240 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



the rocky ground where they typically grow. In the opening of 

 many paunches I have never found any appreciable amount of 

 lichens, and am of the opinion that whatever lichens one does find 

 have been accidentally picked up with the grass. This shows how 

 much at variance with the facts must be the common belief that 

 they prefer a mountainous and rocky country. In Melville Island 

 and elsewhere I have found the living animals and the bones of the 

 dead most abundant in the grassiest country, which, other things 

 being equal, is also the most nearly level and the lowest. In moun- 

 tainous districts animals will be found in the deep valleys grazing 

 in sunny spots, not for any desired warmth, but merely because that 

 is where the grass grows most luxuriously. If the bones of the dead 

 are occasionally found on rocky hilltops, it is because the bands 

 have retreated there in an attempt to defend themselves against 

 the attacking Eskimos. 



The absence of cattle from the fertile hills and valleys of Banks 

 Island where they were recently so numerous has a historical ex- 

 planation. The scattered bones are a confirmation of McClure's 

 statement that when he wintered in Prince of Wales Straits and in 

 the Bay of Mercy in the years 1850-53 "cattle" were numerous 

 everywhere. In 1906 at Herschel Island I was told by whalers that, 

 a few years before, a landing had been made in southwest Banks 

 Island from the Penelope, which was then owned and commanded 

 by Eskimos, and the Narwhal, commanded by Captain George 

 Leavitt, and that recent traces of polar cattle as well as of Eskimos 

 hunting them had been seen near Cape Kellett. 



Then in May, 1911, when I visited the Prince Albert Sound 

 Eskimos,* I found that most of that group spent a part of the win- 

 ter in southeast Banks Island and that some of them occasionally 

 spent the summer in the interior. From them I learned that cattle 

 were occasionally found, and they told me specifically about a 

 small band which during the spring of 1911, probably March, came 

 down from the hills to the coast at the southeast corner of Banks 

 Island, where they were killed. These same Eskimos told me that 

 at a time which I estimated as less than half a dozen years after 

 McClure abandoned his ship the Investigator in the Bay of Mercy, 

 some Eskimos had found her. She was to them, naturally, a veri- 

 table treasure house, especially for her iron. The news spread 

 through Eskimo communities as far south as Coronation Gulf and 

 east towards King William Island, and the Bay of Mercy for 

 twenty or thirty years became a place of pilgrimage for perhaps a 



*See pp. 281 ff., "My Life With the Eskimo." 



