HOW WE HUNT POLAR BEARS 287 



inland. This took me about an hour, during which the 

 Eskimos chatted and enjoyed themselves. At the end 

 of the first hour I would turn eastward to walk from hill- 

 top to hilltop parallel to the coast and approximately 

 three miles inland. About this time the Eskimos would 

 come out of the camp and commence preparing in a 

 leisurely way for the day's march. They would pull 

 down the tent, roll up the bedding, load everything on 

 the sled and hitch up the dogs. Designedly this was 

 done slowly, and by the time they were ready to start I 

 would be five or six miles ahead of them. 



Occasionally during the day they would stop at some 

 promontory and with their field glasses scan the country 

 inland from them and ahead for sight of me or for any 

 signal. My custom was that if I saw game I would heap 

 up a pile of stones on top of some hill. This would be 

 a sign to the Eskimos that I would probably kill game 

 about abreast of this monument. They would, accord- 

 ingly, camp on the coast at the point nearest to the 

 monument and then come inland with an empty sled to 

 fetch any meat I might have secured. 



We had also a system of signals which could be inter- 

 preted at a distance through field glasses. In some cases 

 when I saw game I sat down on a hilltop and waited until 

 I saw through my field glasses that the Eskimos had 

 stopped and were surveying the country through their 

 glasses. As soon as they saw me, they would make a 

 signal which I could see, whereupon I would stand up 

 and make signals which they in turn could interpret in 

 one of half a dozen ways. The signal might mean that 

 they were to camp and stay in camp, or might mean that 

 they were to camp and then come inland for meat. Again 

 the meaning might be that they could proceed to the next 



