162 THE ARCTIC PRAIRIES 



In some seasons the dogs catch Rabbits enough to 

 keep them up. But this year the Rabbits were gone. 

 They are very clever at robbing fish-nets at times, 

 but these were far from the fort. Reduced to such 

 desperate straits for food, what wonder that canni- 

 balism should be common! Not only the dead, but the 

 sick or disabled of their own kind are torn to pieces and 

 devoured. I was told of one case where a brutal driver 

 disabled one of his dogs with heavy blows ; its compan- 

 ions did not wait till it was dead before they feasted. 

 It is hard to raise pups because the mothers so often 

 devour their own young; and this is a charge I never 

 heard laid to the Wolf, the ancestor of these dogs, 

 which shows how sadly the creature has been de- 

 teriorated by contact with man. There seems no 

 length to which they will not go for food. Politeness 

 forbids my mentioning the final diet for which they 

 scramble around the camp. Never in my life before 

 have I seen such utter degradation by the power of 

 the endless hunger pinch. Nevertheless — and here I 

 expect the reader to doubt, even as I did when first I 

 heard it, no matter how desperate their straits — these 

 gormandisers of unmentionable filth, these starvelings, 

 in their dire extremity will turn away in disgust from 

 duck or any other web-footed water-fowl. 



Billy Loutit had shot a Pelican; the skin was care- 

 fully preserved and the body guarded for the dogs, 

 thinking that this big thing, weighing 6 or 7 pounds, 

 would furnish a feast for one or two. The dogs knew 

 me, and rushed like a pack of Wolves at sight of com- 

 ing food. The bigger ones fought back the smaller. 



