4 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



nation when I dreamed of being a castaway on my own 

 island or of visiting Crusoe on his. 



At this time there were no indications that I was to 

 be led eventually into the career of polar exploration. 

 But unconsciously I was getting the best preparation for 

 it. On the frontier farm I had hunted rabbits and grouse 

 in the winter, ducks and geese and swans and cranes in 

 the spring and fall. After I became a cowboy I pursued 

 on horseback the white tail antelope. I can scarcely re- 

 member the time when I did not hunt with a shotgun, 

 and since the age of ten I have been a fair rifle shot. 



But more valuable than anything in fitting me for the 

 life of a hunter in the polar regions was my buffeting by 

 the Dakota climate. Dakota in summer has the same 

 terrific heat that we find in some parts of the arctic prai- 

 ries. The Dakota winter is not as long as the arctic 

 winter but it is occasionally as cold, and some Dakota 

 blizzards are as bad winter weather as any in the north- 

 ern hemisphere. I hear the conditions are getting a little 

 different after thirty years of cultivation. Farmhouses 

 now stand half a mile apart where the cattle ranches once 

 were twenty and thirty miles apart, and trees have been 

 planted in many places to break the wind. 



Things were different when I was eighteen. Four of 

 us boys, all of about the same age, had started a ranch 

 of our own. We had picket! out a conspicuous hill that 

 looked from a distance like the double hump of a camel. 

 Our house stood on one hump and a hundred yards away 

 were our saddle ponies in a bam on the other hump. 

 That year there blew up the day before Thanksgiving 

 a storm which is still called by the pioneers "the 

 Thanksgiving Blizzard." The weather was warm and the 

 sky gradually became overcast. For about six hours the 



