506 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



mitted to wintering on Melville Island the next year whether the 

 Bear got there or not, but it now appeared to me that we could do 

 much better than that. We could divide our party, the larger num- 

 ber wintering in Melville Island and a few of us spending the 

 winter at Cape James Murray. I talked this over with Natkusiak 

 and found him enthusiastic for the plan, provided we could get 

 the right people to be with us. I thought that Charlie and Noice 

 would be ideal and Natkusiak's opinion was that Alingnak's fam- 

 ily would be a suitable addition. 



A special letter of instructions to Storkerson covered this plan. 

 Immediately on the arrival of Castel's party in Liddon Gulf, Stor- 

 kerson was to fit out Natkusiak and Alingnak's family with one 

 or two sleds and they were to proceed by way of Cape Grassy to 

 Cape James Murray, where my party would join them probably 

 in September or October although we might make an effort to get 

 there in late July. I expected that making a living at Cape Mur- 

 ray would be a good deal more difficult than in Melville Island, 

 although I had little doubt that we could do it. Nevertheless, the 

 plan was to have only a few dogs with us there during the winter, 

 Storkerson keeping the greater number in Melville Island where 

 the ovibos makes life simple. Being long past the idea that travel- 

 ing in the darkness of winter is impossible we planned that sledge 

 parties should be on the road all winter between Melville Island 

 and Cape Murray, thus giving a base for the spring work four 

 hundred miles north of Kellett. But while traveling in darkness is 

 feasible hunting is not, and the intention was to accumulate at Mur- 

 ray by freighting from Melville Island dried ovibos meat and fat 

 so that we could start thence with loaded sledges northward in 

 the spring before the arrival of hunting light, these provisions tak- 

 ing us through the first month or six weeks and into the period of 

 abundant daylight. 



My thoughts centered around this during the whole summer. It 

 was one of the most fascinating undertakings we have ever planned 

 because so different from anything that has been tried in the 

 remote Arctic. The only analogy was John Rae's wintering in 

 Repulse Bay on the mainland 600 miles farther south. 



Before Castel started back we took several sets of observations 

 at Cape Isachsen and were considerably disturbed to find that the 

 observations placed us farther east than Cape Isachsen is on the 

 map. At that time we supposed that our watches must be wrong, 

 thinking that Cape Isachsen must surely have been correctly lo- 



