CAMERA FAILS TO WORK 147 



poor. A little beyond me Eaglefoot dropped the 

 poor brute, for food was wanted for the dogs ; 

 but one felt one would have been glad if it could 

 have run on, and found the herd it had strayed 

 from. It paid the full penalty for loitering 

 behind. 



It was now 3 p.m. and too dark for further 

 camera work. It had been snowing lightly all 

 day, and the light was not very good for making 

 rapid exposures. However, what was really 

 worrying me was the action of the intense frost 

 on the focal-plane shutter. Twice it had abso- 

 lutely stuck in the middle of an exposure, and 

 twice, also, it had refused to act at all when 

 beautiful Caribou pictures were possible. I 

 was beginning to fear the shutter was going to 

 spoil everything, and that I wanted a very simple 

 instrument to replace this complicated mechanism, 

 to which tiny frost particles clung and jammed 

 the finer workings. Over the evening camp-fire 

 I spent an hour trying to prevent any recurrence 

 of a hitch in the shutter- workings. Before the 

 heat of the fire it worked perfectly, and I laid 

 it aside in the end with renewed hopes for the 

 morrow. 



The early hours of night were employed 

 cutting wood, feeding the sled-dogs, and cooking 

 a large meal of Caribou meat. Then we lay for 

 an hour or two before turning in, the meditative 

 Indians smoking, and from time to time piling 

 fresh logs on the huge fire. Over the fire, in the 

 upper flames, hung the ghost-like, blackened 

 head of a Caribou, spiked on to a long green staff 

 that was stuck back in the snow to hold the head 



