THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 503 



Whatever they smell or hear or whatever they see, they instantly 

 act on the presumption that a bear is the cause. From this it re- 

 sults that men who have been successful sealers on Norwegian or 

 Newfoundland ships have later as members of polar expeditions 

 been unable to get a single seal during the spring when they bask 

 on the ice, except such as happen to be lying in the vicinity of 

 rough ice so that the hunter could sneak up behind cover and fire 

 from ambush. 



Luck turned after a few days and Natkusiak and Emiu got 

 several seals. By that time the dogs had been thoroughly rested. 

 We had never stinted their food, feeling certain that we should 

 eventually get plenty. When we had three or four hundred pounds 

 of meat and blubber to take with us, the dogs were in such good 

 condition and excellent spirits that we were able to make great speed 

 towards Cape Isachsen, where we arrived the last day of May. 



On the way from the northwest corner of our new land to Cape 

 Isachsen we had been crossing the mouth of a strait. We carried 

 a line of soundings and found the greatest depth to be four hun- 

 dred and fifty meters, with strong currents to the northwest and 

 southeast, apparently tide currents. 



The sandbar where we camped we thought was sure to be 

 Cape Isachsen, yet we began to doubt it next day when in clear 

 weather we found no trace of Castel's party. We supposed that 

 he would have been here four or five days before. His instruc- 

 tions had been to erect a conspicuous monument, and the land 

 was so flat that no such monument could possibly conceal itself. 

 We did not have long to worry, however, for, greatly to our sur- 

 prise, I saw through my glasses towards evening some black specks 

 on the ice eight or ten miles south. We put up a flag on an ice 

 cake thirty or forty feet high to guide them to us. But apparently 

 Castel was as sure of our being behind him as we had been 

 of his being ahead, so that he failed to look around with his glasses 

 and did not see our flag. To use field glasses carefully every 

 hour or two for ten or fifteen minutes is one of the most difficult 

 practices to teach white men and is one in which most Alaskan 

 Eskimos are greatly superior. During the thirty or forty years 

 since they first got telescopes and field glasses they have learned 

 in their hunting to depend upon them so exclusively that there 

 are few animals seen with the bare eyes that have not been pre- 

 viously discovered with the glasses. In spite of all we could do by 

 climbing up and down over the hummocks and waving our coats, 

 Castel pitched camp three or four miles away, oblivious of our near- 



