16 
PLANS FOR SLEDGING. 
companion whenever we could get it; and a frozen liver 
upon our sledge was valued far above the same weight 
of pemmican. Now as I write, short of all meat, with¬ 
out an ounce of walrus for sick or sound, my thoughts 
recal the frost-tempered junks of this pachydermoid 
amphibion as the highest of longed-for luxuries. 
“My plans for sledging, simple as I once thought 
them, and simple certainly as compared with those of 
the English parties, have completely changed. Give 
me an eight-pound reindeer-fur bag to sleep in, an 
Esquimaux lamp with a lump of moss, a sheet-iron 
snow-melter or a copper soup-pot, with a tin cylinder to 
slip over it and defend it from the wind, a good piece 
cle resistance of raw walrus-beef; and I want nothing 
more for a long journey, if the thermometer will keep 
itself as high as minus 30°. Give me a bear-skin bag 
and coffee to boot; and with the clothes on my back I 
am ready for minus 60°,—but no wind. 
“ The programme runs after this fashion. Keep the 
blood in motion, without loitering on the march: and 
for the halt, raise a snow-house; or, if the snow lie 
scant or impracticable, ensconce yourself in a burrow 
or under the hospitable lee of an inclined hummock- 
slab. The outside flit of your walrus sustains your 
little moss fire: its frozen slices give you bread, its 
frozen blubber gives you butter, its scrag ends make the 
soup. The snow supplies you with water; and when 
you are ambitious of coffee there is a bagful stowed 
away in your boot. Spread out your bear bag, your 
only heavy movable; stuff your reindeer bag inside, 
