328 A Musk -Ox Hunt. 



upper surface, when the peculiar hues indicate the presence or 

 absence of water. While the most of the party are building their 

 little huts of snow for the night's encampment, some one takes 

 the ice-scoop and chisel and fares out on the lake and selects a 

 place for his operations. He then digs a hole with the chisel 

 about a foot in diameter, and nearly the same depth, by repeated 

 vertical strokes, and when the chopped ice or debris thus formed 

 commences choking this instrument, it is removed with the ice- 

 scoop, and this alternation of cutting and removal is kept up until 

 the water is reached, at from four to eight or ten feet below. 

 This digging requires far more dexterity than one would at first 

 glance suppose. The amateur finds it impossible to keep it from 

 rapidly narrowing to a point long before the water is reached. 

 Moreover, if the debris be too freely chopped it becomes reduced 

 to a sort of ice-dust, which will pack in so firmly toward the 

 finishing of the water-hole that the edge of the scoop cannot be 

 wedged under it, with its limited play of action. The children 

 and old women of the village may draw many a meal of goodly- 

 sized salmon through this avenue, and this necessitates that the 

 hole should be of fair size throughout. One of the most annoy- 

 ing events of my sledge journey was, after a long and unsuccessful 

 attempt to catch something at one of these water-holes, to find 

 myself suddenly at one, and a big salmon at the other, end of a 

 strong fish-line, separated by an ice-hole through which neither 

 could pass. 



The range of musk-cattle is quite extensive. They occupy the 

 extreme northern shores of Greenland on both the east and west 

 coasts as far as they have been explored, and these two ranges are 

 probably connected around the northernmost point of this great polar 

 continent. They occur on both sides of Smith Sound, and in general 

 frequent arctic America from latitude 6o° to 79 north, and from 

 longitude 67 30' west, almost to the Pacific coast. It is, however, in 

 the great stretch of hilly country lying between North Hudson's Bay 

 and its estuaries on the south and east, and the Arctic Ocean with 

 its intricate channels on the north and west, that these animals are 

 found in the largest herds and greatest numbers. Captain Hall, in 

 his sledge journey from Repulse Bay to King William's Land, in 

 1869, killed 79 musk-oxen, whose hides alone weighed 873 pounds. 



