THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 15 



grees colder than on the north coast of North America and ten 

 degrees colder than at the North Pole. Near the great city of Win- 

 nipeg in Manitoba the weather bureau shows lower temperatures 

 than for the north coast of Canada. So if you happen to be living 

 in northern Montana or southern Manitoba and want to go polar 

 exploring, it would seem you might leave behind a few clothes. I 

 once said substantially this in a lecture in Kalispell, Montana, 

 whereupon some one in the audience took me to task for running 

 down Montana. But the merits of Montana are securely estab- 

 lished, I told him. A friend of mine has a cattle ranch near Havre 

 where steers do well running out all winter. I was not, therefore, 

 running down Montana by the comparison but praising the North 

 Pole. 



The cold pole of the northern hemisphere, far from coinciding 

 with 'the North Pole, is believed to be on the continent of Asia north 

 of Irkutsk, where the temperature is said occasionally to fall to 

 90° below zero. And that is a settled country, the inhabitants of 

 which probably do not complain any more about the climate than 

 do those of London or New York. 



A corollary to everlasting cold in the north is absence of summer 

 heat. It is not easy to say which one of the common notions about 

 the North is the least true, but it is hard to see how any idea can be 

 more wrong than this one. 



I spent the summer of 1910 from fifty to seventy-five miles 

 north of the arctic circle in Canada, northeast of Great Bear Lake, 

 and for six weeks the temperature rose to the vicinity of 90° in 

 the shade nearly every day. Neither did it fall low at night, for 

 in that region the sun does not set and there is no respite through 

 the cooling darkness. The sun beat down on us from a cloudless 

 sky as it continued its monotonous circling, and all of my party 

 agreed we had never in our experience suffered as much from cold 

 as we suffered from heat that summer. The distress was augmented 

 by the unbelievable numbers of pests of the insect world — mos- 

 quitoes, sandflies, horseflies, and so on. No one who has not 

 been in the Arctic, or near it, has any idea what mosquitoes may 

 be like. I have found it wise not to even try to explain, for although 

 people are willing to believe any horror of the North if it centers 

 around cold and ice, they lose faith in your responsibility if you 

 try to tell them the truth about the northern mosquito.* 



Every summer the United States Weather Bureau reports tem- 



* See "The Arctic Prairies," by Ernest Thompson Seton, p. 63. 



