108 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



broken up to build the house in which Leffingwell, one of the joint 

 commanders, afterward hved for many years and where he had 

 recently entertained us so hospitably. 



Storkerson was traveling alone. His family was living in the 

 forested section about half-way up the Mackenzie delta, where he 

 had left them to make the round journey of about five hundred miles 

 to Captain Andreasen's trading establishment near the Interna- 

 tional Boundary. He was now on his way back home from what 

 had been a hard trip, for he had lost some of his dogs by disease 

 and had been compelled to harness himself to the sled to help the 

 remaining animals haul the heavy load. From the first it had been 

 my intention to try to engage Storkerson, who was about the best 

 "all around" man it was possible for the expedition to get. P 

 now found he had not been very prosperous in his trapping and 

 had been spending his money quite as fast as he made it, so that 

 he was glad to give up trapping for a while and join forces with us. 

 There was enough of the poet about Storkerson so that he could see 

 as well the romantic side of the search for undiscovered lands, and 

 of such forays into the unknown. 



On the way up the delta I found that for purposes of negotiat- 

 ing with various residents I had to travel rather more slowly than 

 the police, and they preceded us to Fort Macpherson. About half- 

 way up, in the same neighborhood in which Storkerson lived, were 

 two white men, Peder Pedersen and Willoughby Mason, with whom 

 I spent several days. They were on a diet restricted by the cir- 

 cumstances of the entire neighborhood. 



It seems that the previous summer most of the Eskimos had 

 made journeys either to Herschel Island to meet the traders, or 

 to Fort Macpherson to meet the missionaries, during the time 

 when they should have been fishing. When they returned to their 

 fishing places the "run" for the year was largely over, and as a 

 result nearly everybody in the delta was short of fish and on the 

 verge of starvation. Fish are hard to catch in the delta in mid- 

 winter, and it was a very bad rabbit year. Moose are uncommon and 

 caribou usually absent. There was no danger of anybody actually 

 dying of hunger but there was more than a possibility that some 

 of the dogs might starve. Mason had come down the Mackenzie 

 a few years before as a member of a party of prospectors who had 

 with them two horses and carried a large quantity of corn for 

 horse feed. The first year they had made hay for the horses with 

 scythes (this was about two hundred miles north of the arctic 

 circle, by the way) and had fed them during the winter on hay 



