The Open Polar Sea: A narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States"Hayes, I. I. (Isaac Israel)
History
The Open Polar Sea: A narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States"
Hayes, I. I. (Isaac Israel)
Arctic regions; United States (Schooner)
Oosisoak has other traits befitting greatness. He has sentiment. He has
chosen one to share the glory of his reign, to console his sorrows,
and to lick his wounds when fresh from the bloody field. Oosisoak has
a queen; and this object of his affection, this idol of his heart, is
never absent from his side. She runs beside him in the team, and she
fights for him harder than any one of his male subjects. In return
for this devotion he allows her to do pretty much as she pleases. She
may steal the bone out of his mouth, and he gives it up to her with a
sentimental grimace that is quite instructive. But it happens sometimes
that he is himself hungry, and he trots after her, and when he thinks
that she has got her share he growls significantly; whereupon she
drops the bone without even a murmur. If the old fellow happens to be
particularly cross when a reindeer is thrown to the pack, he gets upon
it with his forefeet, begins to gnaw away at the flank, growling a
wolfish growl all the while, and no dog dare come near until he has had
his fill except Queen Arkadik, (for by that name is she known,) nor can
she approach except in one direction. She must come alongside of him,
and crawl between his fore-legs and eat lovingly from the spot where he
is eating.
So much for my dogs. I shall doubtless have more to say about them
hereafter, but there is only a small scrap of the evening left, and I
must go back to "My Brother John's Glacier."
Halting our teams near the glacier front, we proceeded to prepare
ourselves for ascending to its surface. Its face, looking down the
valley, exhibits a somewhat convex lateral line, and is about a mile
in extent, and a hundred feet high. It presents the same fractured
surfaces of the iceberg, the same lines of vertical decay caused by the
waters trickling from it in the summer,--the same occasional horizontal
lines, which, though not well marked, seemed to conform to the curve
of the valley in which the glacier rests. The slope backward from this
mural face is quite abrupt for several hundred feet, after which the
ascent becomes gradual, decreasing to six degrees, where it finally
blends with the _mer de glace_ which appears to cover the land to the
eastward.
At the foot of the glacier front there is a pile of broken fragments
which have been detached from time to time. Some of them are very
large--solid lumps of clear crystal ice many feet in diameter. One such
mass, with an immense shower of smaller pieces, cracked off while we
were looking at it, and came crashing down into the plain below.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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