stefansson-wrangel-09-34-055

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Part of Fred Maurer's published story in connection
with the wreck of the "Karluk" of which he was a member of the
crew in 1913. The ship is fast in the drifting ice but has
yet not been crushed and sunk.

"There is a peculiar weirdness in those shifty stretches
of the ice-pack. Sometimes no sound is heard for hours or
days, and then comes the boom or roar of ice breaking and
grinding by its own great weight . . .The law of compensation
is operative in the Arctic as well as elsewhere, for though
we were xcxex deprived of the glories of the day, we often
beheld the beauties of the far northern night . . . the sky
was clear, and the stars shone brilliantly.

The Pole Star was almost directly overhead, and the great
constellations that rise and set where most people live made a
nightly circuit of our heavens without setting. The displays
of the aurira borealis were remarkable for their beauty and
variety. We often stood upon our drifting world of ice and
admired their shifting colors, forgetful of the dangers
constantly threatening to destroy us."

From Hadley's description of same---"Could hear the
ice crushing and tumbling."

Fr Kabloona by Contran De Poncins---" I stared at a bird
as it tacked and wheeled in a storm over the empty tundra.
It was a hawk, flying with swiftly beating wings . . skirting
the ridge, dipping into the hollows, vanisjing from sight.
The hawk was hunting; its game was the snowbird; and because
the snowbirds were still here, the hawk was here. Soon they
would move southward, and in their wake would go the hawk
. . . for they were its source of life."

Also-- Everything here was a link in the chain of death.
Man was here because the white fox was here. The white fox was
here because it hunted small creatures, and they were here
because of still smaller prey. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Also--"For you on the outside snow is an enchanting thing
that comes in the night and brings to you of a sudden a white
and beautiful world lying in silence out of the window. For men
in the Arctic snow is a thing of endless labor, always either
too soft or too hard; a thing that drifts through the chinks
and fills ones clothing; a thing that comes down for the ex-
press purpose of burying your dogs and harpoons and whatever
else you have had the ill luck to forget out of doors. Being
uneven in its fall, now here, and now gone, it makes the trail
a laborious thing. In spring the careless are blinded by it.
It buries the Arctic and levels it off with such uniformity
that you have to dig to find out whether you are on sea or on
land. It is something you have constantly to clear away or cut
with a snow-knife, melt for drinking water--and that is a