Volume 11, 1958 - The Arctic Circle - Home

VOL XI No.3
THE ARCTIC CIRCULAR
47
While this daily hard work of pulling a sled got very
monotonous, I never felt better in my life, and had an enormous
appetite that was hard to satisfy. Another thing we noticed was
that we craved lots of fat in our food, whereas hitherto I could never
stand fatty foods. Moving all the time gave us little opportunity to
make yeast bread, and continuous baking powder biscuits were hard
on the stomach, but yeast pancakes were just the thing. At breakfast
I set a large batter of yeast in a dishpan with a top, covered it up
in the bed, and cooked a pot of rice and set it on the back of the
stove. When we came in at noon for lunch, I dumped the still warm
rice into the yeast batter and covered it up again. When we came
back for supper. this mixture would be light and foamy. After
supper I would set to with two or three frying pans. making pancakes
on top of the box stove. After three or four hours, I would have a
pile of pancakes eighteen inches high, enough for two weeks. which,
when frozen, were handy to pack and easily thawed out, and very
healthy and palatable.
March 1899. It was near the end of March when we
reached the continental divide. While the eastern slope had been
very long and gradual, the west side was very much steeper and
shorter in distance to the heads of the rivers. In fact, one could
walk in a day from the watershed to where we later built our boats.
Luckily on the trip to the divide there were only a few places where
we could not get spruce wood for heating our tents, and elsewhere
we found enough dry willow, which makes a hot fire but does not
last. Before starting, I had imagined that we would not have any
comfort living in a tent all winter, with such low temperatures ,
but I found we could be quite comfortable in any weather once we
learnt how.
I think about seventy-five people came through this
route. A few were ahead of us. but many far behind, and, of
course, many got fed up with the hard work and extreme cold and
went back. I was told that the Hudson's Bay Company steamboat
on its last trip up the Mackenzie was loaded to the guards by those
who had given up and wanted to get back to civilization. They
were all taken out, with or without payment, as the Hudson's Bay
Company would have had to look after them if they had stayed in
over the winter.