262 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



would be no deep bays or hindrances to travel, but we lost so much 

 time this way that later we traveled on an average five miles away 

 from the coast. Even then we would come occasionally to what we 

 expected to be a creek, and which had all the winding characteristics 

 of a creek, but was an arm of the sea reaching in some cases six 

 or eight miles inland. 



About half-way to Cape Kellett I had a curious experience with 

 a band of caribou. Each of several times I got near them they were 

 unaccountably scared away. This puzzled me, when the explana- 

 tion appeared in a polar bear. I don't know exactly what he was 

 doing. Part of the time he was probably following me, part of 

 the time he may have been preparing to hunt caribou on his own 

 account, and eventually he was fleeing from me after having got 

 my wind. But in each case he succeeded equally in scaring the 

 caribou. When I finally noticed the bear I tried to get him, but 

 he was aware of me and made off without stopping. The caribou 

 that time ran into my companions and the dogs, which excited the 

 dogs to loud barking and scared them again. To make matters 

 worse, Storkerson did not realize that I was following the caribou 

 and started following them on his own account, which scared them 

 once more. There was nothing to do now they were so thoroughly 

 frightened but to wait for hours until they had not only run a 

 distance of several miles but had had time to quiet down and 

 more or less forget. 



They finally stopped on some rather flat land, and approaching 

 them was a tedious matter, entailing a great deal of crawling and a 

 great deal of waiting in strategic positions for them either to move 

 closer to me or else to move over a hill so that I could resume my 

 devious approach, for this was the last day of our dried meat and 

 we had to get something to eat. I eventually shot four, after hav- 

 ing used up nearly a whole day. This was more meat than we 

 needed, but game had been so scarce on the way south that I 

 thought it best to kill enough for a depot for the return journey. 

 So we dug a hole in the ground, lined it with stones as usual, and 

 filled it with meat that had first been properly chilled. 



Part of the land traversed in the last several days had been 

 sandy, and "heather" does not grow well on sandy soil, or rather, 

 what grows there does not burn well. But it is one of the compen- 

 sations of the Arctic that the same sandy soil that makes the 

 heather unsuited for fuel seems especially adapted to a certain kind 

 of willow, the dead and bleaching roots of which we always found 



