In the depths of winter, svine swift-moving portions of a river stay open. The ice that forms there breaks and is compressed into an ice pack that is difficult to cross. Deep snow presents another hardship when you’re traveling off-traU. Both men and dogs find it exhausting to drag a sled weighing more than five hundred poimds through powder.
When the snow is very deep, a heavily loaded sled always tends to sink, first to one side then the other. It is important to keep it as level as possible.
When sled dogs are working hard, they need a daily ration of five to ten pounds of meat. Between our two teams, this came to over fivo hundred pounds a day. A moose, yielding four hundred to six hundred pounds of meat, was ideal for our purposes, especially when we could kill one near the camp. The dogs can he let loose on the carcass. Otherwise, it has to be cut up and the meat brought back to camp (opposite).
Whence comes the strange attraction of the polar regions, so strong and so tenacious that a man forgets the mental and physical fatigue they have caused him and longs only to return there?
