THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 541 



ing after having followed the shore lead for half a mile. From a 

 high hill caribou could be seen on the middle and smallest island, 

 so I crossed over and shot seven out of nine fat bulls. 



Obviously seven fat caribou was much more than we could 

 carry. The reason for killing them was that on account of the 

 deep water on top of the ice it was now almost impossible to get 

 seals, and the ice itself had been moving and cracking in various 

 directions during the last few days, so that I was afraid that the 

 complete summer break-up might come any day, possibly marooning 

 us on one of these small islands. I was so much worried by this 

 instability of the ice that I should have gone ashore and made a 

 summer camp on the largest of the three islands had I not seen 

 from the top of it a still larger one to the northwest. We loaded 

 seven or eight hundred pounds of boneless meat and fat on the 

 sled and proceeded towards this new land. We knew it was a 

 risky proceeding for, although the sled was strong enough to stand 

 almost any kind of load in ordinary winter going, no sled could 

 stand indefinitely the repeated shocks of diving off one ice island 

 into the next, coming up each time with a shock like the blow 

 of a thousand-pound hammer. 



Our landing-place should have been the nearest point so far as 

 the safety of the sled was concerned, but we would have to live 

 during the summer on caribou and I was reluctant to camp near a 

 promontory from which land game would have to be sought at a 

 considerable distance. We accordingly tried to follow the coast 

 northwestward and did so for two or three miles. It was an espe- 

 cially heavy shock that finally broke the hickory fender on the 

 front end of the sled, which decided us to go ashore and call sledge 

 travel for that season ended. We found no place where we could 

 land except by water. Having this year no tarpaulin intended to 

 convert the sled into a boat and relying instead on sealskins, we 

 inflated these each into an air bladder having a buoyancy of two 

 or three hundred pounds. Four of them lashed to the sled con- 

 verted it into a raft. It took the men several hours to inflate 

 the sealskins and make the landing, and I got ashore meanwhile 

 over some ice that was far too rough for the sledge to negotiate 

 and went in search of caribou. We had seen six with our glasses 

 the day before and I had them skinned and cut up by the time 

 camp was well pitched. This was on August 9th. 



We now had leisure to take good astronomical observations 

 and to make up our minds as to how to reconcile these lands as we 

 found them with the observations of Osborn. The first island was 



