92 FOUR YEARS IN THE WHITE NORTH [May 



the picture is still in my mind — the broken ice, the slop- 

 ing shore, the high bluff, the white hill. Late in the 

 afternoon a black dot appeared on the horizon — some- 

 thing was coming. As the dot approached I could con- 

 tain myself no longer; the sledge coming must be Pee-a- 

 wah-to's. Where was Green .^^ 



I ran along the ice-foot to meet the sledge. Yes, 

 they were Pee-a-wah-to's dogs. As the question, 

 "WHiere's Green?" was about to burst from my lips, 

 the driver, whose eyes were covered with large metal 

 glasses, seemed to turn suddenly into a strange likeness 

 of Green. He looked as if he had risen from the grave. 



"This is all there is left of your southern division," 

 he said. 



"W^at do you mean — ^Pee-a-wah-to dead? Your 

 dogs and sledge gone?" I inquired. 



"Yes, Pee-a-wah-to is dead; my dogs were buried 

 alive; my sledge is under the snow forty miles away." 



The story was quickly told. Green, inexperienced in 

 the handling of Eskimos, and failing to understand their 

 motives and temperament, had felt it necessary to shoot 

 his companion. Pee-a-wah-to was a faithful assistant 

 of Peary for more than two years, his last trip as one 

 of the famous starvation party to the world's record of 

 87° 6'. He had been my traveling companion from the 

 first, and one of the best. How I hated to tell the 

 mother and the five children that the father was not to 

 return ! 



Our dugout was a dreary hole. The northern end of 

 Axel Heiberg Land, with its ever-rushing, whirling winds, 

 seemed the dreariest of the dreary. Green consented to 

 start, and off toward home we went. When we arrived 

 at the "Took-too" igloo, some fifteen miles down the 



