4 MY ARCTIC JOURNAL 



northerly tribe of human beings on the globe, and in many- 

 ways has been enabled to get a closer insight into their ways 

 and customs than had been obtained before. 



I rarely, if ever, take up the thread of our Arctic expe- 

 riences without reverting to two pictures : one is the first 

 night that we spent on the Greenland shore after the depar- 

 ture of the " Kite," when, in a little tent on the rocks — a tent 

 which the furious wind threatened every moment to carry 

 away bodily — she watched by my side as I lay a helpless 

 cripple with a broken leg, our small party the only human 

 beings on that shore, and the little " Kite," from which we 

 had landed, drifted far out among the ice by the storm, and 

 invisible through the rain. Long afterward she told me that 

 every unwonted sound of the wind set her heart beating with 

 the thoughts of some hungry bear roaming along the shore 

 and attracted by the unusual sight of the tent ; yet she never 

 gave a sign at the time of her fears, lest it should disturb me. 



The other picture is that of a scene perhaps a month or 

 two later, when — myself still a cripple, but not entirely 

 helpless — this same woman sat for an hour beside me in the 

 stern of a b(iat, calmly reloading our empty firearms while a 

 herd of infuriated walrus about us thrust their savage heads 

 with gleaming tusks and bloodshot eyes out of the water 

 close to the muzzles of our rifles, so that she could have 

 touched them with her hand, in their efforts to get their 

 tusks over the gunwale and capsize the boat. I may per- 

 haps be pardoned for saying that I never think of these 



