18 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



sands of owls and hawks and gulls. There are the goose and brant 

 and swan and crane and loon and various species of ducks. The 

 ground at the moulting season in some islands such as Banks Island, 

 three or four hundred miles north of the arctic circle, is literally 

 white with millions of wavy geese and equally white with their 

 moulted feathers a little later in the season when the birds are 

 gone. When you add to this picture the bumblebees, blue-bottle 

 flies and abundant insect life of which the clouds of mosquitoes form 

 the most impressive and least tolerable part, you get a picture of 

 a country that in summer certainly is not without life. 



"But then," it may be said, "there comes the winter when the 

 insects live only as eggs and larvae containing the potential life for 

 the coming year, and when all land animals migrate south." It 

 is true that this opinion can be supported by direct quotations from 

 explorers, especially the early ones. It seemed so eminently reason- 

 able to men brought up in England that any animal with legs to 

 walk on would move south in winter, that they translated this be- 

 lief into a statement of fact and asserted that both the caribou 

 and the musk ox leave such islands as Melville in the fall to come 

 again in the spring. If this were so, surely my companions and I 

 could not have lived on the meat of land animals which we killed 

 every month of the year as far north as 76° and even 80° N. Lati- 

 tude. Musk oxen never leave any island on which they are born, 

 for there is no evidence that they go out on the sea ice at all. 

 Caribou do move about from island to island but they are just 

 as likely to move north in the fall as to move south. On the north 

 end of Banks Island McClure found them abundant in midwinter 

 seventy years ago, and we found them more abundant in the north 

 end of the island than anywhere else every winter while we lived 

 there. The bull caribou shed their horns about the middle of winter, 

 and even the summer traveler cannot fail to notice that the horns of 

 bull caribou are scattered over every arctic island that he visits. 



No more than the caribou and musk oxen do the wolves that 

 feed on them go south. The white foxes leave the islands and the 

 mainland, ninety per cent, of them, but they go north rather than 

 south. What they really do is to leave the land for the sea ice, 

 where they subsist through the winter on remnants of seals that 

 have been killed and not completely devoured by the polar bears. 

 The lemmings stay in the north. Most owls and most ravens go 

 south but some spend the winter north. Fully half the ptarmigan 

 remain north of the arctic circle. The hares live in winter about 

 where they do in summer. 



