THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 241 



thousand Eskimos. They made long trips there to get material for 

 knives, arrow points, and the like, certain families making the 

 journey one year and other families another year. 



Banks Island, which is less than 20,000 miles in area, has prob- 

 ably always been, as it is now, a country only moderately supplied 

 with caribou. However that may be, cattle are much easier for 

 Eskimo hunters to kill and the people who made the journeys to the 

 Bay of Mercy undoubtedly lived during the summer largely on their 

 meat. A few, after a hasty visit to Mercy Bay, may have gone to 

 the southwest quarter of the island where geese can be killed by the 

 thousand with clubs during the moulting season. Ovibos is one of 

 the most conspicuous animals on earth and easily found. He has 

 not the cunning for concealment nor the ability, and indeed not 

 the temperament for flight. The Eskimo method of hunting is to 

 sick a few dogs at the herd, which then forms in a defensive circle, 

 the large animals on the outside and the calves and weaker ones 

 in the center. This defense does well against the dogs, as it would 

 against a similar attack of wolves, but is of no avail against the 

 Eskimos, who lash their hunting knives to their walking sticks, 

 converting them into lances, and go up and stab the entire herd. 

 Or they may use their bows and copper-pointed arrows with 

 equal effect. 



When I got the story in the spring of 1911 about the discovery 

 by the Eskimos of McCIure's ship and their pilgrimages for a score 

 of years to the island, I might have inferred the complete or ap- 

 proximate extinction of ovibos. I had not done so, however, and 

 for some time after landing in Banks Island we were expecting daily 

 to come in contact with them. We now know that the giving out 

 of the iron in Mercy Bay must have been about coincident with 

 their extinction. Their survival was longest in the south end of the 

 island because that was most remote from the iron and therefore 

 least visited. That the Eskimos had spent a part of each winter 

 from February to April on the southeast coast does not affect the 

 case materially, for at that season these Eskimos never hunt inland, 

 or at least did not do so up to 1917, though they will doubtless 

 change their habits as soon as the majority of them receive rijfles 

 from the incoming traders. It was not these winter visits, therefore, 

 but the summer ones that led to the extermination of the polar ox. 



