A MUSK-OX HUNT 



By FREDERICK SCHWATKA. 



FOR about twelve months, during 1879 and '80, I was traveling 

 by sledge in the arctic regions with a party of twenty persons. 

 During that time, we depended for our food, as well as for that 

 of our forty-two dogs, upon the game of the country, twice traversed 

 by us, stretching from the waters of North Hudson's Bay to the 

 Arctic Ocean. The design of subsisting for so long a time upon the 

 game of those bleak, dreary regions entailed a great variety of hunt- 

 ing adventures. And to describe one of the incidents of a hunt after 

 musk-oxen, or musk-sheep as they are sometimes called, is the object 

 of this article. 



Our route led us from the northernmost point of Hudson's Bay 

 directly to the nearest available point on Back's Great Fish River, 

 which empties into the Arctic Ocean just south of the large island 

 known as King William's Land, on which island and adjacent main- 

 land Sir John Franklin's party of over a hundred British seamen 

 perished in 1848-49, and whose sad fate it was the object of this 

 expedition, as far as possible, to determine. This route lay directly 

 across country. The bulk of authorities on arctic sledging, both 

 white and native, bore against long overland sledge journeys, an 

 opinion to which they often gave practical illustration by unneces- 

 sary detours to follow salt-water ice or sinuous water-courses. Our 

 course, therefore, had never been traveled by either white men or 

 natives, and the latter, who formed an important element of the 

 expedition, advised against it. The Indians of the north, as I found 

 them, are loath to enter a totally unknown country. They knew 

 almost nothing of the game of the region, so thev said, but believed 



