. The only thing we found this time was the case, which they had thrown away a little way off. The thermometer itself we were never to see again; the snow had unfortunately drifted in the night, so that the tracks had disappeared. Goodness only knows what fox-hole it now adorns; but from that day we learned a lesson, and henceforward fastened our last thermometer securely.

Meanwhile time passed. The sun sank lower and lower, until on October 15th we saw it for the last time above the ridge to the south; the days grew rapidly darker, and then began our third polar night.

We shot two more bears in the autumn, one on the 8th and one on the 21st of October; but from that time we saw no more until the following spring. When I awoke on the morning of October 8th I heard the crunching of heavy steps in the snow outside, and then began a rummaging about among our meat and blubber up on the roof. I could hear it was a bear, and crept out with my gun; but when I came out of the passage I could see nothing in the moonlight. The animal had noticed me, and had already disappeared. We did not altogether regret this, as we had no great desire to set to at the cold task of skinning now, in a wind, and with 39° (70.2° Fahr.) of frost.

There was not much variety in our life. It consisted in cooking and eating breakfast in the morning. Then, perhaps, came another nap, after which we would go out to get a little exercise. Of this, however, we took no more than was necessary, as our clothes, saturated as they were with fat, and worn and torn in many places, were not exactly adapted for remaining in the open air in winter. Our wind clothes, which we should have had outside as a protection against the wind, were so worn and torn that we could not use them; and we had so little thread to patch them with that I did not think we ought to use any of it until the spring, when we had to prepare for our start. I had counted on being able to make ourselves clothes of bearskins, but it took time to cleanse them from all blubber and fat, and it was even a slower business getting them dried. The only way to do this was to spread them out under the roof of the hut; but there was room for only one at a time. When at last one was ready we had, first of all, to use it on our bed, for we were lying on raw, greasy skins, which were gradually rotting. When our bed had been put in order with dried skins we had to think about making a sleeping-bag, as, after a time, the blanket-bag that we had got rather cold to sleep in. About Christmas-time, accordingly, we at last managed to make ourselves a bearskin bag. In this way all the skins we could prepare were used up, and we continued to wear the clothes we had throughout the winter.

These walks, too, were a doubtful pleasure, because there is always a wind there, and it blew hard under the steep cliff. We felt it a wonderful relief when it occasionally happened to be almost calm. As a rule, the wind howled above us and lashed the snow along, so that everything was wrapped in mist. Many days would sometimes pass almost without our putting our heads out of the passage, and it was only bare necessity that drove us out to fetch ice for drinking-water, or a leg or carcass of a bear for food, or some blubber for fuel. As a rule, we also brought in some sea-water ice, or, if there were an opening or a crack to be found, a little sea-water for our soup.

When we came in, and had mustered up appetite for another meal, we had to prepare supper, eat till we were satisfied, and then get into our bag and sleep as long as possible to pass the time. On the whole, we had quite a comfortable time in our hut. By means of our train-oil lamps we could keep the temperature in the middle of the room at about freezing-point. Near the wall, however, it was considerably colder, and there the damp deposited itself in the shape of beautiful hoar-frost crystals, so that the stones were quite white; and in happy moments we could dream that we dwelt in marble halls. This splendor, however, had its disadvantages, for when the outside temperature rose, or when we heated up the hut a little, rivulets ran down the wall into our sleeping-bag. We took turns at being cook, and Tuesday, when one ended his cooking-week and the other began, afforded on that account the one variation in our lives, and formed a boundary-mark by which we divided out our time. We always reckoned up how many cooking-weeks we had before we should break up our camp in the spring. I had hoped to get so much done this winter--work up my observations and notes, and write some of the account of our journey; but very little was done. It was not only the poor, flickering light of the oil-lamp which hindered me, nor yet the uncomfortable position--either lying on one's back, or sitting up and fidgeting about on the hard stones, while the part of the body thus exposed to pressure ached; but altogether these surroundings did not predispose one to work. The brain worked dully, and I never felt inclined to write anything. Perhaps, too, this was owing to the impossibility of keeping what you wrote upon clean; if you only took hold of a piece of paper your fingers left a dark-brown, greasy mark, and if a corner of your clothes brushed across it, a dark streak appeared. Our journals of this period look dreadful. They are "black books" in the literal sense of the term. Ah! how we longed for the time when we should once more be able to write on clean white paper and with black ink! I often had difficulty in reading the pencil notes I had written the day before, and now, in writing this book, it is all I can do to find out what was once written on these dirty, dark-brown pages. I expose them to all possible lights, I examine them with a magnifying-glass; but, notwithstanding, I often have to give it up.

The entries in my journal for this time are exceedingly meagre; there are sometimes weeks when there is nothing but the most necessary meteorological observations with remarks. The chief reason for this is that our life was so monotonous that there was nothing to write about. The same thoughts came and went day after day; there was no more variety in them than in our conversation. The very emptiness of the journal really gives the best representation of our life during the nine months we lived there.

"Wednesday, November 27th. -23° C. (9.4° below zero, Fahr.). It is windy weather, the snow whirling about your ears, directly you put your head out of the passage. Everything is gray; the black stones can be made out in the snow a little way up the beach, and above you can just divine the presence of the dark cliff; but wherever else the gaze is turned, out to sea or up the fjord, there is the same leaden darkness; one is shut out from the wide world, shut into one's self. The wind comes in sharp gusts, driving the snow before it; but up under the crest of the mountain it whistles and roars in the crevices and holes of the basaltic walls--the same never-ending song that it has sung through the thousands of years that are past, and will go on singing through thousands of years to come. And the snow whirls along in its age-old dance; it spreads itself in all the crevices and hollows, but it does not succeed in covering up the stones on the beach; black as ever, they project into the night. On the open space in front of the hut two figures are running up and down like shadows in the winter darkness to keep themselves warm, and so they will run up and down on the path they have trampled out, day after day, till the spring comes.

"Sunday, December 1st. Wonderfully beautiful weather for the last few days; one can never weary of going up and down outside, while the moon transforms the whole of this ice-world into a fairy-land. The hut is still in shadow under the mountain which hangs above it, dark and lowering; but the moonlight floats over ice and fjord, and is cast back glittering from every snowy ridge and hill. A weird beauty, without feeling, as though of a dead planet, built of shining white marble. Just so must the mountains stand there, frozen and icy cold; just so must the lakes lie congealed beneath their snowy covering; and now as ever the moon sails silently and slowly on her endless course through the lifeless space. And everything so still, so awfully still, with the silence that shall one day reign when the earth again becomes desolate and empty, when the fox will no more haunt these moraines, when the bear will no longer wander about on the ice out there, when even the wind will not rage--infinite silence! In the flaming aurora borealis the spirit of space hovers over the frozen waters. The soul bows down before the majesty of night and death.