14 Arctic Adventure (3 page)

As the whip came down Roger caught it and pulled it out of Zeb’s hand.

‘You interfering upstart,’ Zeb cried. ‘What do you know about wild beasts?’

‘Not much,’ Roger said. ‘But I know a whip is no good if you want to calm down a terrified animal.’

Still holding a horn with one hand he used his other hand to stroke the neck of the excited animal and he spoke sweet nothings into a big ear. He kept this up for a good ten minutes, stroking, speaking softly.

It was the old Roger magic. The animal had given up struggling. His eyes were fixed upon the boy. After all, he was just a boy and not worth killing. And he didn’t seem to mean any harm.

It was lucky for Roger that it is not difficult to tame a caribou. Thousands of them have been tamed by the Eskimos of northern Canada and Greenland. They have been harnessed and can pull a plough or a wagon as well as any horse or ox. In fact they are much better than an ox. One caribou can draw a sledge with two men on it at a speed of up to eighteen miles an hour. To become tame, all they need is a little understanding.

Roger noticed that the caribou’s feet were as big as soup plates.

‘That’s so he can walk on snow without sinking in,’ Olrik said.

‘What’s that funny flat bone that looks like a shovel just above his upper lip?’ Roger asked.

Olrik replied, ‘That’s exactly what it is —a shovel. He uses it to push the snow out of his way so he can get at the lichen underneath. For most of the year lichen is his only food.’

‘What is lichen?’

‘It’s something that will grow where nothing else will grow. It doesn’t even have to have soil. It will grow on rocks. It’s sometimes called reindeer moss because it’s a little like moss, and all members of the deer family including the caribou consider it a good food. It keeps on growing even under snow. It never grows large, not over a few inches. Some Eskimos eat it —I’ve eaten it myself. It’s not half bad.’

‘Dad told us to get one of these caribou,’ Hal reminded his brother. ‘He said it was the best friend of the Eskimos. It gives them most everything they need. Their warmest blankets are caribou hide, and their shoes can be made of it because it’s strong. Its blood makes a good soup. They cut open the stomach to get the moss —they think it’s as lovely as cake. The caribou provides them with meat, cheese, clothes, tents, buckets and bedding. In northern Canada the caribou have been the chief support of Eskimos for thousands of years. Clothes made from caribou hide are as warm as toast. You’ve got this one feeling pretty good, so I think it’s time to take it to the airport.’

The great animal, nine hundred pounds of bone and muscle, was led by the horns a mile to the airfield, where it was placed in a box-car. After a few more animals were added the box-car would be mounted on an airplane, which would then be called a skyvan and would take off on a night flight to Long Island.

The two Yanks and Olrik looked at the ruins of the snow house that Hal had so carefully built.

There was not one block of snow standing on another. The caribou had done a thorough job.

‘Are you going to rebuild?’ Olrik asked.

‘After we come back,’ said Hal. This was a surprise to Roger.

‘Are we going somewhere?’

‘I’ve been thinking about making a trip,’ Hal said. ‘Up on the ice cap. Now is a good time to do it. Tonight we’ll just sleep out in the open in our nice, warm, caribou-hide sleeping bags. Tomorrow we’ll lure ten dogs and a sledge and take off.’

‘You don’t need to hire anything,’ said Olrik. ‘You can use mine. Provided you let me go along with you.’

‘We’d like nothing better than to have you with US,’ said Hal. ‘Of course we’ll pay you.’

‘Of course you won’t,’ said Olrik. ‘We Eskimos don’t do things that way. Friends don’t pay each other.’

Hal saw there was no use in arguing. He knew Eskimo custom. If your friend did something for you, you would do something for him. Hal already had an idea of what he would do for Olrik and his parents.

He would build them a stone house so solid that nothing could pull it down. This Eskimo’s family now lived in an igloo. Hal had seen stone houses in Thule. The chinks between the stones were filled with mud which froze solid and kept out the cold. The roof was made of the skins of wild animals all sewn together, and sod completely covered the skins. This layer of earth was about three inches thick and froze almost as hard as ice. In summer it thawed a little, just enough for grass and flowers to grow in it. And what you really had was a roof garden above your head.

