86 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



The hope haphazardly to find again a trail which you have long 

 ago lost may show merely a sanguine temperament, but I think 

 McConnell was right in interpreting it to mean that Angutitsiak 

 thought chopping whale meat for dog-feed would be pretty hard 

 work. 



The next day I sent McConnell and Angutitsiak again to look 

 for the whale, never dreaming that they might not find it, and went 

 out for a walk in another direction. On the way home I struck 

 for the place where I thought the whale would be and found it, with 

 plenty of evidence of Eskimos having been there to get meat several 

 weeks before. I also found a white fox dead in a trap, but I saw 

 no trace of McConnell and the Eskimo. On coming home in the 

 evening I found that they had miraculously missed that whale a 

 second time. This amused me almost as much as it annoyed. But 

 two days seemed enough time to lose, so we proceeded next morning 

 towards Collinson Point, feeling fairly certain that we would fall 

 in with Eskimos who could give us dog-feed. This proved to be 

 correct, and the Eskimos also gave us news of interest. Natkusiak, 

 I learned, had gone east to Collinson Point to pay a visit to our 

 ships there, but a pile of seal and whale meat belonging to him had 

 been cached in the neighborhood of my informant's house. The 

 next day we picked up all we needed from this cache and proceeded 

 to Flaxman Island. 



Here we found Leffingwell in the house which had been built in 

 1907 from the wreck of the Duchess of Bedford. He had already 

 spent several winters there, although he had made two visits to his 

 parents in California, passing each time a winter in the south. The 

 house had been added to and was rather palatial for those latitudes. 

 He had an extensive library in several languages, one of his rooms 

 was furnished with a roll-top desk, and altogether the equipment 

 ranged from the sumptuous almost to the effete. 



But I must make clear immediately that while the outfit was 

 elaborate it was in the main a relic of the times when he had been 

 a tenderfoot and his tastes had not yet been turned towards sim- 

 plicity by his experience in the North. The first year he was there 

 he had "lived well," as the saying goes. He had no end of variety 

 of jams and marmalades, and cereals and food of all sorts. At the 

 end of the year he complained on arrival in San Francisco (or at 

 least the reporters quoted him so) that he had had a very hard time. 

 He had been several weeks without butter and so many more weeks 

 without something else. How his tastes had altered in the seven 

 years since then was best shown when McConnell volunteered to 



