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intense dislike for school, and two years later, in 1911, Maurer and a boyhood friend headed to California. Arriving in San Francisco, the boys began looking for work and came across an advertisement in a newspaper: GREEN HANDS WANTED 26 ON THE BELVEDERE .
    The boys enlisted immediately, Maurer as deckhand, and it was while the expedition was wintering at Herschel Island that Maurer met Vilhjalmur Stefansson. The famed explorer made quite an impression on Maurer as he came aboard the Belvedere and regaled the crewmen with stories of his adventures.
    When Maurer had finished his contract with the whaling ship at the end of 1912 and was once again on land, he stumbled across a newspaper article about Stefansson and his forthcoming Canadian Arctic Expedition. As soon as he returned to Ohio, Maurer lost no time in writing to Stefansson to volunteer his services.
    Maurer’s friends strongly advised him against going to the Arctic. His family, too, did not want him to go. Before he had left Ohio to join this new expedition, before he ventured far away from his loved ones and everything familiar, he decided to ask the fates if he was doing the right thing. “It was heads 27 , I go; tails, I stay at home. I tossed the coin thrice, and twice the head turned up, and the fates decreed that I should go.”
    A SECOND BEAR was sighted on August 2, half an hour after the first was wounded, and this time each of the scientists was armed with a rifle, firing blindly away. Mamen watched as Bartlett stood at the bow and, in just two shots, brought the bear to its knees. It was a beautiful animal—seven feet, ten inches, from head to tail. The Eskimo hunters Stefansson had hired skinned the creature, and the skins were scraped and hung out on the rigging to dry, to be used later for clothing; the meat would be kept to feed both the men and the forty-some dogs on board, the pick of the finest dog breeder in Alaska.
    That night, the Karluk forced her way into the heavy ice pack and bucked the ice until she was ground to a stop at midnight, surrounded by a solid field of white. There was nothing else to do but fill their tanks with fresh water from the nearby pools that had formed on the surface of the ice, and wait to be freed.
    F OR THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS, the Karluk sat trapped, just twenty-five miles from Point Barrow, Alaska. The staff and crew were restless and impatient to be on their way. No one knew what it meant, whether they would be stuck for the rest of the season, or whether it was only a minor setback. No one was more restless than Stefansson, and on August 3, he headed by dog sled to the Point Barrow trading station, Cape Smythe, where he hoped to hire more Eskimos and purchase more supplies.
    That same day, the staff began amusing themselves by exploring the surrounding ice pack, going for long walks, playing European-style football, or trying their luck on skis. Mamen, who excelled in all sports, particularly skiing, was especially entertained by Beuchat’s antics. The Frenchman was anything but athletic, and, his colleagues soon discovered, was quite clumsy. Beuchat raced about on the slippery ice, tumbling feet over ears, picking himself up and running on. Mamen warned him to be careful, told him he couldn’t walk on ice as he did on the floor of a ship or on the ground, but the dignified anthropologist ignored his advice and promptly landed on his tail between two ice cakes, soaking himself to the bone.
    McKinlay had dreamed of the moment when he would first set foot on the polar ice pack, and he was shaking with excitement as he stepped off the ship. He ran and danced with the rest of the men, leaping from one floe to another, scrambling to the tops of the ice hills, slipping and falling and sliding everywhere. It was exhilarating and liberating to be off the ship and running, momentarily free.
    By August 5, however, the men of the Karluk were beginning to feel trapped and restless. Frolicking on the ice