THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 253 



After cutting up my caribou and — with the gulls in mind — 

 hiding the fat underneath the meat, I proceeded to the coast. Ole 

 was waiting, happy as always and full of stories of his adventures 

 while I had been gone. Most of these, as he told them, centered 

 around wolves. It seemed that a pair of them, peculiarly sportive 

 and mischievous, had been in the habit of coming near camp and 

 getting the dogs excited, with a view of enticing them away. One 

 day the dogs succeeded in breaking loose at both ends the long line 

 by which all were tethered to two sticks. Dragging this line they 

 gave chase to the wolves, Ole following. They were impeded by 

 the weight of the rope and by getting tangled in it so that he was 

 almost able to keep up. He fired several shots at the wolves, that 

 tantalizingly were keeping just ahead of the dogs. This did not 

 scare them. Of course he had little chance of hitting them, for he 

 was out of breath. After a chase of several miles the dogs got 

 finally so tangled in the line that Ole caught up with them. 



A year later I discovered that while this story was literally 

 true, it had been told me with added emphasis and detail to appease 

 any suspicions on the score of Ole's considerable expenditure of 

 ammunition while I was away. Early in July we had taken an 

 ammunition inventory, finding that we had 109 rounds for the 

 Mannlicher and 157 for the Winchester rifle. This was not a great 

 deal even with the most careful shooting, for there was no guaran- 

 tee that any of our ships would get to us during the summer, in 

 which case this ammunition had to secure food for us for all of 

 the coming winter and would have to take us east across Banks 

 Island and across Prince of Wales Straits, then south along Victoria 

 Island, across Dolphin and Union Straits to the mainland and 

 across several hundred miles of mainland, probably to Bear Lake 

 and to the Hudson's Bay Company's post at Fort Norman on the 

 Mackenzie River. When we are stationary it is possible to aver- 

 age better than 125 pounds of meat to each cartridge, but in making 

 rapid journeys it is not possible to be so economical, for when a 

 heavy animal is killed only a part of the meat can be hauled along, 

 causing a good deal of waste and bringing down the average meat 

 equivalent of the ammunition. So Ole knew I put a high value on 

 the ammunition; nor could his own estimate of its value have dif- 

 fered much from mine, for he saw equally our dependence on it for 

 comfort and safety. 



Now I have mentioned that the day we landed, while I was away 

 getting the first caribou killed, Storkerson and Ole had eaten the 

 last of the food we brought ashore and had discussed the probable 



