172 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



or more years old. Seals are seldom found under ice more than a 

 year old. Of this year's ice much has been crushed into ridges 

 where no seal can live, but here and there are level patches, partly 

 covered with snow, but with the surface visible in rare spots where 

 the wind has blown the snow away. If in a day's journey you keep 

 your eyes carefully on every patch you pass, you will, if there are 

 seals in the region, see now and then a scar on the ice. The previ- 

 ous autumn when this young ice first formed and while it was still 

 mushy, a seal has shoved its head up through to breathe. In doing 

 this he has made not only a hole six to ten inches in diameter, but 

 has come up so suddenly that he has scattered fragments of two 

 or three-inch ice for a foot or two around the hole. Months after- 

 wards the outlines of the hole can still be faintly seen, but more 

 easily discernible are the little pieces of ice in an irregular circle 

 around it. 



Food was still in our sled and our main concern was speed. We 

 never had much time to stop at a lead to watch for seals, and when 

 we did stop we never saw any. But every day or two we saw one 

 or more of these scars in the ice, showing that the seals had been 

 there the previous September or October, and if seals were there in 

 September we felt certain they would still be there in April. And so 

 we pushed ahead with increased confidence in a theory the logic of 

 which had seemed to me conclusive from the beginning. 



On April 15, 1914, I built the first snowhouse I ever tried to 

 build myself, although as far back as 1907 I described in Harper's 

 Magazine just how it could and should be done. A midwinter jour- 

 ney through the Mackenzie delta (1906-7) had provided opportu- 

 nity for me to see and assist for the first time at the building of a 

 snowhouse. The assistance happened to be confined to carrying the 

 blocks from where they had been cut to where the house was being 

 built, but I was free to observe and analyze every process that went 

 to the making of the finished house. The principles appeared so 

 simple that, in spite of having read in various arctic books that 

 their construction is a racial gift with the Eskimos and a mystery in- 

 soluble to white men, I never from that moment had any doubt 

 that I could build a snowhouse whenever I should want to. On my 

 expedition of 1908-12 we often used snowhouses but only in the 

 Coronation Gulf district, where they were always built for us by 

 the hospitable Copper Eskimos, who never allowed a visitor at 

 their own camps to lift a hand to the building of his own house. 



Apart from that one year my companions on my second expe- 

 dition had been exclusively Alaskan Eskimos. These people had 



