318 A Musk-Ox Hunt. 



The following morning, a heavy drifting fog threatened to spoil 

 our sport and lose us our coveted meat, but we managed to get away 

 soon after eight o'clock, having a party of eleven rifles, with two 

 Eskimo women, two light sledges, and all the dogs. At that hour 

 the great thick clouds seemed to be lifting, but shortly after starting 

 the fog settled down upon us again. After some two or three hours 

 of wandering around in the drifting mist, guiding our movements as 

 much as possible by the direction of the wind, which we had pre- 

 viously determined, we came plump upon the trail, apparently not 

 over ten minutes old, of some six or seven of the animals. Great 

 fears were entertained by the experienced hunters that the musk- 

 oxen had heard our approach, and were now probably "doing their 

 level best" to escape. The sledges were immediately stopped, and 

 the dogs rapidly unhitched from them, from one to three or four being 

 given to each of the eleven men and boys, white or native, that were 

 present, who, taking their harnesses in their left hands or tying them 

 in slip-nooses around their waists, started without delay upon the 

 trail, leaving the two sledges and a few of the poorer dogs in charge 

 of the Innuit women, who had come along for that purpose, and who 

 would follow on the trail with the empty sledges as soon as firing 

 was heard. The dogs, many of them old musk-ox hunters, and with 

 appetites doubly sharpened by hard work and a constantly diminish- 

 ing ration, tugged like mad at their seal-skin harness lines, as they 

 half buried their eager noses in the tumbled snow of the trail, and 

 hurried their attached human being along at a flying rate that threat- 

 ened a broken limb or neck at each of the rough gorges and jutting 

 precipices of the broken, stony hill-land where the exciting chase 

 was going on. The rapidity with which an agile native hunter can 

 run when thus attached to two or three excited dogs is astonishing. 

 Whenever a steep valley was encountered, the Eskimos would slide 

 down on their feet, in a sitting posture, throwing the loose snow to 

 their sides like escaping steam from a hissing locomotive, until the 

 bottom was reached, when, quick as thought, they would throw 

 themselves at full length upon the snow, and the wild, excited brutes 

 would drag them up the other side, where, regaining their feet, they 

 would run on at a constantly accelerating gait, their guns in the 

 meantime being held in the right hand or tightly lashed upon the 

 back. 



