254 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



delectability of the island geese, and the harshness of my rule that 

 no ammunition must be spent on birds. It appears that ever after 

 that Ole's mouth kept watering for the geese he had not tasted. 

 Part of his contentment at being left alone when we went inland 

 had been due, he confessed to Storkerson some months afterwards, 

 to his lively anticipation of eating at least one fat goose while we 

 were gone. Accordingly, we were scarcely out of sight when he got 

 his rifle, sneaked around to a neighboring pond and killed a goose. 

 But geese are small targets and it is not easy to get close to them, 

 so that he wasted half a dozen bullets before he got the first one. 

 Hence the necessity of impressing me, in case I should audit the 

 ammunition account, with the large number of cartridges necessary 

 to kill or scare the wolves that had been enticing our dogs away. 



But what annoyed Ole most was that the goose when he came 

 to eat it did not taste as good as the caribou he had been living 

 on. While still of the firm opinion that caribou meat was "all right 

 if you had nothing else" and that many kinds of meat, such as 

 goose, were better and especially desirable "for a change," he had 

 in reality become so accustomed to caribou in a month, and his 

 tongue if not his mind had been so thoroughly converted to it, that 

 the flavor of goose did not prove half as agreeable. He told Stork- 

 erson that if he had followed his inclination he would have eaten 

 only a part of the goose, giving the rest to any dog that might have 

 wanted it, but he decided to punish himself for the wasted ammu- 

 nition by abstaining from caribou till the goose was eaten. Any 

 ammunition he spent thereafter during our absence was fired at 

 wolves. 



Ole had been studying the tides, partly because of our scientific 

 interest in them and partly because the sea ice that has been land- 

 fast during the winter "goes abroad" only when there is a high tide 

 such that the ice is first lifted off the sea bottom by it and then 

 pushed away from land by the wind. Ole had found that in 

 Banks Island, as on the north coast of Alaska, there is a "low tide" 

 with east winds, and a "high tide" with west winds. But what he 

 had noticed in addition was that here the lowest water was brought 

 about by a north wind. This was well exemplified the day I got 

 home, for it was then blowing stiffly from the north and the water 

 was six inches lower than it had been during our absence or at any 

 time since we began to observe its height by sticks planted at the 

 beach. This was not encouraging, for the winds that might be ex- 

 pected to take the ice off could not easily do so because of the heavy 

 grounding of the ice at low tide, while the high water that lifted it off 



