526 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



bad, for we are getting near the point where we must have meat. 

 Noice must learn hunting some time, and the experience will do 

 him good as most people learn best from failures. 



"July 5: Started 7 A. M., telling the others not to start for at 

 least two hours to give me a chance to hunt. One and one-half 

 miles south of camp I saw a seal, was prevented from approaching 

 nearer than three hundred yards by open shore lead, shot him at 

 that range and had to go half a mile around to get to him. It 

 turned out he was shot through the neck just back of the head and 

 above the spine. He was merely stunned. I had pulled him ten 

 feet or so from his hole and was about to leave him when he began 

 to come to life. I should have lost him had he come to five minutes 

 later. I expected the others to come along behind and pick up 

 the dead seal, so I walked ahead about five miles but, as the 

 team did not come in sight in four hours, I went back to meet them. 

 I met them three miles from camp and we camped there, as 

 Charlie's eyes were troubling him and I feared a relapse. He 

 seemed quite willing to go on but I think it best to take no chances. 

 The crusted snow is also very hard on the dogs' feet. 



"The seal was needed. I have never seen so protracted a spell 

 of weather unfit for men or dogs as we have had since June 22nd, 

 and this is the first seal that has come out of his hole, so far as 

 we have seen. At the floe (before reaching Meighen Island) we 

 threw away considerable blubber but kept enough to last until two 

 days ago. At sea one can get seals in almost any weather (if there 

 is open water) but inshore they come up only in warm and prefer- 

 ably in sunshiny, not very cloudy, weather." 



A day or two after this when I was walking overland and the 

 men taking the sled along the ice in the straits, they had the mis- 

 fortune to have it upset into deep water. Most of the bedding 

 and clothing got soaking wet. It was really a marvel that this had 

 not happened before and still more of a marv^el that it did not 

 happen frequently after, for conditions under which one must 

 travel over sea ice in summer are such that it might seem impos- 

 sible to keep anything dry. 



This is because in the spring the thaw water sinks to the bot- 

 tom of the snowdrifts and begins to trickle along the ice, gradually 

 eroding little water courses which grow deeper and wider day by 

 day. This never leads to a very bad situation if the ice is of that 

 year, but if it does not break up and float to sea towards the end 

 of summer, the next frosts make of it the most wretched going 

 imaginable the following year. Then the thaw water finds deep 



