620 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



a hundred pounds of meat to the cartridge. There was no reason 

 now, unless it were pride, for trying to maintain that record, for we 

 were on the homeward journey of the last exploratory trip and 

 expected to reach Kellett easily in time for connecting with our 

 ships which would get us out into the Pacific and home within 

 three months. 



Emiu had been off hunting the day before this and brought 

 home his pack bag full of coal. He had found a vein of it in the 

 side of a hill. The next day he went with Knight to investigate 

 the find and to bring home a load, and they discovered what 

 Knight described as a "hill of coal" a few hundred yards from 

 Emiu's discovery vein. Knight said that but for the absence of 

 any sign of a railroad one would think that the coal had been 

 brought there and dumped in a heap from a trestle. We could not 

 fancy what geological forces had brought together this heap of 

 surface coal, but if its origin was a mystery, its utility was evi- 

 dent. We began at once to weave around it all sorts of romantic 

 plans for future exploration. We could travel here with confidence 

 from afar with one or two dog teams. We could kill caribou and 

 seals in the summer, in the fall we could put up snowhouses and 

 line them with caribou skins, we could burn coal during the winter, 

 and in the spring we would have a base better by several hundred 

 miles than any we had had for exploring the field that most inter- 

 ested us to the northwest. 



For Noice and me it was exasperating to realize that this coal 

 mine was no more than ten miles away from where we had spent 

 the previous summer with nothing for fuel but the caribou fat 

 which we would so much rather have used for food. We should 

 probably have been no better off now for the feasts of a year ago, 

 but with human illogicality in such matters we kept wishing and 

 wishing again that we had known of this coal to boil our meat with. 

 Now that I am farther removed from the scene I am rather glad 

 we did not find it, for we learned how inconsiderable a hardship 

 it is to be so sharply limited in fuel. I had always thought that 

 an island in which there was practically nothing to burn would 

 be an unpleasant place to spend the summer, but in looking back 

 and talking it over we find that all of us have the most pleasant 

 recollections of our stay in fuelless Lougheed Island in 1916. With 

 fuel it would have been an arctic paradise. 



With sledges loaded with caribou meat and coal we now went 

 on to our former summer camp so as to "tie up" the observations 

 of this year with those of last. This was especially important, for 



