THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 529 



all about the peculiar red tins. MacMillan was a disciple of 

 Peary's and the boards were chiefly from condensed milk boxes, 

 and condensed milk was one of the four items of the standard 

 Peary ration of pemmican, hard bread, tea, and condensed milk. 

 The only other white men who could have been in this region were 

 Isachsen and Hassel in 1901, and they would not have carried 

 American condensed milk nor American rifles, the empty cartridges 

 of which were scattered all about. The beacon was probably 

 a conspicuous one when MacMillan built it out of substantial- 

 looking chunks of hard earth, and placed probably on top a box 

 into the corner of which a tin can containing his record had been 

 fastened with bent nails. But since then summer had come on, 

 the mud had softened and in part flowed away in the form of a semi- 

 liquid, the heap had collapsed, and the box was half buried in the 

 mud. 



We were much excited over the neatly written record, which is 

 here reproduced as a photograph. It was news — news of that part 

 of the world's activities which interested us most, the activities 

 of our contemporaries in exploration. It was East meeting West for 

 the second time in arctic exploration, the other case being that of 

 McClure and Kellett at Melville and Banks Islands in 1853. 



As I already knew from talking with MacMillan and as this 

 record showed, we were meeting here also a method of exploration 

 different from ours and conducted in a country of different natural 

 conditions and especially different resources. He had three Es- 

 kimos with him and no white men and was depending mainly on his 

 Eskimos to do whatever hunting was necessary, while I had with 

 me white men because I thought them better suited for the work. 

 He had lost eight dogs and still had thirty-nine at his farthest. 

 We had lost one and now had seven. Our one dog had died of dis- 

 ease and so had three of his. But he had been hurrying so much 

 that between hard driving and perhaps short rations three of his 

 dogs had dropped in their harness and had been either killed or 

 left behind to die, while ours had traveled in such easy stages and 

 been fed so well that they were continually fat and had suffered 

 from nothing except occasionally from sore feet. 



Evidently MacMillan had been using the Eskimo method of 

 bear hunting, for two of his dogs had been killed by bears. It 

 was perhaps no credit to us that none of our dogs had been killed 

 by bears, for we had not even seen the tracks of bears until within 

 the past few days. But our method of hunting them is the oppo- 

 site of that of the Eskimos and involves no risk to the dogs. Our 



