290 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



made themselves conspicuous now and then by standing on their 

 hind legs, which brought their profiles against the sky. My first 

 two shots brought down one big bear and a small one, but the 

 third inflicted apparently only a flesh wound and the bear that 

 received it disappeared in the rough ice. 



Natkusiak, about half a mile away, heard the shooting and soon 

 arrived. We skinned the two bears, and, making a sort of sledge 

 of the skin of the small one, loaded into it its own meat and 

 dragged it home, allowing the meat of the other and the seal to 

 take its chances. These bears came just in time, for we had but 

 a single meal left of the seal killed three days before. The fol- 

 lowing day we found where we had left them the other bear and 

 the seal, although the ice, which was crushing in the neighborhood, 

 might easily have buried them during the night. 



One of the most serious losses when the Karluk sank will be 

 recalled as that of our small kerosene-containers intended for 

 sledge journeys, which had been substantially made of galvan- 

 ized iron. As kerosene is much more convenient than blubber 

 for cooking in snowhouses in winter, we were carrying a supply 

 of it in an ordinary five-gallon tin such as is furnished by the 

 oil companies, and now found that it had sprung a leak and that 

 nearly all the kerosene was gone. This mischance, together with 

 the too rapid passing of the midwinter period, decided me to give 

 up for that year the search for Eskimos and to return to the winter 

 base at Kellett. We made the return with such good luck in 

 weather for picking a trail through valleys where earlier we had 

 floundered up and down ridges, that we were able to travel in one 

 day as much as forty-five miles, a distance that had taken seven 

 days on the way east. 



When we got back to Kellett we found that Wilkins had com- 

 pleted a series of tidal observations. But both during this period 

 and through most of his time with the expedition he put much 

 labor and care into the gathering and preparing of zoological 

 specimens. This is, for any one who lacks the scientist's enthusi- 

 asm, a sort of work where the fun soon wears off. The animal, say 

 a fox, is first measured as to several dimensions in a routine way. 

 Next the skin is carefully removed and hung up to dry, salted 

 or "poisoned" with arsenic and alum or some similar chemical, 

 and a label attached giving all available information as to age, 

 sex, size, date and place of killing, etc. The skull, after being 

 cleaned and having the brain removed through the foramen magnum 

 in a tedious way, is labelled correspondingly with the skin, and 



