THE SUPPLIES ON THE BIG FLOE“Our supplies on the big floe we left at first where we put them. Later on as we got opportunity we built a regular house, with walls composed of boxes and bags of coal, cases of biscuit, barrels and other large articles.”
THE SUPPLIES ON THE BIG FLOE“Our supplies on the big floe we left at first where we put them. Later on as we got opportunity we built a regular house, with walls composed of boxes and bags of coal, cases of biscuit, barrels and other large articles.”
THE SUPPLIES ON THE BIG FLOE
“Our supplies on the big floe we left at first where we put them. Later on as we got opportunity we built a regular house, with walls composed of boxes and bags of coal, cases of biscuit, barrels and other large articles.”
We had a new dredge by this time, a larger and better one, made by Chief Engineer Munro, with a long line, for we were getting soundings of 1200 fathoms. We brought up a brittle starfish on thesixteenth and a spherical-shaped creature unknown to Murray, two or three inches in diameter. Murray had a laboratory which we built on deck for his specimens, and it became a good deal of a museum before it finally went down with the ship.
We got fur clothing enough made by the middle of the month for each man to have an outfit and I had all the skins we had left collected and put in canvas bags. The sailors were busy putting our pemmican in 48-pound packages, sewed up in canvas which later we used for dog harness; canvas is one thing the dogs will not ordinarily chew.
On the twentieth we saw bear tracks near the ship. There had been cracks in the ice and ribbons of open water at some distance from the ship and the Eskimo had continued their seal hunting with considerable success. The dogs, curiously enough, though tethered at various points around on the ice, were not aware of the bear’s presence.
Wherever there are seal you will find bear because the bear hunt the seal and live on them. When I was hunting with Paul Rainey and Harry Whitney in 1910 in Lancaster Sound, that historic entrance to the islands and waters west of Baffin Land, I saw a bear creeping along the ice very stealthily. So intent was he that he did not know I was there and I watched him steal up on a seal asleep on the ice. He got nearer and nearer andfinally made a spring and landed on his prey. The seal never woke up.
Sometimes the ice would be closed up and our Eskimo would get no seal, or the weather would be bad and the sky overcast, but when the ice parted and the water-lanes opened, if the air was fine, the seal would sometimes swim over to the edge of the floe, put their flippers up and crawl out of the water. Then they would lie out on the ice and sun themselves. After a time, as the sun disappeared and the raw wind came up, they would become cold from staying on the ice and then they would slide back into the water. I have seen seal off the Newfoundland coast that were so sunburned after lying for many days on the ice, blockaded in the bays by the on-shore winds, that they actually cried out with pain when they finally went into the water, and came back on to the ice again at once.