502 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



I stepped. I examined my trail the next day and found that 

 scrutiny of the snow would have warned me that I was about 

 to step on the roof of a crevasse. 



I was black and blue in spots, for glare ice is no cushion, and 

 the next day I enjoyed less than ever the jolting of the sled as I 

 was hauled along. The fall proper did not apparently hurt my 

 ankle, but the sprain received in walking home set its recovery 

 back at least two weeks. 



The hunting continued bad, not through any real scarcity of 

 seals, but because of the thick weather that prevented them from 

 basking on the ice, and because of wind conditions that pressed 

 the loose ice in so that sealing in open water could rarely be carried 

 out. On such occasions I have envied the explorers who have oper- 

 ated farther east. Sverdrup, for instance, three or four hundred 

 miles east of us kept running into polar bears, but along the floe 

 edge between latitudes 76 and 80 we never saw even a single track 

 in two years. His lands were inhabited by ovibos, the most con- 

 spicuous of all animals and nearly the only one that does not try 

 to flee from the hunter, while ours had only caribou, so continually 

 on their guard against wolves that only men of experience could be 

 expected to get many of them. Sverdrup also found walrus. As 

 to the presence of bears, ovibos and walrus the experience of all 

 explorers to the east has been much the same, and I have learned 

 since that our contemporary, MacMillan, was finding an abundance 

 of polar bears and ovibos at this very time. We had to make our 

 living from the elusive seal, which is on the whole the most difficult 

 of all north polar animals to get. I don't think there were more 

 than one or two seals secured by all the British polar explorers that 

 searched for Sir John Franklin in the region southeast of us, although 

 the diaries of several commanders as published in the Parliamen- 

 tary Blue Books show that attempts were made to get them. 



As previously observed the ease of catching seals is taken for 

 granted by those who in recent years have read narratives of the 

 Antarctic. The implements needed for the butchery are a hammer 

 to stun the animal and a knife to cut its throat. It is also well 

 known that schooners go out from Newfoundland and Norway and 

 kill seals by the ten thousand. The explanation here is again 

 largely the same as in the Antarctic ; the seal has no "natural ene- 

 mies" and is therefore largely devoid of fear in the regions where 

 the commercial sealing is done. 



But in the Arctic the seals that bask on the ice or swim in the 

 water have to be continually on the alert against the polar bear. 



