134 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



reached, it would have by then lasted long enough to serve all 

 our purposes. We were going to start from that edge of the ice 

 from which the drift is assumed by Nansen and others to be north- 

 westward or northerly; we should assuredly have with us as fellow 

 travelers all these docile animals that allow the currents to carry 

 them where they please. 



It was thus I reasoned that the animals upon which seals live 

 will be found everywhere under the ice of the polar sea. And 

 if the feed is there, the seals will follow the feed. We can travel 

 along with confidence, killing seals as we need them, using the lean 

 and part of the fat for food and the rest of the fat for fuel. For 

 a seal that weighs two hundred pounds will give something like 

 eighty pounds of meat and bones, twenty or thirty pounds of waste 

 and nearly a hundred pounds of blubber. When you have killed 

 enough seals to furnish you with the lean meat needed for men and 

 dogs and when the men and dogs have eaten all the seal's fat they 

 care for, there will be left over blubber for fuel to be used extrava- 

 gantly, with still a remainder to be thrown away. 



Does it seem that even if the seals were there we might not 

 be able to get them? I am glad to say that none of the members 

 of our expedition raised that point very seriously. Both Storkerson 

 and I had lived for many years with Eskimos. They remembered 

 that we knew every trick there is of detecting and securing seals 

 and, further, that these tricks are easily acquired. It is true, al- 

 though puzzling, that it is possible to live in close contact with 

 people who are doing certain things and still to keep the mental 

 attitude that we ourselves undoubtedly could never learn to do 

 them. The feeling is familiar not only to men who hire Indian 

 guides to take them miraculously through the wilderness, but to 

 those who own cars or hire taxis and yet feel that their driving 

 and repair are things in which they could never become adept. 

 But none of our men supposed Storkerson or me to belong, so far 

 as seal hunting went, to the class of those who own cars and can- 

 not drive them. 



At this point it was common for my auditors to say something 

 to the effect that, while this reasoning sounded all right in a warm 

 room, they did not think they cared to risk their lives upon it. 

 Rather than an argument ever so sound, they preferred the evidence 

 of eye witnesses, such as Nansen and Peary, who had been there 

 and come back with testimony of the absence of seals. It was 

 unreasonable to assume that all polar travelers before our time 



