AN AUTUMN JOURNEY 95 



enough heat so that a fire every six hours is ample to keep 

 the house comfortable. The cooking of the three regular 

 meals a day, therefore, gives enough incidental heat to 

 last until nearly midnight when people go to sleep. Like 

 us, the Eskimos prefer to have their houses cooler at night 

 than in the daytime, and houses of the inland type may 

 get almost cold. I do not, however, recall ever having 

 been in one where it froze even towards morning. 



On our way over the mountains Roxy and I had talked 

 about spending a week or two at the caribou camp hunt- 

 ing, but the weather continued unpropitious. It was 

 foggy or snowing nearly every day and there was con- 

 sequently little chance of finding game. The hunters 

 who had been at the camp all the time said also that for 

 the last two or three weeks caribou had been very scarce. 

 Just ahead was the period of mid-winter darkness when 

 hunting is difficult, and the meat already in camp was, 

 therefore, precious. Between us, Roxy and I had fifteen 

 dogs. On the coast, where fish by the ton were piled 

 up under heaps of driftwood, feeding the dogs did not 

 make noticeable inroads into the winter provisions. But 

 here in the mountain camp we could daily see the little 

 store of caribou meat growing smaller. 



It is always one of the most difficult problems of the 

 caribou-hunting Eskimos to decide how many dogs to 

 keep. You must have enough to follow the herds around 

 and to fetch home the meat of the animals that have been 

 killed. On the other hand, if you have too many they will 

 eat you out of house and home. In the present case there 

 was no lack of hospitality on the part of our hosts and 

 they urged us to stay till the weather became better so 

 we could do some hunting, but Roxy finally decided that 

 doing so would be unfair to our hosts and even unsafe, for 



