256 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



see as much of the country as Storkerson had seen, he and I now 

 made a hunting trip eastward from Storkerson's camp, a distance 

 of about twenty miles. We found a beautiful country of rolling 

 hills with small lakes and again an abundance of heather. I re- 

 member particularly one camping place in the bottom-lands of a 

 small river where wc pitched our tent on hard, level ground a few 

 yards from a stream of the best water in the world, amid so much 

 heather that we agreed that on ten acres of ground in a week or so 

 we could have picked enough fuel to last the winter. 



Everywhere the Eskimos had preceded us, although apparently 

 none had been there in ten years. We formed the opinion that few 

 of the relics were very old, probably none over a century. There 

 were "tent rings," or circles of stones that had been used to hold 

 down the flaps of a tent and had been rolled away when camp 

 had been broken, giving a somewhat enlarged outline where the 

 tent had stood. The Victoria Island Eskimos nowadays occasion- 

 ally made a wall of sod from eight to twenty inches high as the 

 base of their tents. Walls of this kind are found here and there 

 over Banks Island, although not numerous. The tent rings are 

 in places naturally suited to them — occasionally on hilltops and 

 more frequently in lower places where there are ''nigger heads," the 

 little knobs one can take hold of and break loose with the hands, 

 getting round pieces of sod varying in size from a grapefruit to a 

 pumpkin. Of these the Eskimos had built the sod foundations for 

 their tents, and we used them occasionally for the erection of 

 beacons. 



Near many of the camp sites were shavings and small pieces of 

 wood. In at least three cases out of four these had been brought 

 from Mercy Bay, for they were fragments of barrel staves, painted 

 boards, or other parts of a ship or of the equipment of a ship. This 

 was confirmation of the accounts of McClure, sixty years before, 

 who saw no Eskimos at all on Banks Island, from which he ap- 

 pears to have thought that there were none and from which we 

 now infer that they certainly cannot have been numerous. It was 

 also confirmation of stories told me by the Prince Albert Sound 

 Eskimos in 1911 and later, to the effect that there had been a great 

 influx of people into Banks Island following the discovery by some 

 of their number of McClure 's abandoned ship, the Investigator, in 

 Mercy Bay, probably about 1855.* 



Often the Eskimo camp sites were in the vicinity of ovibos kill- 

 ings. Sometimes these kills seem to have been what we may call 



♦See "My Life With the Eskimo," p. 293, and elsewhere. 



