214 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



even at thirty or forty below zero, will lessen in weight day by day, 

 the oil trickling out perceptibly. It is therefore necessary to pre- 

 serve blubber in bags. This we do by skinning the seal through 

 the mouth, or "casing" his skin, to use the language of the furrier. 

 This means that the skinning is commenced at the lips. The hide is 

 turned back and, as the skinning proceeds, pulled backwards over 

 the head and then back over the neck and body as one might turn 

 a sock inside out. When the skinning is done in this fashion, there 

 are no openings in the bag except the natural ones. The flippers 

 have none, for the bones are dismembered at what correspond to 

 the wrist and ankle joints, leaving the flipper unskinned. The nat- 

 ural openings are closed by tying them up like the mouth of a bag. 

 This makes the pok which we use for a seal-oil container and which 

 will hold the fat of about four seals. The same sort of bag may 

 also be inflated by blowing and then forms a float with a buoyancy 

 of two or three hundred pounds. Occasionally instead of using our 

 canvas to convert the sled into a boat we fasten three or four of 

 these inflated poks to the sides of the sled, making a sort of life 

 raft. This is an Eskimo method, satisfactory in warm weather but 

 not in winter, because the water which splashes over the sled turns 

 into an ice coating very difficult to remove.- 



While our seal hunting for blubber continued, the bears kept 

 coming into camp. The third one arrived May 31st and in a pe- 

 culiar way. It was three or four o'clock in the morning, the other 

 men were asleep and I with my six-power glasses was standing on 

 a hummock near the camp watching the ice of the lead, counting 

 seals as they came up at distances beyond gunshot and also watching 

 for whales, the northward passage of which was intermittent. The 

 lead now was several miles wide and covered with young ice not 

 strong enough to walk upon, except near the middle where some of 

 it had telescoped, making it double thickness. As I could see 

 later by careful study of this ice with my glasses, the bear must 

 have been proceeding north along the middle of the lead. Possibly 

 he had seen the camp or been attracted towards it by some noise. 

 I do not remember having made any sound, but he may have heard 

 the dogs — they had been tied up so long and wTre in such high 

 spirits that they were developing an inclination to fight which, 

 because of their chains, could only be translated into snarling and 

 barking. 



The visitor's manner of coming was peculiar. The young ice was 

 not strong enough to bear his weight but was too tough to allow 

 comfortable swimming on the surface. He must have been coming 



