634 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



Island. The teams were stopped and I lay down on an ice hum- 

 mock to wait, for he was heading to pass us at a distance of two 

 or three hundred yards. Unfortunately he climbed over a hummock 

 that brought him against the skyline. One of the dogs saw him and 

 a moment later they were all barking. The bear was behind an- 

 other hummock and he must have stood still a while, listening. 

 His mind was soon made up that there was danger in the wind, and 

 the next I saw of him he was going off at a lumbering gallop. At 

 about four hundred yards from me he paused and I fired. I learned 

 later that this bullet had gone through his shoulder, breaking the 

 bone but missing any vital part. He disappeared but reappeared 

 promptly, going slowly now and stopping frequently. In ordinary 

 course his end would have come in a few minutes with a second shot. 



My attention had been centered on the bear and the men had 

 had their hands full with the teams. Nobody had noticed Sapsuk, 

 and the first thing any of us knew he was half-way to the bear. 



We have discussed elsewhere the Eskimo method of hunting 

 bears with dogs and I have given my reasons for never following 

 it. Now we were going to have a case of it in spite of ourselves. 

 The first alarm that occurred to me was that Sapsuk had never 

 been after a bear and would not know how to take care of himself. 

 We had one or two dogs which had been bought from the Victoria 

 Island Eskimos and recommended as good bear dogs. There 

 were also one or two others that were remarkably agile and at 

 the same time far less endeared to us than Sapsuk. We turned 

 these loose hastily, hoping that they might get to the bear first. 

 No such luck. The bear was going slowly and Sapsuk went for 

 him straight as an arrow. He had often eaten bear meat and 

 apparently recognized him not as a fighting animal but merely as 

 food. I could see with the glasses that he ran up to the bear in 

 the most naive way and bit into him, apparently with the idea that 

 he was beginning a meal rather than a fight. The bear turned to 

 give him one blow and poor Sapsuk lay paralyzed and fiat on 

 the ice. A minute later the other dogs caught up and surrounded 

 the bear about a quarter of a mile away, but apparently they had 

 taken a lesson from Sapsuk's case, for none of them dared go 

 nearer than four or five yards except one of the Victoria Island 

 dogs. 



The bear was losing strength and was not going fast, but the 

 dogs did not really hold him and he was making progress away 

 at the rate of three or four miles per hour. I must say, however, 

 that the one Victoria Island dog was admirable and had there 



