IN SEARCH OF OUR OWN EXPEDITION 177 



in the North, Inspector Moody wanted to offer him some 

 courtesy and purchased a team of the best dogs obtainable 

 in that region to send to Amundsen as a present. But 

 Amundsen already had all the good dogs he could use and 

 was having the difficulty all northern travelers know of 

 finding sufficient food for them. To show his appreci- 

 ation of Inspector Moody's gift he kept one dog from the 

 team but returned the others with an explanation of the 

 cause. The next year Captain Amundsen had tried to 

 sail west to the Pacific but had been frozen in (as we have 

 explained) at King Point and had spent the winter there 

 as a neighbor to Sten, for Amundsen's winter camp was 

 but a few hundred yards away from the wreck of Sten's 

 schooner Bonanza. The next summer when he sailed 

 away Amundsen made Sten a present of a whole dog team 

 which he had brought from Greenland and of this one 

 dog from Hudson Bay. The Hudson Bay dog was so 

 much bigger and stronger than the Greenland dogs and 

 was so likely to injure them if they got into a fight, that 

 Sten was glad to sell him to me although he was the best 

 of all his dogs. 



So when the widow and her son wanted to make their 

 trip, I loaned them The Owl — that being our name for 

 the Hudson Bay dog. This was some months after my 

 trip across the Mackenzie delta with Roxy and I had for- 

 gotten the peculiar Eskimo point of view when it comes 

 to feeding dogs. On the trip the woman and boy were 

 stormbound several days at King Point and during that 

 time they ran out of food. I happened to be making a 

 short trip at that time. When I met them I was astounded 

 to see that although their own dog was fat, mine that I 

 had lent them looked like a skeleton. When I asked how 

 this happened, I was told they had run out of food and 



