TRAVELS AFTER THE SUN CAME BACK 169 



realized also that the situation was of a sort which ac- 

 cording to all the books I had read should lead to tragedy. 

 The Eskimo sled had been light, for they had bought 

 very few things from the ship. But mine was heavy, for 

 Captain Leavitt had sold me all the flour and ether things 

 that Sten wanted. My sled being heavy with groceries, 

 the Eskimos had put on theirs all the camp gear and bed 

 clothing and all the equipment. During the early part 

 of the day a frying pan had fallen off their sled. I had 

 picked it up and stuck it on mine, and this was the only 

 implement I now had. 



I remembered that somewhere in this vicinity on the 

 way west we had seen a deserted Eskimo snowhouse. 

 When I could not get the dogs to move ahead farther, I 

 left them and taking the frying pan with me I plodded 

 into the wind searching for the snowhouse. It turned 

 out to be only a few hundred yards away. 



It was an old house built in the early fall and repeated 

 blizzards had cut away at the roof until a hole had been 

 made by the wind. Through this hole the house had 

 been packed full of snow. I did not have even a hunting 

 knife big enough to use for a snow knife, so there was no 

 use trying to make a new house. Furthermore, I had 

 never tried to build one although I had seen Ovayuak 

 build several. The only thing to do, then, was to try to 

 dig out the soft snow from the interior of the house with 

 my frying pan shovel. About two hours of work enabled 

 me to do this sufficiently. I then went back to the sled 

 and took a small piece of canvas that was on it, unhitched 

 the dogs and led them to my proposed camp. While I 

 was doing this a good deal of fresh snow had drifted in so 

 that I had to do some more shoveling with the frying pan. 

 I then dropped two of the dogs into the house with the 



