Word: ptarmigan
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...Landmark. Fletcher's crusade began over a year ago when the radar operator of a B-29 flying the dogleg "Ptarmigan" track (Alaska to the Pole) reported that he had picked up a strange target-an "island" of some sort where there should have been nothing but spongy, saltwater ice pack (TIME, Nov. 27,1950). Because the 16-hour weather hops over the white wastes of the Arctic get monotonous, the crews took a lively interest in searching for a new landmark...
There are still some problems, but already Squadron 375 can laugh at the treacherous twilight. Every other day a stripped-down B-29 takes off on a 3,500-mile "Ptarmigan flight" to the pole and back. So far, no plane has been lost on the ice cap. Married officers often save bits of in-flight lunch and bring it home to their kids as a present from Santa Claus. Lots of mementos (e.g., flags) have been dropped on the pole itself. Cracked one pilot: "A few more drops and we'll be sent back in to police...
...built an igloo nearby and settled down with his family for a sleep-only to be awakened shortly afterward by an uninvited anthropologist. While the "lemming-faced" white intruder busily sketched everything in sight, hospitable Ernenek brought out his choicest delicacy, "a thoroughly chewed hodgepodge of caribou eyes, ptarmigan dung, auk slime and fermented bear brain," which the visitor rudely refused. Then wife Asiak had a happy idea: "Maybe he is not hungry. Maybe he just wants to laugh with a worthless woman." Beamed Ernenek: "Make yourself beautiful...
...canned food ran out. Bud and Connie lived off fish, wild geese, snipe and ptarmigan-when they could get them. They spent whole days in icy water holes, waiting for the wary game. Once Bud shot a moose, but Connie never achieved his ambition for her. Friendly natives gave them an occasional bite of "Eskimo ice cream" (blueberries, snow, and seal oil). Sometimes they had so little to eat that they lost all desire for food and meandered down the river "dizzier than sick cats," sipping hot tea in the driving rain...
There is the psaga of Psmith ("the p ... is silent as in phthisis, psychic, and ptarmigan"), the fastidious young man who calls everybody "Comrade," and almost alone among Wodehouse fauna has enough wits to live by. There is the epic of Jeeves, the infallible, verse-quoting valet ("We are in the autumn, sir, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness"). In the workaday world Jeeves might seem like an average enough gentleman's gentleman but stacked up beside Bertie Wooster, to whose harebrained Don Quixote he plays a discreet Sancho Panza, Jeeves looks like an intellectual giant. There is also...