The Frozen North
9781465650504
311 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
As we travel northward, leaving the sunny lands of the temperate zone, we come after a time to mighty and seemingly endless forests of pines and firs. Mile after mile, they stretch away in a lonely silence. The wintry gale that rages among them is answered only by the howl of the wolf, while a few bears, reindeer, and the arctic fox, alone of animals, find a home in their snowy depths. Gradually as we go onward the trees are more stunted, gradually the pines and firs give way to dwarfed willows, and soon we come to the barren grounds, a vast region extending about the pole, and greater in size than the whole continent of Europe. The boundary line of these barren grounds, is not everywhere equally distant from the pole. The temperature of arctic lands, like that of other climes, is affected greatly by the surrounding seas and by ocean currents. In the sea-girt peninsula of Labrador they reach their most extreme southerly point; and as a rule they extend southward where the land borders on the ocean, receding far to the northward in the centre of the continents. All this vast territory is a frozen waste, its only vegetation a few mosses and lichens. The few weeks of arctic summer do not allow the growth of even shrubs. As we advance through the forests the trees are more and more dwarfed. Soon they become merely stunted stems, for though they put forth buds in summer, winter is upon them before wood can be formed. On the shores of the Great Bear Lake, it is said that a trunk a foot in diameter requires four hundred years for its formation. A more desolate scene than the barren grounds in winter, it is difficult to imagine. Buried deep under the heaped up snows, with the winds howling across their dreary wastes, and an intense cold of which we have little idea, it is no wonder that almost no animal, save the hardy arctic fox, can find a subsistence upon them. But no sooner does the returning sun bring the short weeks of summer than all this is changed, and they are the scene of varied life and activity. Vast herds of reindeer come from the forests to feed upon the fresh mosses, flocks of sea-birds fly northward to lay their eggs upon the rocks, and to seek their food in the rivers teeming with fish, while millions of gnats fill the air in clouds, enjoying to the utmost their short lives. And their lives are indeed short, for it is almost July before the snows are gone and the hardy lichens can send forth shoots, and by September all vegetation is again beneath its snowy coverlet for another long nine months’ sleep. The reindeer have, before this, made haste to seek the shelter of the forest, the bears have disposed of themselves for their winter sleep, the birds have allsought the milder region southward, and all is again silence and solitude. It is due to the snow, that at first seems such an enemy to vegetation, that even such low forms of life as mosses are able to exist on the barren grounds. Before the intense cold of the arctic winter has set in, they are buried deep beneath its warm folds. Outside the wind may howl and the cold grow more and more severe till the thermometer marks for months forty degrees below zero; beneath the snow an even and comparatively mild temperature exists. Dr. Kane found that when the outside air was thirty below zero, beneath eight feet of snow it was twenty-six above zero, a difference of fifty-six degrees.
