326 FOUR YEARS IN THE WHITE NORTH 



summer opened an abundance of meat would be forth- 

 coming. By the 1st of June, not quite a month after 

 our arrival, most of our tinned supplies were gone, even 

 though we had despatched several sledges to Etah after 

 more. 



An attack of snow-blindness early in the summer 

 taught me a valuable lesson. It was in the last week 

 of May that I went out for a seal-hunt with Mene Wal- 

 lace, the New York Eskimo celebrity. For over thirty 

 hours we hunted steadily. I used no sun glasses, for I 

 felt no fear of snow-blindness; but throughout the hunt 

 I taxed my eyes to the utmost, searching the ice for the 

 sleeping seals with my big Leitz No. 10 field-glasses. 

 When finally we made camp, at the head of Grenville 

 Bay, instead of sleeping, we hunted ptarmigan, of 

 which we found several flocks. After a luncheon of seal 

 meat we started home. My eyes w^ere heavy and tired, 

 but I thought nothing of it until I was almost half-way 

 home. Just after we had come out of Grenville Bay 

 and turned up Wolstenholme Sound toward North Star 

 Bay, I began to feel sharp pain in my eyes and my 

 sight became blurred. The pain increased, and my eyes 

 became so bloodshot that what little I could see looked 

 red. 



We got into the station late in the afternoon. Soon 

 afterward I went to bed. By midnight I was almost rav- 

 ing mad wuth the pain, and I had to call Tanquary and 

 Peter to help me. For nearly three days they dropped 

 cocaine into my eyes at frequent intervals, and gave 

 me occasional hypodermics of morphine; whenever the 

 effect of the drugs waned the pain grew so excruciating 

 that I became almost irrational. Never have I suffered 

 such keen or intense agony. I felt sure I should never 



