522 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



bones are found in the old-appearing islands but not in our islands 

 or in the Ringnes Islands) have suggested to me that the ovibos 

 spread over the Arctic at the time when most of the islands were 

 connected by land bridges, but when our islands and the Ringnes 

 pair had not yet risen from the sea or were at least not connected 

 by land with what are now the other islands. A later subsidence 

 left the animals populating the remnants of the previously con- 

 nected land, but because of their aversion to crossing ice they have 

 never penetrated to the newer islands. 



On his discovery of Prince Patrick Island Sir Leopold McClin- 

 tock was also the discoverer of the eggs of Ross's gull, a nest of 

 which he found near the north end. But to this day such eggs are 

 rare in collections. On June 18th on a reef between Second Land 

 and a smaller island lying to the north I saw with the glasses 

 some gulls sitting while two flew about my head, screaming and 

 behaving much like terns that have a nest. On the chance, I 

 walked half a mile out of my way to the reef and found a nest of 

 two eggs. The bird remained on it till I was about fifty yards 

 away. There were also two holes where nests were being made 

 by other g\ills. The nest was little more than a bowl in dry dust, 

 lined with a few grass roots and some small bivalve shells, found 

 on the reef itself. Knowing these eggs to be so fare, I took the 

 nest, what there was of it, and the two eggs. 



Second Land (which I have since named Meighen Island) is 

 the most nearly barren land I have seen in the Arctic. There is a 

 little grass in places and there are some lichens and mosses, but 

 a dozen caribou would find it difficult to spend a season and they 

 certainly could not live there permanently. We saw caribou tracks 

 that were several years old. Almost certainly no animals stay 

 there more than a few days at a time. We saw no lemmings and 

 no owls but we found owl exgorgitations, the ordinary balls of lem- 

 ming bones and hair. There were the three kinds of gulls already 

 mentioned and at least one and perhaps two kinds of sandpipers. 

 But it is the paradise of the Hutchins goose. Seals had been more 

 abundant around the camp which we made nine miles before 

 landing than they had been the entire season, but we saw none on 

 the landfast ice during our survey of the coast. The conclusion 

 is that in this region sustenance for a large party can be found 

 only by following the shore floe. 



We managed to get along for a while on the eggs of the Hutchins 

 geese. The men followed the shore with the sled traveling on the 

 sea ice from point to point while I walked inland, and when I 



