476 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



which a wolf might hope to make a living. There are a few ptar- 

 migan and hares, but neither of these would go far to support a 

 number of wolves. Now and then wolves would in certain islands 

 kill a sick ovibos that had been separated from the herd, and occa- 

 sionally a newborn calf when the mother was not watching. We 

 have even seen a seal killed by a wolf. But all these sources of 

 food put together would never sustain a permanent wolf popula- 

 tion. When the wolves die from hunger the surviving caribou in 

 turn have a chance to become more numerous, flourishing tempo- 

 rarily among surroundings congenial to them until a second influx 

 of wolves brings their number down again. 



I have not space to go into all the evidence upon which these 

 conclusions are based, but will mention that we found a striking 

 difference between our New Land at the time of discovery, when 

 caribou traces were more numerous than we have seen them almost 

 anywhere in the Arctic, and that same land in the fall of 1916 

 when the wolves appeared to be as numerous as the caribou and 

 the caribou not one-tenth as numerous as a year and a half before. 

 In May, 1916, a period intermediate between the plenty of 1915 

 and the scarcity of the autumn of 1916, we found an intermediate 

 condition as to the number of caribou. This one example would 

 not prove the hypothesis of ebb and flow in caribou population, 

 but it is one of the bits of evidence upon which that theory has 

 been adopted. 



At Castel Bay, which I named after its discoverer, we found 

 game especially abundant, with caribou tracks everywhere and bear 

 tracks on the beach. We hunted inland one day to verify what I 

 felt certain of, that this was the mouth of the great river which our 

 party had been unable to ford on leaving Mercy Bay the previous 

 summer and which we had been compelled to follow inland some 

 sixty miles. We had seen from Mercy Bay the open water caused 

 by the entrance of this river into the sea, so we had in that sense 

 really discovered the river mouth in 1915. Although not as wide 

 as Mercy Bay, Castel Bay is a conspicuous landmark that can be 

 seen from the hills of Melville Island. It has the general appear- 

 ance of a fjord with high land on both sides and conspicuous cliffs 

 at either side of its mouth. 



When we found that Mercy Bay was no more than six miles 

 from Castel Bay it became the more astounding that the second 

 bay should not have previously been on the maps. Surely some one 

 from the Investigator must nearly every fine day have walked to 

 the top of the land to the west of winter quarters where he could 



