OTHER BEASTS OF BURDEN 297 
dogs, or for the Eskimo to make his long migrations 
with his family and household goods to fresh hunting- 
grounds without their aid. If the epidemic of rabies 
which half-destroved their teams had not been arrested 
by the ice-fiord of Jacobshaven, the Greenlanders 
would by now have been pensioners on Danish 
charity. It was noticed, as evidence of the absolute 
dependence of the Arctic man upon the services of 
the Arctic dog as a beast of burden, that whenever a 
native lost his dogs, he went very rapidly down-hill in 
the scale of Eskimo respectability, and became a sort 
of hanger-on to the fortunate possessor of a sledge- 
team. Exactly the same degradation has been ob- 
served in the case of the Tartar who is too poor to 
keep his horse, and a corresponding rise in the social 
scale of the “foot” Indians of Patagonia, when a 
neighbouring tribe of horse-Indians lent them horses, 
and provided them with hunters to teach their use in 
the capture of game. On good ground, a team of 
six Eskimo dogs will draw a load of from eight to ten 
hundred-weight at a speed of seven miles an hour. 
Large teams, with light sledges and little except the 
driver to carry, are wonderfully rapid. Kane, the 
Arctic traveller, was carried for seven hundred miles 
at an average rate of fifty-seven miles a day. 
Lieutenant Schwatka sent two Eskimo with a double 
team of forty dogs, the sledge having its runners 
“iced ” by pouring water over them, to the rescue of 
a half-frozen sailor, who was viewed from the ship at 
a distance of ten miles across an ice-covered bay just 
