60 FOUR YEARS IN THE WHITE NORTH [Mar. 



ice. We lowered everything carefully to the surface 

 of the sea ice without mishap. One sledge, however, ran 

 amuck and buried its short rounded nose deep into the 

 debris below the face of the glacier. But it was not 

 seriously injured. 



After we had traveled a few miles down the fiord we 

 found the snow trampled and crisscrossed in all direc- 

 tions by the tracks of musk-oxen. We were all now on 

 the alert, the dogs with heads up, sniffing the air, run- 

 ning their noses deep into the footprints in the snow, 

 the men scanning the slope of every hill. In a few 

 minutes we reached a point which commanded a view 

 of the whole fiord, and here Pee-a-wah-to thought it 

 best to camp, assuring us that we would certainly find 

 musk-oxen within a few hours. 



In the morning the first man out of the igloo yelled: 

 ^ ' Oo - ming- much- suit F' ("Musk-oxen!"). There they 

 were! five black dots on a sloping white hillside and 

 strikingly resembling five black rocks. A strange 

 anomaly! A black animal in the white North and yet 

 wonderfully protected by its color! This similarity to 

 boulders is heightened considerably by the presence of 

 the whitish spot on the back. The musk-ox grazes in 

 wind-swept areas which consist of bare ground, patches 

 of snow, and boulders, and the tops of the latter may 

 be lightly sprinkled with snow. W^e have often halted 

 our dogs and scrutinized with powerful binoculars the 

 dark spots on such a field, unable to discriminate be- 

 tween boulders and musk-oxen, motion being the only 

 deciding factor. 



As these rocks slowly changed their relative positions, 

 we were compelled to admit that they must be alive. 

 Arklio and Pee-a-wah-to immediately doubled up their 