But he wouldn’t breathe a word of this to Olrik until it was almost time for them to leave Greenland.

During the night snow fell, but the boys were snug in their furry bags and drew the flaps over their heads. In the morning they were practically buried under four inches of snow. Olrik couldn’t find them at first. He saw two mounds and cleared them away only to find large rocks. Then at a little distance he saw the snow move as if it were alive. He cleared it away as best he could and discovered two very lively and hungry boys.

They heard a yapping sound that told them the dogs and sledge were already there.

‘The huskies are ready to go,’ said Olrik.

‘Why are they called huskies?’ Roger asked.

Olrik explained. ‘A husky man is one who is big and strong. So they call these dogs huskies because they are big and strong.’

They kicked off the snow that covered their supplies and had a quick breakfast. Then they loaded the sledge with all that they would need, mainly food.

Also they put on crates and cages for the animals they expected to find.

‘Where do we sit?’ Roger wanted to know.

Olrik grinned. ‘You don’t sit. You walk. Unless you get sick. In that case, you ride. But you can’t expect the huskies to go so fast if they have to haul a big fellow like you.’

The harness for the dogs was made of strips of walrus hide. The huskies looked powerful. Every one of them weighed ninety pounds or more. Olrik said they were the finest in Greenland. They looked a little more wolflike than most dogs.

The sledge was four feet wide. The runners were the long jawbones of the Greenland whale. Roger admired them. He saw the bottom of each one was covered with ice.

‘How did that happen?’

‘I made it happen.’ said Olrik.

‘How?’

‘You turn the sledge upside down. Then you pour water on the bottom of each runner. It quickly turns to ice. The well-iced runners glide smoothly over ice or snow.’

‘Do the huskies have to be fed three times a day?’

‘Not on your life,’ laughed Olrik. ‘They are fed only once every two days.’

‘But don’t they get hungry?’

‘They do. And it’s when they’re hungry that they run fast. If they are stuffed with food they slow down.’

‘But how can we walk or run without sinking into the snow?’

‘I saw you had skis. I have a pair also. We’ll put them on and then we can get along as fast as the huskies do.’

‘How quiet your dogs are. Even when they bark it’s hardly a bark.’

‘No,’ said Olrik. ‘They have only two ways of speaking. One is a growl, and the other is a howl.’

‘A howl,’ said Roger. ‘That’s what wolves do.’

‘Right. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a bit of wolf in every one of these huskies. That doesn’t mean that they like wolves. They’re deathly afraid of them. Wolves killed seven of my dogs —killed them and ate them.’

‘I hope we don’t meet any wolves,’ said Roger earnestly.

‘We probably will. But we won’t worry about that now. Are you ready to go? Better wear your skis. I have mine here. Then we won’t stumble along so badly in the snow.’

They took off for the great beyond. Roger’s heart thumped with excitement. Even his big brother was thrilled to think of the adventures that awaited them. They were going to travel on the mighty ice cap. Under them would be ice not three inches thick as on a lake or ocean, not three feet thick, but two miles thick. It seemed impossible.

It was not easy to get from the lowland up to the ice cap. It did not slope gently down from high to low. Instead it ended in a steep cliff three hundred or four hundred feet high. To get up such a cliff with ten huskies and a sledge was impossible.

There were only a few places in all Greenland where the abrupt cliff gave way to an easy slope from low to high. Olrik knew where to find the nearest one. The huskies were happy, the humans enjoyed speeding along on their skis in the sparkling fresh air straight from the North Pole.

Suddenly Olrik said, ‘Now you are on the ice cap.’

The wind had blown the snow away and their skis were sliding over ice but it was only two inches thick.

‘Is this a joke,’ Roger demanded.

‘No joke,’ said Olrik. ‘This is the edge of one of the two greatest caps of ice in the world. The other is in Antarctica. Now all we have to do is go up and up and up. The famous ice cap is only a few inches thick here. We will keep going until it is two miles thick. If anyone wants to go back, now is the time to say so.’

Nobody said so.

The rise was so gradual that they could still ski.

They had followed a road through the low country, but now there was no sign of a road.

Roger asked Olrik, ‘Why don’t we go up one of the roads?’

Olrik answered, ‘There’s no road across the ice cap.’

