i 7 4 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



of Canada it is not likely to be colder than that more 

 than ten or twenty days in any one winter. 



It is only in the interior of a continent or large island 

 a hundred miles or more from the coast that you may 

 occasionally get a temperature of sixty below zero. Your 

 first morning of that kind of weather is a marvelous ex- 

 perience. The air is so clear that you can see three or 

 four times as far as you can in any lowland in the South 

 (mountain air is clear in all parts of the world). You 

 can see with the bare eyes almost as well at 50 ° below 

 as you can with opera glasses at 50 ° above. But if your 

 eyesight is improved two or three times over, your hear- 

 ing becomes ten times keener. I have heard distinctly at 

 a mile the footfall of caribou walking quietly through 

 slightly crusted snow. Firth told me that in the moun- 

 tains west of Fort Macpherson he had frequently heard 

 Indians chopping their firewood in camps that were ten 

 miles away. 



From Christmas until April the arctic skies are clear 

 most of the time and you have such experiences as I have 

 just described. But when the temperature begins to rise 

 towards zero Fahrenheit, the skies begin to cloud over, 

 fogs are frequent, the snow storms are twice as numerous 

 and the snowfall heavier than in the next worst period, 

 which is the late fall. 



When Cape York and I started west we still had clear 

 weather, but Captain Leavitt warned me that it was un- 

 likely to continue that w; y and that we might miss Flax- 

 man Island and the ship unless we were careful. Fear- 

 ing this difficulty, he gave me as good a description of the 

 topography as he could, but unfortunately he had seen it 

 only from shipboard in summer. The land then has an 

 appearance quite different from that of winter, and the 



