The Dog-Sleigh Ride 5 



if it had not been for the great snowdrifts and 

 masses of ice. There were some steep, jagged rocks 

 in sight of our village, and during the long daytime 

 enough of the snow would melt off to leave the rocks 

 bare in a few places. On these bare spots we would 

 find a kind of brown moss, which we gathered and 

 dried to light our fires with. 



We never saw anything green in Greenland, and 

 I never could understand why they called it by that 

 name. 



When we looked out toward the ocean, we could 

 not see very far, for even in the warmest season there 

 was only a small space of open water, and beyond 

 that the ice was all piled up in rough, broken masses. 



The great event in our family life, however, was 

 the dog-sleigh ride. When father told us we could 

 go, we came as near dancing and clapping our hands 

 for joy as Esquimaux children ever did. But we did 

 not have a fine cutter, with large horses and chiming 

 bells. We did not even have an old-fashioned bob- 

 sled, in which young men and young women have 

 such good times in your country. 



Sometimes the sleigh would be made of a great 

 wide piece of bone from the jaws of a whale, one 

 end of which turned up like a runner. But more 

 often it would be either a skin of some animal laid 

 flat on the ground, or a great frozen fish cut in two 

 at the back and then turned right over. I never saw 

 such a fish in this country, or in Iceland, so I cannot 

 tell what kind of fish it was. 



