KING POLAR BEAR IN THE REVOLVING RAT-TRAP

Otago Witness, Issue 3885, 28 August 1928, Page 76

KING POLAR BEAR IN THE REVOLVING RAT-TRAP

By

Henry Ette.

(Special eor the Otago Witness.) In the olden days when the modern rat-traps were unknown in the Old Country an old-fashioned home-made rattrap was often used in country places. This was a little revolving staircase in the form of a wheel, and when the rat sprang up on it to get the bread crumbs its weight made the wheel go round, until at last it fell off into a zinc pail filled with water and was drowned. This kind of revolving rat-trap can be found in the Far North, in the polar regions. There the enormous floes of ice roll irom Pehring Straits over the Arctic explorer Green’s beautiful, but, unfortunately, fantastical and imaginary tropical polar country—over the North Pole, past Greenland’s north point, 84deg, down along the 1600 miles long, unfriendly, icy cold, east coast of Greenland, until at last, south of Cape Farewell, the Zinc Pail—the North Atlantic Ocean opens her bottomless pit. Here die polar floating ice plains melt in the warmer water, except one or two great mountains, the sides of which are so slippery that neither the claws of the polar bears, . rats’ claws, nor the nails of human beings can by any chance cling fast to them. Anything that has got into this circulating rat-trap and hasn’t had a chance to jump off on the way fall-, with a certainty, into the Zinc “ail and is drowned. If one could imagine this polar stream and the ice masses ntinuing their drifting towards the south, over the equator, and round the South Pole one would possess the finest revolving conveyance in the world. One would just have to stand on one place or another, let it circulate, and hop off at the right time. Day and night, by the midnight snn’s beautiful . •%;. , in the six-months-long day’ and in the polar night’s oppressive eternal darkness, in the great stillness, only broken by the thundering sound of the ice plains colliding with one another, and the shrill, dismal howling of the white polar wolves, while the Northern Lights sparkle at the zenith, and a band of many colours quivers on the horizon in the south, always the rattrap circulates.: From the time of King Tut it has been rolling on. This way rolled the sailors on the coal ship Hansa when it got separated from the Austrian expedition’s ship Germania 50 years ago on the east coast of Greenland until they, after having been rolled down to Greenland’s south point, Cape Farewell, at last, at the right moment,- escaped falling into the Zinc Pail; this way rolled Nansen with the Fram, this way rolled Roald Amundsen’s Maud, and if he himself had fallen with his aeroplane he would also have been rolled towards Cape Farewell and fallen into the Zinc Pail unless he saved himself on the coast of East Greenland or Spitzbergen. Between 400-500 polar bears come every year by mistake into this rolling rat-trap. From North America, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Franz Josef’s Land, Nova Zeinbla thev come on their eternal wanderings after food blubber, and meat, too far out from land, get caught by the rat-trap’s white steps, and borne, without knowing it, with an uncanny certainty south to where the Zinc Pail stands open. Unless they save themselves—as shipwrecked whalefishers, sailors, and North Pole, explorers have done—on Greenland s east coast they will never more return to the polar regions. The Zinc 1 ail swallows them up.