LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA 117 



all the more confusing because he had explained to me 

 earlier in the year the Eskimo communistic idea of food, 

 where what belongs to you belongs to me equally. He 

 now told me that this form of food communism applied 

 only when you were at home. He said (and I found it 

 later to be true) that you can arrive at a man's house 

 with any number of dogs and feed them and your party 

 out of his fish pile. But when you leave you are not 

 entitled to take with you any of his fish for your men or 

 your dogs, but must buy what you want. My two dogs 

 could have eaten at his fish pile all winter if we had re- 

 mained at Shingle Point, but on a journey it was an 

 entirely different thing. 



Roxy now seemed to be angry at me for not having 

 brought along fish for my own dogs and also apparently 

 at Sten for not having explained to me that it was neces- 

 sary. He said that he had fed my dogs for two or three 

 days at the beginning of the journey but that each day he 

 had done so he had become more angry at the injustice 

 of being compelled to do it, until finally, when he found 

 we were lost and that the journey was going to be longer 

 than we expected, he had stopped feeding them. No ar- 

 guments of mine would induce him to feed them now. I 

 argued the less because he said it was his intention to stop 

 feeding his own dogs either to-night or to-morrow night. 

 "For," he said, "dogs are more used than men to going 

 without food. They can stand it better, and anyway we 

 have the upper hand and must look after ourselves." 



Being new in the Arctic, I was greatly worried by the 

 situation and began to picture myself heroically starving 

 to death. Of course, there was no real fear of this, for 

 it was only seventy-five miles or so to Tuktuyaktok. 

 Roxy now told me that he thought there might be two 



