stefansson-wrangel-09-31-113v

184 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

The first step in building the typical winter trapper's camp is the erection of two uprights upon
which is placed a ridge pole. The ends and side walls of
the house may then be built in one of many ways. The
Wrangel party used the side of a steep hill for one end
and snow blocks for the other three walls. Next, rafters
are put up with one end of each rafter resting on the side
wall and the other on the ridge pole. Snow blocks are
then laid over the roof in the manner of turf on the roof
of a sod house. If the tent to be pitched inside is seven
feet high the house would be nine or ten feet from floor
to ridge pole, and if the tent is ten feet wide and fourteen
feet long the structure housing it would be at least four-
teen feet wide and eighteen long. Since the Wrangel
party pitched two tents end to end, the house which
covered them must have had dimensions at least fourteen
feet in width and twenty-four feet in length.¹

When the wood-burning stoves were put up in the two
tents the stovepipes would be long enough to reach up
through the roof of the house built outside the tents and
high enough above to clear the ridge pole by one or two
feet so as to prevent wind from eddying over the ridge
and blowing the smoke down into the stovepipe.

Through many years I have had many friends, both
white and Eskimo, living in such winter camps on the
north coast of Alaska, and they have sometimes been
used by my own parties. There is the theoretical objec-
tion to them that they shut out completely the sun’s

¹ These speculations were written before we recovered the pages from
Knight’s diary which had been torn out by Mr. Noice (see Appendix IV).
When those pages were recovered, we found the entry for October 22nd and
have inserted Knight’s own figures and description—see post. We had made an
attempt to write the whole story while the abstracted pages were still missing,
nlling m the blanks by conjecture as best we could. As we got possession of
further documents we kept interpolating the facts contained in them. This
progressive correcting is one of the reasons for certain unevennesses and repeti-
tions m the text which could not be fully smoothed out because of the hurry
of going to press.