352 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



and the men had to keep their hands on the sledges to keep them 

 from upsetting as they floated along behind the teams, buoyed up 

 by empty tin cans kept near the bottoms of the loads for the 

 purpose. 



But the worst thing was the effect upon harness that had now 

 been wet for weeks. We always made an attempt to dry them but 

 our stops were never long enough to provide a fair chance except 

 when we were delayed by rain or snow, and then there was no 

 question of drying. The harness, whether made of cotton webbing 

 or of Indian smoke-tanned moosehide, would stand about two or 

 three weeks of this, after which they became so rotten that they 

 broke whenever the dogs made a particularly heavy pull. That 

 meant that they broke at the most critical times. 



By the 3rd or 4th of July the harness had become so bad as to 

 be almost unusable and we had to devote a day to making new 

 harness out of the raw hides of recently killed seals. These would 

 soon rot under the same conditions and they were exposed to the 

 further danger of being eaten by the dogs, for there are few things 

 more appetizing to a dog than fresh sealskin. In this we prac- 

 tically agree, for if you have time to scald the hair off seals, as is 

 done in butchering pigs, the skin becomes an excellent dish resem- 

 bling pigs' feet. 



Another trouble was that the thaw had now been in progress 

 long enough to convert most of the ice into what is known as 

 "needle ice." Salt water ice so long as it remains salt does not 

 divide into crystals on thawing, but fresh water ice or sea ice that 

 has become fresh settles into crystals resembling hexagon or octagon 

 lead pencils on end and with upward pointed tips sharper than the 

 sharpest leads. Over these men and dogs alike have to walk, but we 

 have the advantage of our feet being protected by boots soled with 

 the hide of the bearded seal, so that one pair of boot soles will stand 

 perhaps a hundred miles of walking over even this sort of ice, 

 although boots shod with the skin of the common seal would not 

 last more than one-fifth that distance. We protect the soles by 

 using patches under the heel and the ball, expecting each patch to 

 last a day or two. In this way we can make two or three pairs of 

 boots do us a season. 



But the poor dogs have none but the natural protection of 

 their feet at first. Four or five days of travel over needle ice will 

 make the soles of their feet raw, and the time would soon come 

 when they could not travel at all if we did not make boots for them. 



