u8 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



or three settlements this side of Tuktuyaktok, in which 

 case we could secure food that much sooner. 



It was not long after I noticed the slack traces of my 

 dogs until they stopped pulling entirely. Roxy then un- 

 hitched them and let them follow behind the sled. From 

 my experience with the Indians up the river and from 

 the fact also that Roxy seemed to be angry not only at 

 me for not providing dog feed but also at my dogs for 

 pulling so badly, I wondered why he did not cut a willow 

 switch from the river bank and try to whip them into 

 pulling. When I asked him about it he said that whipping 

 tired dogs was one of the white man's customs which he 

 had not yet learned. The Eskimo idea was that a dog 

 should be treated with great consideration, and his opin- 

 ion was that a good dog would pull about as long as he 

 had any strength without being whipped. Whipping, he 

 said, would not help our speed much, if any, but would 

 hurt his reputation and lower his standing in the com- 

 munity. He told me that the only approved Eskimo 

 method of inducing dogs to work is either by shouting to 

 them and trying to cheer them up by the voice, or else by 

 having some person walk ahead 0/ the team of whom the 

 dogs are fond so that they will pull hard to try to keep up. 



I regret to say that during the twelve years following 

 1906 the Mackenzie River Eskimos adopted the custom 

 of whipping dogs, so that when I was among them last 

 (191 8) it was only a few of the old men who did not 

 do so. 



Something like forty miles from Tuktuyaktok we be- 

 gan to look for people at well-known camp sites, but all 

 the camps turned out to be deserted. We were thirty 

 miles away when our dogs had become so weak that it 

 was necessary to leave behind most of our belongings. 



