THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 619 



The men made such rapid recovery as to surprise me. When 

 Emiu and I had been away two or three days and had secured the 

 first lot of really excellent marrow bones, I sent him back with 

 these and received a joint letter from Noice and Knight saying 

 that they were now well enough to travel. Three or four days 

 had eliminated one of the chief symptoms of scurvy, for they were 

 now as cheerful as they had been gloomy. Their willingness to 

 travel was, however, no more than an indication of a frame of 

 mind, for I knew they would not for something like two weeks 

 have the strength to walk ten miles a day. And so it proved, for 

 when we started May 27th and made a ten-mile day, we could do 

 so only by their riding alternately, each being able to walk about 

 five miles. As we proceeded south their strength increased and in 

 a week they did not need to ride at all. A month from our killing 

 of the twenty-three caribou they were in perfect health with no 

 sign of the disease left, except that their gums which had receded 

 badly from the teeth had failed to regain the normal position. 



Our course was direct for the northwest corner of Lougheed 

 Island. We could travel with little meat and keep the sledges 

 light for the convalescents, for the abundance of Lougheed Island 

 had been revealed. The going was generally through fog, the sky 

 was thinly clouded, and the light although diffused was of excep- 

 tional and continued brightness, so that we were delayed by snow- 

 blindness. We reached Lougheed Island the last day of May and 

 that day had the first trouble of the year with water on the ice. 

 For the present this was confined to the vicinity of land. Lougheed 

 Island was already more than half bare of snow, although the thaw 

 had not commenced on the uniform whiteness of the sea ice. 



We feared, as it proved wrongly, that the sealing might not be 

 good between Lougheed Island and Melville Island nor the hunt- 

 ing on the northeastern peninsula of Melville Island. Accordingly, 

 we took care now to load up the sledges with caribou meat. Part 

 of the time we traveled overland for greater convenience in hunt- 

 ing. June 7th we saw the first new-born caribou calves. Con- 

 trary to the experience of the summer before, there were now 

 many wolves on the island and the caribou were continually on the 

 alert. It is not often that I shoot caribou at more than three 

 hundred yards, but this time I shot several at ranges varying from 

 four hundred and fifty to six hundred yards. This long-range 

 shooting, especially with a moderate or strong breeze, gave a greatly 

 increased percentage of misses, so that under these conditions we 

 could not long have maintained our record of averaging more than 



