40 FOUR YEARS IN THE WHITE NORTH [Dec. 



est Eskimo village of Nerky. When they arrived at 

 their first camp below Cape Alexander, at the old, un- 

 inhabited village of Sulwuddy, imagine their astonish- 

 ment to find Ak-kom-mo-ding-wa, age fifty-seven, snugly 

 ensconced in a new snow house with his temporarily 

 exchanged wife, Ah-took-sung-wa. Panikpa, age fifty- 

 six, was headed south on his honeymoon, equally as well 

 pleased with his new acquisition. This interchange 

 was for six days only ! 



On December 19th Kood-look-to, an old friend of the 

 1908 expedition, arrived from his igloo, 250 miles away, 

 to pay his respects to the newly arrived visitors. He 

 had learned from the Eskimos that I had tried to reach 

 him with the ship in August, so he harnessed his dogs 

 and started for Etah at once. I was glad to see this 

 companion of my trip of 1908 to the most northern 

 point of land in the world. He also accompanied me 

 on my visit to Fort Conger in June of that year. I re- 

 member well how he stalked about the grounds in sol- 

 dier's uniform and hand-bag! He found a bronze pro- 

 peller, suspended it from a tripod, and banged it with 

 a rock, awaking the echoes of the hills a dozen times 

 a day. Wondering what he was up to one morning, I 

 peeped into his tent, where was revealed to my astonished 

 eyes a toy sledge drawn by three lemming and moving 

 rapidly across the floor! How he laughed to see Jack, 

 our sailor from the S.S. Roosevelt, from behind the corner 

 of old Fort Conger, wriggling along cautiously on his 

 belly through the snow for fifty yards, to shoot a dead 

 duck comfortably seated upon an ice-cake — one we had 

 placed there while Jack was asleep. Kood-look-to had 

 much to tell me, but the chief item of interest was 

 that he had found a meteorite near his igloo as large 



