574 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



look can see from the statistics of the last hundred years that 

 unless the growth of population is checked through war or pesti- 

 lence or birth control it will not be long till we need the North for 

 those to live in it who like it, and for the production of that sort 

 of food for the world's consumption to which its natural conditions 

 are adapted. To take but one item: The tens of thousands of 

 wolves that live on caribou do not kill merely enough for them- 

 selves to eat; they leave each carcass after a single gorging to be 

 picked clean by wolverines and foxes, ravens and gulls. With the 

 constant tendency in the tropical and temperate zones to convert 

 cattle and sheep ranges into cereal farms and orchards, it will not 

 be long, if we desire to continue our habit of living in part on 

 meat, before it will be a real world necessity that the vegetation 

 of the North shall be converted into meat that shall be used for food 

 in the centers of population and not for the exclusive delectation 

 of wolves, wolverines, foxes and ravens. 



We talked much of such things as these, not only on our first 

 day at Storkerson's camp but in its comfort and abundance dur- 

 ing the whole winter. And we conceived there plans for con- 

 servation of the food resources of the North which have since 

 been laid before the Canadian Government and which are sure to 

 be carried out because the logic of conditions and events will be 

 irresistible. In the geographic books of seventy-five years ago 

 and less, the Great American Desert covered a large part of the 

 western United States. There are only little desert spots left now, 

 and these are getting smaller under the advance of knowledge and 

 skill in irrigation, dry farming and the like. The "Frozen North" 

 is now large upon our maps, but during the next fifty years most 

 of it will go the way of the Great American Desert, by the same 

 removal of ignorance from men's minds. The more stubborn areas 

 will continue to shrink slowly before an advancing technique of 

 food production and home-building just as the small desert parts 

 of the United States are now shrinking before irrigation and dry 

 farming. 



If any men deserved rest Charlie and Noice did now, not be- 

 cause they were tired, for none of us were that, but because they 

 had been looking forward to a leisure time when they could read 

 a few books and write a bit and in a general way take it easy. 

 This was now impossible. Charlie stayed indoors but only because 

 of his painful finger, while Noice and Lopez had to start next day 

 hauling in the dried meat. At the nearest depot, about eight miles 

 southwest, they found a polar bear in residence. He had evidently 



