THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 479 



tleman, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, Dean of the Lawrence Scien- 

 tific School of Harvard University, whose lectures on geology first 

 opened to me some of its most interesting problems and had more 

 to do than any single cause in turning my mind into geographic 

 channels. 



I had intended to proceed to the Bear, but I gathered from the 

 tenor of Storkerson's letter, although it did not contain the actual 

 statement, that he and his assistants would by now be up in Mel- 

 ville Island. So we crossed from Mercy Bay to Cape Ross where, 

 sure enough, we came upon his trail and later found one of his 

 camps. Here we killed a polar bear which had been prowling 

 around for a day or two, eating the entrails of killed bears and 

 other scraps he found lying about. The bear had touched neither 

 a depot of pemmican and other provisions which Storkerson had 

 protected by a heap of rocks in a ravine, nor the ovibos meat which 

 had been sunk into a sort of well made with pick-axes into the top 

 of an old ice hummock. 



This meat depot was an ingenious one, and while no such depot 

 is probably safe against a polar bear, came as near to safety as 

 well could be. The well had been made two or three times as deep 

 as was necessary to hold the meat, and on top of the meat had 

 been filled with ice boulders which even a bear would have had 

 difiiculty in lifting up and rolling away. We were able to remove 

 them only by cracking each one into several pieces before handling. 



There has been among arctic explorers much speculation as to 

 whether polar bear liver is poisonous. I have made many experi- 

 ments to determine this and one of the most interesting ones was 

 made here. 



The belief in the poisonous nature of polar bear liver was 

 probably picked up by early explorers as information from the 

 Eskimos. Many whalers have told me that bear liver is poison- 

 ous but all of them have had it on hearsay from the Eskimos. 

 When I first inquired from the Eskimos I gathered also that they 

 meant to say it was poisonous. That was the interpretation I 

 placed upon statements that it must not be eaten and that who- 

 ever eats it would become ill. When after years with the Eskimos 

 I finally got reasonable command of their religious ideas and cere- 

 monial language, I discovered that what they meant to say was that 

 bear liver is taboo and that some misfortune, perhaps taking the 

 form of illness or death, will come upon the eater of it as a pun- 



