THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 486 



with the rifle cocked till the animal was three or four yards away. 

 His mouth was open and Hadley stuck the rifle almost into it as he 

 pulled the trigger. But there was no report. The rifle had been 

 empty. 



There was time only to turn the rifle crosswise as the bear 

 came down upon him. The animal's mouth closed upon the stock 

 of the rifle and the canines went through Hadley 's hand and nearly 

 through the rifle stock, when the bear surprisingly merely gave 

 one shake that tumbled Hadley in a heap on the ground, let go 

 and started off again. He was followed and killed by the Captain 

 and two or three others, while Hadley went back to the house to 

 dress his hand. The wound looked bad at first and it w^vS thought 

 that bones were broken but this did not prove to be the case. The 

 hand had apparently been grasping the small of the stock. On 

 one side the lower canine went between two fingers and on the 

 other between the phalanges, piercing the flesh without breaking 

 the bone. The wound eventually healed with a scarcely perceptible 

 scar. 



Herman told me also that Storkerson had been trying to make 

 use of our pemmican both for man and dog food and had found 

 the same trouble with it that had been so serious for the Karluk 

 party. We had two varieties of pemmican, designated as "man" 

 and "dog" pemmican. The man pemmican contained some raisins 

 and probably some cereal with lean meat and a little fat, and 

 was not bad food if one had something else with it. But the dog 

 pemmican seemed to be practically nothing but lean meat and salt. 

 It was so salty that when two pounds of it were mixed with two 

 pounds of hard bread and two pounds of unseasoned ovibos meat, 

 the mixture cooked was as salty as any of our sailors could stand, 

 and sailors are proverbially fond of salt. There was so little fat in 

 it, too, that when four pounds of pemmican were boiled in a pot 

 ten inches in diameter the fat that came to the surface was not 

 sufficient to make a film over the water but merely scattered 

 globules. If the dogs were fed on pemmican alone, getting a pound 

 a day (the "standard ration" of Peary), they showed all the symp- 

 toms of starvation and were in addition diflacult to drive because 

 excessive thirst caused them to lag in the harness while picking up 

 mouthfuls of snow. If more than a pound was fed the dogs be- 

 came violently ill. They had been able to use the pemmican for 

 the dogs only by feeding a little of it with fresh ovibos or caribou 



