THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 291 



so are the "long bones" of all four legs, and the lot are put away. 

 These are the data of the closet naturalist who studies the speci- 

 mens and the accompanying information after the expedition gets 

 home. 



I have never known any one who worked harder than Wilkins. 

 He would be cleaning the scraps of meat off the leg bones of a 

 wolf before breakfast and scraping the fat from a bearskin up to 

 bedtime at night. His diaries were filled with information about 

 the specimens he gathered, his fingers were stained with the pho- 

 tographic chemicals used in the development of his innumerable 

 plates and films, his mind was always alert and his response al- 

 ways cheerful when a new task was proposed. A half dozen such 

 men would make an invincible polar expedition. 



Everybody remaining at the home base was working so well 

 that it seems almost invidious to single out Wilkins. Crawford, 

 Ole Andreasen, and Storkerson were at their trapping camps five, 

 fifteen and twenty-five miles away, catching each his hundred or 

 two hundred foxes, the pelts of which grow more expensive each 

 year as women's need for summer furs increases. These three 

 men were working for the expedition only half the year and so 

 had time to grow rich during the winter. The men at the base 

 camp were trapping foxes also in their spare moments, but many 

 pelts went to Wilkins to become zoological specimens and the rest 

 to the expedition storekeeper, for all these men were on full pay 

 and everything they secured belonged to the Government. But 

 most of their time was spent in work preparing for the ice trip. 



Mrs. Thomsen at home and Mrs. Storkerson at the trapping 

 camp were busy making or mending skin clothing. Thomsen hunted 

 seals for dog feed part of the time and foraged around Kellett 

 with his team in search of driftwood. Levi did the cooking, in 

 addition to slicing and drying bear and caribou meat to make it 

 more portable as sledge provisions, and, most important of all, 

 kept everybody in good spirits with his inexhaustible good nature 

 and his everlasting tales, some of which were probably truer than 

 they sounded, though the adherence to truth was never slavish 

 enough to make them commonplace. Captain Bernard, a won- 

 derful carpenter, blacksmith and mechanic in all lines, worked 

 as early as Wilkins and as late repairing or making sledges. His 

 ingenuity and industry were beyond price, for we had no good 

 sledge except the one used in coming to Banks Island over the ice 

 the previous spring. Neither did we have any really suitable 

 material for making a new sled, but by plundering the Sachs of a 



