STEFANSSON-ANDERSON ARCTIC EXPEDITION 135 
a good sheep hunter and a useful companion. ‘We followed the coast line, 
in general, to the mouth of the Hula-hula River, about six miles west of 
Barter Island. Here we picked up a toboggan, very useful in the mountains, 
and fixed up our whaleboat cache. We took only three 50 Ib. sacks of flour, 
two slabs of bacon, a few pounds of beans, and some tea and tobacco with 
us from Flaxman Island. We cached half a sack of flour here for our 
return trip, but it was eaten by wandering natives before we returned. ‘There 
is plenty of driftwood along the coast for camping purposes, but inland, 
between the coast and the mountains, there is little to burn, only a few willow 
twigs and snags along the river bars. We found two families of natives 
living on the Hula-hula, and hunted with them during November, the entire 
party killing fifteen sheep (Ovis dall’). One mountain hunter, named 
Kunagnana, with his wife and three small chi!dren had been living on sheep 
for months. He had oyer thirty sheepskins on hand, besides having clad 
the whole family from head to foot in sheepskins. His shirt, coat, pants, 
stockings, boots, mittens, snow-shoe lacings, and even the little tent he 
lived in, were made entirely of mountain sheepskins. 
Our flour and other “civilized rations,” except tea and tobacco, were gone 
early in November, and for the next month we lived on mountain sheep 
“straight,”’ with a few messes of ptarmigan thrown in. Willow ptarmigan 
were very common and rock ptarmigan rare in the creek valleys. On the 
north side of the mountains, it required very little effort to bag ten or fifteen 
ptarmigan in a couple of hours. Later in November, we joined forces 
with a party of five Eskimo whom we had met at Herschel Island the summer 
before — Auktelek and his wife Tulak, their grown son Akorak, and another 
young hunter named Pikalo, and the latter’s father Kunasilek. Auktelek 
told me that several years before his brother Umegluk with two companions 
had crossed the ‘‘divide”’ from the head of the Hula-hula River and hunted 
ona river flowing south (I believe the middle or east branch of the Chandlar), 
a northern tributary of the Yukon, and had found plenty of ttik-ta (caribou). 
There is an immense territory south of the Endicott Mountains and north 
of the Yukon which the white prospectors have not yet reached except in a 
few places. The Rampart House and Fort Yukon Indians do not range 
so far north except in summer, and the Eskimo seldom cross the mountains. 
To the knowledge of the natives, no white man had ever crossed the moun- 
tains in this region. 
We decided to cross this mountainous divide. We hauled a load of meat 
and a little wood within a quarter mile of the sunmmit and camped one night 
(December 3) above the willow line. We took the sleds over safely by put- 
ting ten dogs in harness, and with the help of six men boosting and pulling. 
Descending a rocky creek gorge, we reached large willows before night of 
