In\u00e9s counted the people and got the loads right, so I'll take the other column: forty-odd dogs, near enough eight to a sled. They were the engine. A good husky picks her own line through a pressure ridge before anyone gets round to shouting a command, then looks back at you like you've been slow again, which you have.
The Arctic still has working teams. Antarctica doesn't. The last dogs came off the continent in 1994, under the environmental protocol \u2014 worries about distemper passing to seals, and about what teams do to wildlife generally. Machines do the hauling now. A quieter camp, by all accounts. Nobody left to sit outside your tent at four in the morning, visibly unimpressed.
She went back to teaching. Gym class, St. Paul, kids in the hall — that's what came after about two months on the sea ice north of Ellesmere, which I find much more interesting than the pole itself.
The loads first. Five sleds, roughly…
Kit, the column I always checked was the feed: about half a kilo of frozen meat per dog per day, thawing over a stove while the humans waited their turn. Dogs eat first in any decent camp. And the drivers are up in the dark to do it, which is the part nobody puts in the book.