North Cape

Folsom smiled. "All right, we've been warned. But don't worry about it. Even if we do have to carry you, we will get you back, one way or another." The executive officer stood up. "Okay. We head out in five minutes. Julie, pass out those snowshoes."

Gadsen got up and pulled out four pairs of make-shift snowshoes from under the pile of gear on his side of the tent and passed them out.

"Sorry about the pack frames," he apologized, "but I figured sore shoulders were better than tired legs."

The snowshoes were made from aluminum bracing taken from the Himalaya mountain packs. Gadsen had straightened the frames and bent them into rough circular shapes, then used nylon line for webbing and the rough bootstraps. They were clumsy, but would serve to keep the wearer on top of, rather than floundering knee-deep in, the snow. While Teleman pulled on a pair of insulated boots over two pairs of heavy wool socks and one pair of felt underboots, McPherson and Folsom loaded the gear and sleeping bags into the packs. Then he pulled his dacron parka tighter and zipped it close to his throat, pulling the hood up and tying it tightly. Around his neck went a six-inch flap that snapped in back, covering chin and throat. Folsom handed him a face mask, which he snapped to the throat flap and along the rim of the hood.

"I feel like a man from Mars," he muttered through the muffling fabric. The others looked much the same.

"The very best Arctic gear the U. S. Navy has, Major." McPherson laughed. "Once we get outside, you'll wonder why the damned clothing couldn't be warmer. Me, I intend to write a letter to Naval Supplies when I get back, telling them just what I think of this stuff."

Folsom looked Teleman over carefully. "How do you feel now?"

"To he truthful, pretty weak. But I think I can make it." Folsom undid a pocket flap on his pack and pulled out an aluminum tube. "Try a couple of these, Benzedrine. They'll pick you up."

"Yeah, I know. But I'll wait awhile." Teleman wondered if Folsom had any idea what effect that Benzedrine would have on him. "No sense exhausting myself too early." Folsom nodded. "Yeah, I guess you're right." He turned and quickly looked over the other two. "A/1 right, let's move out."

They broke camp quickly, each man carrying a carbine, canteen, and thirty-pound pack, with the exception of Teleman. He insisted that he carry at least his own carbine and the tent. Reluctantly, McPherson gave it to him. The tent folded into a compact package weighing less than ten pounds, but even so McPherson knew that in his weakened condition the extra ten pounds would soon begin to weigh on Teleman like ten thousand.

Folsom took the lead. Head down, and with the queer shuffling gait that snowshoes force, he struck out through the scrub forest toward the cliffs at a steep diagonal. The snow was deep and the wind whistling through the trees swept at them from every direction, dumping snow from the laden branches onto the four men trudging below. Folsom led them around the deepest drifts, sticking to the open areas as much as possible so that the drifting snow would thoroughly cover their tracks.

It took them an hour to walk out of the trees and reach the cliffs. An hour of tense shuffling on the round snowshoes that cramped muscles unknown to Teleman until then. The width of the snowshoes forced him to walk with his legs farther apart than he was used to, and shortly the muscles on the inside of his thighs were screaming for relief. And the dense underbrush made the walking that much harder. Bushes, half hidden in the snow, caught at the rims and webbing of the shoes. Within the first hour Teleman had fallen twice.

As soon as they stepped from the tree line, the full force of the wind caught them squarely. Snow, swirled up into a ground blizzard, stung at their eyes and any exposed skin surface, finding its way inside snow masks, around the elastic wrist and ankle bands and between hood and parkas with an insidiousness that was almost human. It had been Folsom's intention to strike west along the rim of the cliffs as long as they lasted, but the ground blizzard, whirled into a fog of ice crystals, made travel along the cliff tops too hazardous. It would have been very easy to walk over the edge before realizing it. McPherson led them back away from the cliffs for fifty yards and, bent into the rising wind, they moved parallel to the line of cliffs, using their meager lee for what shelter that could provide from the gale-force wind.