640 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



before many days most of them were thrown away. A few things 

 I had taken to serve the semi-scientific purpose of showing in 

 what condition the Dealy Island depot had been found after sixty- 

 four years, and these the dogs carried. There was also a sweater 

 intended for Captain Bernard. 



After following the coast for four or five days I came to the 

 conclusion that getting game near the straits was too difficult and 

 that we were being too much delayed. We could not in any event 

 complete the east coast of Banks Island, so we did not seem justi- 

 fied in carrying the survey farther. The all-important thing was 

 to get to Kellett so that our ships would not have to wait for us 

 too long. 



When we commenced our inland travel we fell in with a group 

 of lakes, the largest of which Captain Gonzales had discovered in 

 the early fall of 1915. We now found several other lakes and as- 

 certained that the head of the big river which we had followed 

 south from Mercy Bay in 1915 and could only cross after going 

 a long way inland, was in one of these lakes, although some of 

 them drain into Prince of Wales Straits. The journey was pleasant 

 except for the need to hurry. Try as we would, we could not do 

 more than average about ten miles a day. There were a few big 

 dogs which could have done better even with packs of thirty or 

 forty pounds, but most of the dogs were small and with packs 

 of even twenty pounds they were played out at the end of ten 

 miles. There was continual trouble with the packs of the little 

 dogs, too, through their dragging in the water and through bunting 

 against stones or inequalities of the ground. 



Thousands of owls have been within my sight in the North 

 but I had never happened upon one of their nests. On this trip 

 we found a nest almost every day, and being ignorant of the nat- 

 ural history of these birds I was surprised to find the difference 

 in size among the young. In one nest there were four birds, the 

 smallest apparently hatched that day and the largest as big as 

 the parent birds and able to fiy away when I came near. In 

 another nest were two eggs and three birds, the largest apparently 

 half-grown. 



As on our other overland journeys across Banks Island, we 

 found continued evidence of the presence of Eskimos in former years, 

 chiefly in the form of ovibos skeletons, often ten or fifteen together, 

 and stone depots in which ovibos meat had been temporarily kept. 

 There were also tent rings of sod or stone. We saw inuksuit only 

 rarely, indicating that the caribou had been unimportant in the 



