354 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



on an incline, and the blood from the wound gets under him (as 

 previously explained) and acts like a lubricant, tending to make him 

 slide forward into the water. 



On July 3rd we saw a thing unique in the experience of all of us 

 — a seal that had been killed by a wolf. We saw the wolf eating 

 something on the ice about half a mile from our course and I went 

 over to see what it was. With usual intelligence, this wolf made 

 off while I was more than a quarter of a mile away. From the po- 

 sition of the seal's body and from the marks on the ice the wolf 

 had caught him sleeping near his hole and had dragged him about 

 fifteen yards. He had then killed him by biting him repeatedly in 

 the throat, whereupon he had commenced eating. I have heard 

 trappers on the mainland say that seal's blubber is poor bait for 

 wolves and that they will not eat it. Possibly this is another of the 

 common superstitions, for all this wolf had eaten was blubber. He 

 had commenced on the back of the seal a little forward from the tail 

 and had eaten about a square foot, perhaps six or eight pounds, of 

 the fat but none of the lean except for the skin that was attached 

 to the blubber. 



This recalls the food habits of the polar bears. Apparently they 

 do not keep in close touch with the trend of modern dietetics, for 

 they do not seem aware of the necessity for variety in their food. 

 Or it is possible that they are overimpressed with the views of cer- 

 tain dietitians and are afraid of an excess of protein. However that 

 may be, they seem to confine themselves to fat when they can. I 

 have seen the evidence of a polar bear eating nearly a whole seal — 

 meat, bones, blubber and all — but these have been small seals and 

 the bear must have been hungry. The ordinary thing, so far as my 

 experience goes, is that if a bear kills a good-sized seal he goes about 

 it just like our wolf, only a good deal more rapidly, and he strips 

 the entire carcass, or nearly the whole of it, of fat and then goes off, 

 leaving the meat and blood for the foxes. 



This practice of bears has led to the belief among Eskimos that 

 a bear has the ability to strip the blubber off a seal along with the 

 skin in the manner in which an Eskimo skins a fox. It is an opera- 

 tion for which English has no good descriptive term unless we bor- 

 row it from the furriers, who call it "to case" a skin. It is as if you 

 were to remove a stocking by turning the upper -part back on itself 

 without first pushing it down towards the ankle, and then pulling it 

 off in such a way that the stocking is turned entirely inside out. 



Those who are familiar with the well-known "fact" (and who of 

 us is not?) that more fat is needed in the diet where the weather is 



