182 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



out food, but I have seen half-breed St. Bernards who would pull, 

 perhaps not with the same strength, for that would be impossible, 

 but with the same willingness day after day while their strength 

 lasted. In our last five years' work we never lost a dog from 

 hunger, and some of our dogs were never without food long enough 

 to affect their willingness to work. The Eskimo dogs that had to 

 meet the trial proved mostly quitters and needed a whip the 

 second foodless day. 



The Eskimo dog has one advantage in the soundness of his 

 feet, and another in his good fur. Certain kinds of white men's 

 dogs have even better fur, but I know none that have feet as sound, 

 or at least as little affected by adverse polar conditions. It is in 

 this soundness of the feet that half Eskimo blood gives the chief 

 advantage above the pure bred St. Bernard, whose fur also needs 

 improvement. 



One of the most spectacular ice crushes of our experience hap- 

 pened in our path on April 18th. A floe to the north was moving 

 east with reference to ours at the rate of about twenty feet per 

 minute. There was such force behind the two floes that although 

 the ice was over six feet thick, their relative speed seemed undimin- 

 ished even by their grinding against each other with a force that 

 piled up a huge ridge. The ice buckled and bent for several hun- 

 dred yards, but the ridge was on one side of us, and we were con- 

 veniently able to retreat. The toppling ice cakes sounded at half a 

 mile like a cannonade heard over a stormy surf on a rockbound 

 coast. The surf-like noise was the actual grinding of the edges 

 where the ice was being powdered rather than broken. There was, 

 too, a high-pitched screeching, like the noise of a siren, when a 

 tongue of six-foot ice from one floe was forced over the surface 

 of the other. The pressure ceased in about two hours, when we 

 crossed the newly-formed ridge and proceeded on our way. 



All this time we had been traveling in a direction a little west 

 of north. But frequent observations for longitude showed that 

 our course was a little east of north, which had to be accounted 

 for by the eastward motion of the whole surface of the sea. By the 

 20th we were entering a region of less and less game. We saw 

 only about one polar bear track every twenty miles, and these 

 tracks were mostly a month or two old. The scars on the ice show- 

 ing the presence of seals the previous autumn became fewer, and 

 we never saw any seals in the leads, although we occasionally 



