LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA 115 



is no thoroughfare for men or sledges. You must, there- 

 fore, thread your way through the devious channels be- 

 tween the islands, and no man need be ashamed of get- 

 ting lost, especially if the light conditions are bad. 



It was now the time when the sun did not rise at all. 

 Writers of arctic romance have given this period the name 

 of "The Great Night" but that is really a misnomer, con- 

 veying a wrong impression. We were only about a hun- 

 dred miles north of the arctic circle and at that distance 

 you have something like six or seven hours of daylight 

 clear enough for reading large print out of doors. The 

 sun never actually rises, but at noon you can see the glow 

 of it in the south where it lies about as far below the hori- 

 zon as a tropical sun would be ten or twenty minutes 

 after sundown. The Mackenzie Eskimos when traveling 

 at this time of year (and it is their favorite time for 

 traveling) ordinarily get up about one or two o'clock in 

 the morning and spend three or four hours in cooking and 

 in their usual talkative breakfasts. They then hitch up 

 the dogs any time between five and seven o'clock and are 

 on the road sometime before the faintest dawning. About 

 noon they stop so as to have plenty of daylight for mak- 

 ing camp and feeding the dogs, and everything is snug 

 and comfortable before it is yet dark. On cloudy days 

 we sometimes camp as early as ten or eleven o'clock in the 

 morning, for on overcast days there are only three or 

 four hours of good working light. Pitch darkness such 

 as we have in the tropics or "temperate" lands is unknown 

 in the Arctic, for even on a cloudy midwinter night there 

 is enough light from the stars behind the clouds reflected 

 by the snow on the ground so you can see a man in dark 

 clothes ten to fifty feet away. 



In many later years in the North I have had hundreds 



