THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 337 



much use looking to west or southwest, for that was the district 

 from which we had come. To the south I had already had a good 

 look from the observation spot, so that the new and fruitful fields 

 lay to the northeast and east. In those directions I saw high hills 

 or low mountains rising one behind the other until the farthest 

 ones were blue in the distance. I estimated that these were at least 

 fifty miles away from my mountain to which I gave the name of 

 Leffingwell Crags after Ernest de Koven Lefiingwell now of Pas- 

 adena, California, one of the joint commanders of the first polar 

 expedition of which I was a member — The Leflfingwell-Mikkelsen 

 Expedition of 1906-7. 



To the south I could see camp from the top of the crag although 

 it was so far away that I could not have identified it apart from 

 my knowledge of where it ought to be. The tent, sledges and every- 

 thing together were visible through my powerful binoculars as a 

 mere dark speck. I was able, however, to get an exact compass 

 bearing so as to make a direct course. Towards morning it had 

 frozen a little and I found the walking less bad, and the land was 

 also more level. It was ten minutes before noon when I started 

 for home and I arrived there after seven hours and thirty-five 

 minutes more of steady walking. 



Within a mile of the camp I saw the men beginning to hitch up 

 a dog team attached to a light sled. I knew this meant that they 

 had been beginning to worry about me and had decided to go out 

 for a search. They had first waited supper a long time, then they 

 had gone to bed and slept ten hours, after which they had had 

 breakfast and waited around an hour or two and finally made up 

 their minds that something had to be done. 



One might think that my companions would have had enough 

 experience by now not to worry over my absence for twenty hours 

 in good weather. This was one bit of hunter's wisdom which 

 they had so far refused to absorb, although all of them learned it 

 later. During my second year with the Eskimos I had been with 

 a deer-hunting group in northern Alaska who still kept the ancient 

 custom of beginning the hunt without breakfast. It was etiquette 

 there that the hunters would get up stealthily while everyone else 

 in the house was asleep and start for the hunt without touching food. 

 It was considered effeminate to do otherwise. On a theory which I 

 have found to work invariably, I decided that if this custom was 

 all right for them it would be all right for me, and I found that it 

 took but a few days of practice until I could quite as easily as 

 they make a ten or fifteen-hour hunt without breakfast and come 



