THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 369 



There are dogs that know how to find their way home. But in 

 the sense of a permanent dwelling place the Eskimo dog has no 

 home, for the camp is always moving. It is rarely that a dog when 

 once lost finds his way back. If he is recovered by the owner it is 

 usually either through accident or because the dog finds another 

 camp and is eventually returned by people who recognize him and 

 are able to tell where he belongs. 



A good story to illustrate this point can be cited from the Mik- 

 kelsen-Leffingwell Expedition of which I was a member. When they 

 were starting out for their ice journey they camped three or four 

 miles west of the winter base, and during the night one of their dogs 

 ran away. They thought he had run home. It is impossible to say 

 what the dog's own idea was; possibly he went in pursuit of a polar 

 bear. He appears to have gone right past his own home and past 

 many Eskimo camps for he was picked up a week or so later on 

 the verge of starvation at a camp forty or fifty miles to the east. 

 The arrival of this dog under those particular circumstances gave 

 rise to a rumor that the whole ice exploring party had perished and 

 that the dog had come in off the ocean ice, the sole survdvor. This 

 is not an exceptional but a typical story of what happens to dogs 

 in the North that for one reason or another get separated from their 

 human companions. 



On this journey we had one more example of how easy it is to 

 misjudge size when the thing judged is at an unknown distance. 

 We had been seeing nothing but cows and other lean caribou for 

 two or three days and were nearly out of food. If we saw no bull 

 this day we would have to kill anything we could get. I had fallen 

 behind a quarter of a mile instead of being about two miles ahead, 

 and when the men came to the top of a hill I saw them drop down 

 and start crawling towards me, the dogs following. This meant that 

 they had come suddenly in sight of game on the other side. It must 

 be a bull, otherwise they would not have taken such pains to con- 

 ceal themselves. Sure enough, Storkerson and the others told me 

 when I caught up that the biggest bull they had ever seen was right 

 on the other side of the hill. When I went to the top of the hill the 

 animal had probably moved off, for now it was about half a mile 

 away. I looked at it through the glasses and saw it was a young 

 calf. I had already told the men to make camp, so I went ahead 

 and killed it. It was so small that one man could easily carry it on 

 his shoulders. 



The only sure way of judging caribou is by some physical pe- 

 culiarity other than size. The age and sex can be told by the color, 



