THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 585 



We lived almost entirely at Storkerson's camp on ovibos meat 

 and the white men preferred to continue doing so, but the Eskimos 

 were hungry for caribou meat and insisted on having it brought 

 in. The depots were in very rocky country to the east and I 

 was reluctant to send sledges for it until later in the season, for 

 the shoeing easily gets worn through, and sled shoeing is the most 

 valuable and indispensable of items in work such as ours. But 

 eventually we yielded and the meat was brought in. For two or 

 three days there was much talk among the Eskimos about how 

 much they preferred the caribou meat and no doubt arguing 

 against them would have kept them of the same opinion. But 

 by quietly refraining I was able to observe them gradually for- 

 getting the superiority of the caribou meat and a good deal of it 

 was eventually fed to the dogs. This was not because the ovibos 

 meat was superior but rather because it was fatter. In my opin- 

 ion not one person in ten could even when on his guard tell an 

 ovibos steak from a beefsteak, unless there were bones in the cut 

 to enable one to tell through anatomical difference. Peary has 

 said that ovibos meat is better than beef, but he probably meant 

 merely that his appetite was better when he was eating it. To 

 me the two meats seem identical. 



As the name ovibos implies, we have here a cow or ox with a 

 coat of wool. The entire body is covered with long, straggling, 

 stiff black hair, in nature similar to the mane of a horse. In the 

 roots of this hair grows wool. The wool is shed every spring but 

 the hair is never shed. Furriers prefer skins with as little wool 

 on them as possible and ovibos killed for commercial purposes 

 have therefore been killed in the autumn. Through the autumn 

 and early winter the wool gradually thickens and by spring it 

 bulges out all over the animal, but especially on the shoulders. 

 Their bodies are heavy forward, anyway, somewhat after the 

 style of the buffalo, but a great exaggeration of the hump is pro- 

 duced by the mass of wool that covers it. In April and May 

 the wool is shed. These are short-legged animals and when you 

 have a side view of them at the shedding season frequently the 

 legs cannot be seen at all for the curtain of wool that hangs to 



this necessary. Grass has neither legs to run nor wings to fly, and decay 

 does not come till the following summer. Then where should the grass dis- 

 appear to? The snowfall is far less than in such countries as Montana, where 

 stock feed out all winter. Then wherewithal should the grkss be so covered 

 that animals native to those regions have any difficulty in getting it? That 

 polar cattle are fatter in January than in Julj^ shows equally that they can 

 get the grass in winter and that the grass is nourishing. 



