THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 595 



or among rocks. After Storkerson's experience where he had in 

 a day nearly taken the shoeing off several of our sledges, it became 

 evident that no one must travel over rocks at all, no matter how 

 badly he got tangled in them, unless it were a matter of life or 

 death. There was nothing to do but wait for clear weather or 

 a moon, for now that the Bernier shoeing had been put on our 

 sledges there was none to replace it. On his way northward and 

 back on the first trip Storkerson had made some depots of fresh 

 ovibos meat. These were either rifled by wolves because of some 

 fault of construction, or could not be found in the darkness by the 

 traveling parties. While our summer work has frequently been 

 disagreeable, this was the only winter of our whole experience 

 where any of the men had what could fairly be called hardships. 

 But this winter they had plenty of them. 



At first I remained in camp for the sake of the ethnological 

 work I was preparing and because with more men than teams and 

 sledges my help was unnecessary. But during the winter I devel- 

 oped a slight but annoying illness which confined me to the house 

 and threatened to last into the spring. This did not happen, how- 

 ever, for by sprmg I was almost well and perfectly so before we 

 had to leave the Grassy base. 



We had intended to start the spring work this year in Janu- 

 ary, but misfortunes dragged the preparations on into February. 

 These did not make a great difference except for the hardship to 

 the men and the fact that the dogs were in consequence not in the 

 best condition. One thing you cannot start without is an adequate 

 outfit of good clothing, and our seamstresses were slow in getting 

 the clothing ready because two of them were ill — Mrs. Lopez se- 

 riously for a while, and the best one, Guinnana, was troubled with 

 failing eyesight which interfered both with the quality and quan- 

 tity of her work. There was probably nothing wrong with her 

 eyes which a good pair of spectacles would not have corrected, 

 but it was a long way to the nearest optician. 



In early February when everything else was in a fair state of 

 readiness we had trials of a more serious sort. The mainspring 

 of the better of our two pocket chronometers broke. There is not 

 much use in a journey such as we wanted to make unless you can 

 carry accurate time for the determination of longitude. None of 

 us were watchmakers but something had to be done, so Storkerson 

 undertook the job. He took out the broken mainspring and then 

 we examined several ordinary watches carried among us and found 

 one which had a mainspring of a similar size and kind. Storkerson 



