III 



AT ANNOOTOK 



NO matter how conventional a man may be, 

 how wedded to luxury and the good things 

 of civilization, somewhere in his innermost 

 soul he harbors the primordial instinct the instinct 

 of the chase the instinct that urges him on when 

 Nature challenges him to open combat in her wild, 

 uninhabited places. He may not admit or per- 

 haps realize that he possesses even in the slightest 

 degree this instinct of primordial man, but it is there, 

 nevertheless. He has received it as an inheritance 

 in perpetuity from those savage ancestors of his who 

 lived in prehistoric ages and whose everyday business 

 it was to pit their human intelligence against the 

 sagacity of the brute creation. It may be said in 

 proof of this that a white man is transformed into 

 an Indian very quickly, so far as ready adoption of 

 the Indian's mode of life is concerned; but to trans- 

 form an Indian into a white man is a process of evo- 

 lution that requires generations. 



I must say that when I found myself alone on the 

 bleak rocks of Northern Greenland with the Eskimo 

 representatives of my prehistoric progenitors, and 

 with no other object in view than the hunt and to 



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