no HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



put them on top of the sled to be ready for the next 

 emergency. 



These are ideal clothes to use in winter in such places 

 as Russia, the Adirondack^, Minnesota, or Montana, and 

 generally everywhere in Canada except on the Pacific 

 Coast. Or, rather, they would be ideal if people knew 

 how to take care of them, but that is a delicate matter. 

 Should they become damp you must not hang them up 

 near a stove, for in that case they would not last you 

 many weeks. The same heat that would not affect our 

 ordinary "civilized" furs at all will spoil caribou skin 

 clothes. If they become damp they shrink when they 

 dry, but a little scraping makes them soft again. There 

 are many other tricks of taking care of caribou skin 

 clothes after they get wet or when something goes 

 wrong. 



But the main thing is to see that nothing does go wrong. 

 To begin with, you should not let them get damp. Be- 

 fore going North, I had read some polar books and had 

 learned how the arctic explorers suffered from wet cloth- 

 ing. Hoar frost would gather in them in the day time. 

 This cannot be prevented, for even when you are not 

 perspiring there is a certain amount of invisible vapor 

 coming out all over your body. I found on this winter 

 journey across the Mackenzie delta that on a calm morn- 

 ing if I held my bare hand in front of me there would 

 be columns of steam rising from every finger although 

 the hand appeared perfectly dry. This steam is always 

 rising from the body no matter what the temperature, and 

 indeed it rises the more rapidly the warmer the tempera- 

 ture. But it is not visible to the human eye except when 

 if is condensed into a kind of fog by a temperature of 

 thirty or forty below zero. It is this ordinarily invisible 



