United States or Switzerland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I unloaded a sledge, and reloaded it with a couple of skins, the instruments, and a cooker with enough alcohol and food for one meal for three, and then I turned in to the igloo where my boys were already sound asleep. The thermometer registered 29° below zero.
Following the trail four miles farther north, we passed the Captain's second igloo. He had unloaded his three sledges here and gone on to Parr Bay to hunt musk-oxen. We caught up with the Doctor and his party at the end of the ice-foot and pushed on to Cape Columbia. We found but one igloo here and I did the "after you my dear Alphonse," and the Doctor got the igloo.
That night when they stopped to make their camp, sixty miles lay behind them. The going had been good and they had done a splendid day's work. Before unharnessing the dogs, which would have immediately attacked and destroyed the goods upon the sledge had they been released, the Eskimos went about building an igloo.
They get their sleep in snatches of a minute or so at a time, and between their naps they clear the ice from their breathing holes. There is usually a deep layer of snow over the ice. Each mother seal hollows out a little igloo under the snow, around her breathing hole, and leaves a tiny hole in the top of it, so her baby can have plenty of fresh air and be hidden from sight at the same time.
"So I went to the igloo of Neewak. And behold, he had made his own still, fashioned cunningly after mine. And as he beheld me he could ill conceal his triumph. For he was a man of parts, and his sleep with the gods when in my igloo had not been sound.
The shrieks, the growls ceased, and the dead bear lay among the ruins of the igloo. The next day Anvik stayed away from school to help build a new igloo. His father and Tanana did not talk much, from the time when they laid the blocks of extremely hard snow in a circle till the time when the inwardly-slanting snow walls had risen to the topmost horizontal block that joined the walls.
I wonder what he'll do." And then they shouted to Skipper Ed, and again and again they shouted, but the wind blew their shouts back into their teeth and Skipper Ed did not hear them, and at last he faded away, and the land ice faded away in the cloud of drifting snow. "There's going to be a hard blow, and we'll have to find a place to build our igloo," Bobby at length suggested.
We had to cross one deep snowbank before reaching the crest of the hill, and upon our descent came upon a depression in the snow, which Toolooah recognized as a bear's igloo. A few patches of white wool near the entrance confirmed his opinion. I crawled in as far as I could, to see in what sort of a house the polar bear hibernated, and found it very much in size and shape like those of the Inuits.
"Yes, by all means," agreed Skipper Ed. "We'll have plenty of time in the morning to go out, and if the hunting proves good, and we prefer to stay there, we can build an igloo at our leisure. If we get plenty of seals we will want to haul them in here to land to cache them, and then if the ice breaks up before we get them all hauled home, we can take them in the boat.
Over this a snow knife was stuck into the side of the igloo and the kettle hung upon the knife in such a position that it was directly over the flame, and snow, cut from the side of the igloo near the bottom, was melted for tea, and thus the simple breakfast was prepared without going out of doors.
Word Of The Day