‘I can see that there’s no road here. But there must be somewhere. How do people get from one shore of Greenland to the other shore?’

‘There’s no road anywhere. There will be some day. Then automobiles will stream across from one side to the other of the great ice cap. They will pull caravans, or perhaps they will live in motor homes. They will stop where they please and have all the comforts of home. That day hasn’t come yet.’

‘How about snowmobiles—like the ones we have in America?’ Roger asked. ‘Then you could go anywhere without roads.’

‘I know,’ said Olrik. ‘I’ve been there and I’ve seen them. They are all right but I hope they don’t come here soon. I like my friends, the huskies. And I’d rather have the peace and quiet of the dog team than the noise and stink of engines. Besides, if your gasoline or petrol or whatever you call it ran out where would you be? There’s no place up here where you could get more. With dogs you don’t have to worry. They don’t run on gasoline. They eat only once in two days and they are always cheerful and eager. Besides, you can make friends with them and you can’t do that with an engine.’

Poor Olrik. The time would come, and soon, when the old pleasant way of life would change.

Now they were going up a slope so steep that they had to remove their skis, put them on the sledge and walk.

It was a stiff climb but the huskies never hesitated. Olrik didn’t seem to mind it, but Hal and Roger did a good deal of snorting and puffing. Even the brave dogs were tiring. Roger understood now why his dream of resting comfortably on the sledge and being pulled up the mountain was not practicable. For three hours they struggled on.

Now they were nearing the top of the great ice cap. It didn’t look at all as Roger had imagined it. He had expected that it would be perfectly rounded, as smooth as the top of an old man’s bald head.

But instead it was all hills and holes. The holes were great cracks in the ice, sometimes forty feet wide and hundreds of feet deep. The hills were drifts of snow that had grown higher and higher under the strong winds so that they rose into the air anywhere from twenty to ninety feet high. The snow had turned to ice so that they looked exactly like icebergs, except that they were not floating in the sea but two miles up in the air on top of the Greenland ice cap.

‘We can go around some of them,’ Olrik said. ‘But this one ahead is so long that we can’t take the time to go around it. We’ll simply have to climb over it.’

Olrik picked out the place where this mountain range of ice could be climbed. It looked impossible to the boys from Long Island. But the huskies were tackling it and set an example of courage for the other climbers.

Up they went, slipping, sliding, advancing two yards and falling back one, but keeping at it until they reached the peak.

Now, what a view they had! Away down there by the sea was the city of Thule. Around them they could count seventy nunataks, which was what Olrik called the pyramids of snow and ice.

Judging by the position of Thule, Roger guessed the direction of the North Pole.

‘It must be that way,’ he said. ‘Hal, what does your compass say?’ Hal got out his compass. The needle didn’t point to the North Pole. Instead, it pointed south-west.

‘What do you make of that?’ said Hal. ‘This compass must have gone crazy.’

Olrik grinned. He thought that the crazy one was Hal, not the compass.

‘You’re forgetting something,’ he said. ‘A compass never really points to the North Pole.’

‘Then what does it point to?’ Hal demanded.

‘To the Magnetic Pole.’

‘I remember now. The earth is a sort of magnet or bowl of electricity. The electric’ centre is down there to the south-west. But if you were in New York and looked at the compass you would be so far away from both poles that the compass would give you a pretty good idea of due north.’

‘But up here’, complained Roger, ‘we just have to guess where the North Pole is. It seems to me we’ve got to do a lot of guessing. We have to guess whether it is morning, noon or night. Look at that silly sun. All summer it never goes up in the sky. And it never sets. It just goes round and round, low down all summer. And up here, summer is like winter.’

He shivered inside his thick caribou coat.

‘Here it is June,’ he said, ‘and it’s a sight colder here than in New York in February. Everything is the wrong way around.’

‘Well,’ laughed Hal, ‘that’s what makes it interesting. You wouldn’t want to find Greenland just another New York.’

They went down the hill of ice and wound their way in and out and over the nunataks.

A bitter wind came up. Winds could be terrific on the ice cap. Down at Thule they were not so bad. But two miles up winds could tear over the surface of the ice cap at more than 150 miles an hour.