THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 19 



To sum up, the arctic sea is lifeless except that it contains about 

 as much life to the cubic mile of water as any other sea. The 

 arctic land is lifeless except for millions of caribou and of foxes, 

 tens of thousands of wolves and of musk oxen, thousands of polar 

 bears, billions of insects and millions of birds. And all these go 

 south in the fall except the insects which die as they do in temperate 

 lands, and except the ptarmigan, caribou, foxes, wolves, musk oxen, 

 polar bears, lemmings, hares, weasels, owls, and ravens, all of which 

 we have named in approximately the order of their decreasing nu- 

 merical strength.* 



Then there is the "silent north." Nothing is more characteristic 

 of the Arctic as it has been imagined to be than its silence. But 

 it will appear just how silent a summer must be where the air is 

 continually filled with the hum of the blue-bottle fly, ubiquitously 

 waiting to deposit its larvae, and the buzz of the mosquitoes, hover- 

 ing in clouds to suck the blood of man or beast. There are the 

 characteristic cries of the plovers and the snipes and the various 

 sandpipers and smaller birds, the squawking of ducks, the cackling 

 of geese, and the louder though rarer cries of the crane and the 

 swan. And especially the night is resonant (if you are "of a nervous 

 temperament" you will say hideous) with the screaming of loons, 

 in its nature somewhere between the shriek of a demented woman 

 and the yowling of cats on a back fence. 



Two characteristic noises of southern lands are absent. There 

 is not the rustle of leaves nor the roar of traffic. Nor is there the 

 beating of waves upon a shore except in summer. But none of these 

 sounds are heard upon the more southerly prairies. The treeless 

 plains of Dakota when I was a boy were far more silent than 

 ever the Arctic has been in my experience. In both places I have 

 heard the whistling of the wind and the howl of wolves and the 

 sharp bark of the fox at night; in both places I have heard the 

 ground crack with the frost of winter like the report of a rifle, al- 

 though these sounds are more characteristic of the Arctic. In the 

 far North not only is the ground continually cracking when the 

 temperature is changing and especially when it is dropping, but 

 near the sea at least there is, not always but on occasion, a con- 

 tinuous and to those in exposed situations a terrifying noise. When 

 the ice is being piled against a polar coast there is a high-pitched 

 screeching as one cake slides over the other, like the thousand-times 



* On the arctic prairies of the mainland there remain for the winter also 

 the muskrat and the grizzly bear. Of the sea life only whales and walruses 

 are known to go south. 



