142 
SETTING OUT. 
and wide as a folio volume. These when frozen were 
laid directly upon the cross-bars of the sledge, and 
served as a sort of floor. The rifle and the noonghak 
were placed on top, and the whole was covered by a 
well-rubbed bear-skin, strapped down by a pliant cord 
of walrus-hide. 
Thus stowed, the sledge is wonderfully adapted to its 
wild travel. It may roll over and over, for it defies 
an upset; and its runners of the bones of the whale 
seem to bear with impunity the fierce shocks of the ice. 
The meat, as hard as a plank, is the driver’s seat: it is 
secure from the dogs; and when it is wanted for a cold 
cut, which is not seldom, the sledge is turned upside- 
down, and the layers of flesh are hacked away from 
between the cross-bars. 
We started with a wild yell of dogs and men in 
chorus, Kalutunah and myself leading. In about two 
hours we had reached a high berg about fifteen miles 
north of the brig. Here I reconnoitred the ice ahead. 
It was not cheering; the outside tide-channel, where I 
had broken through the fall before, was now full of 
squeezed ice, and the plain beyond the bergs seemed 
much distorted. The Esquimaux, nevertheless, acceded 
to my wish to attempt the passage, and we were soon 
among the hummocks. We ran beside our sledges, 
clinging to the upstanders, but making perhaps four 
miles an hour where, unassisted by the dogs, we could 
certainly have made but one. Things began to look 
more auspicious. 
We halted about thirty miles north of the brig, after 
I 
