60 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



from some anatomical or deep physiological cause I do not know, 

 or whether it results merely from his having lived his whole life 

 in an unvitiated atmosphere with the sense of smell consequently 

 unperverted. In the direction from which the smoke must come, 

 if it was smoke, land was about eight miles away. I climbed on 

 one of the sledges, examined the coast 'with my field glasses, and 

 saw what afterwards proved to be a house, but was now so low and 

 far away that it could not be identified. We traveled towards it, 

 however, and after five or six miles its character as a human habi- 

 tation became clear. 



It was the dwelling of a single Eskimo family of the Colville 

 River people. They were able to tell us about several other fam- 

 ilies, most of them old acquaintances of mine, that were scattered 

 in various places in the vicinity. Through previous residence in 

 the country I knew the Eskimo names not only of the places I had 

 visited, but also of many which I had heard discussed and which 

 had been described to me by the drawing of crude maps. Had I 

 been a stranger to the topography and to the Eskimo names I 

 should have been unable to form a clear idea of where all these 

 people were living, even with the aid of the most modern published 

 maps and with a thorough command of the Eskimo language; for 

 besides being inaccurate, most maps carry only the names of 

 European explorers, patrons of exploration, or friends of the map- 

 makers. The places and names shown on such maps are unidenti- 

 fiable through any information available from Eskimos, and com- 

 monly even from resident whites. To have full value to the trav- 

 eler an Arctic map should carry Eskimo names, either exclusively 

 or as supplements to the others. 



I must pay a tribute to the adaptability of my companions. 

 On the Karliik all of them had disliked the seal meat prepared for 

 us by the ship's cook, who insisted on putting it through various 

 elaborate processes which were supposed to deodorize it and take 

 away its peculiar taste. I had imagined my own dislike for seal 

 meat cooked this way to be a peculiarity due to long acquaintance 

 with the undisguised article. The men all ate it on shipboard 

 with so good a grace that I really thought they liked it. But 

 when we killed the first seal after leaving the ship, cut its meat into 

 pieces, dropped it into cold water, brought it to a boil and served it 

 underdone on a platter in the true Eskimo style, every one of my 

 three companions commented on its great superiority over seal 

 meat as cooked on the ship. Wilkins, who was brought up in 

 Australia and was used to the eating of fresh mutton, said it tasted 



