CHAPTER XX
ACROSS THE MOVING ICE
From now on, our journey became a never-ending series of struggles to get around or across lanes of open water—leads, as they are called,—the most exasperating and treacherous of all Arctic travelling. We would come to a lead and, leaving the sledge and dogs by it, Kataktovick would go in one direction and I in the other; when either of us found a place where we could cross he would fire a revolver or, if the whirling snow and the condensation were not too thick would climb up on some rafter where he could be seen by the other and make a signal to come on. Sometimes there would be a point where the ice on the opposite sides of the lead almost met and by throwing the dogs over, bridging the sledge across and jumping ourselves, we could manage to reach the opposite edge of the ice; at other times the lead would be too wide for this method and we would have to look for a floating ice-cake or a projecting piece that we could break off to use as a ferry-boat. Often we would get across one difficult lead—and they all had their peculiar difficulties—and then in almost no time would find ourselves confronted by another. We consumed a great deal of time crossing the leads and even more in finding a place to cross, for sometimes, no matter how far we looked in either direction—and it was not safe for us to get too widely separated—we would find that in the middle of a lead there was a narrow platform of thin ice, not strong enough to bear the sledge. It called for the exercise of all the training I had gained in my twenty years of Newfoundland sealing and Arctic exploration with Peary to negotiate these constantly recurring leads with any degree of safety.
We did not turn in until ten o’clock that night, for tired as we were from our first day’s wrestle with the leads, we had to sit up and mend our clothes, which had been torn by the jagged rafters.