DR. KANE'S EXPEDITION. 509 



floor to ceiling. The entrance was also by a low, moss- 

 lined tunnel, and in this apartment the men stowed 

 away for the winter. The closer they lay, the warmer. 

 Dr. Kane was once more nearly lost, however, before 

 darkness came on. In an attempt to kill a seal he got 

 upon thin ice, and was, with dogs and sledge, thrown 

 into open water. He owed his extrication, when 

 nearly gone, to a newly-broken team-dog, who was still 

 fast to the sledge, and drew it and the doctor up on to 

 the floe. 



An occasional intercourse had always been kept up 

 with the Esquimaux. We have seen that they came to 

 pilfer, and Dr. Kane retorted by making some of them 

 prisoners. A treaty of friendship was then made, and 

 never broken by the natives. The nearest Esquimaux 

 settlement was distant, by dog-journey, about seventy- 

 five miles ; and with this rude but friendly people our 

 adventurers established a communication, and procured 

 from them supplies of bear-meat, seal, walrus, fox, and 

 ptarmigan, which were eaten raw, the custom in this 

 region. But these supplies became scanty with the 

 approach of the dark months. Attempts to reach the 

 Esquimaux were rendered impracticable by the rugged- 

 ness of the ice ; and this unfortunate people were them- 

 selves reduced to the lowest stages of misery and 

 emaciation by famine, attended with various frightful 

 forms of disease. 



On the 14th of January Dr. Kane congratulated him- 

 self that in Jive more days the mid-day sun would be 

 only "eight degrees below the horizon " On the 9th of 

 February he wrote in his journal : "It is enough to 

 solemnize men of more joyous temperament than ours 

 has been for some months. We are contending at 

 odds with angry forces close around us, without one 

 agent or influence within eighteen hundred miles whose 



