288 
THE FESTIVAL. 
vociferating according to his own impulse, they urged 
both boats upon the floes. A crowd of hands seized 
the seal and bore him up to safer ice. The men 
seemed half crazy: I had not realized how much we 
were reduced by absolute famine. They ran over the 
floe, crying and laughing and brandishing their knives. 
It was not five minutes before every man was sucking 
his bloody fingers or mouthing long strips of raw 
blubber. 
Not an ounce of this seal was lost. The intestines 
found their way into the soup-kettles without any 
observance of the preliminary home-processes. The 
cartilaginous parts of the fore-flippers were cut off in 
the melee, and passed round to be chewed upon; and 
even the liver, warm and raw as it was, bade fair to be 
eaten before it had seen the pot. That night, on the 
large halting-floe, to which, in contempt of the dangers 
of di’ifting, we happy men had hauled our boats, two 
entire planks of the Red Eric were devoted to a grand 
cooking-fire, and we enjoyed a rare and savage feast. 
This was our last experience of the disagreeable 
effects of hunger. In the words of George Stephenson, 
“ The charm w r as broken, and the dogs were safe.” 
The dogs I have said little about, for none of us 
liked to think of them. The poor creatures Toodla 
and Whitey had been taken with us as last resources 
against starvation. They were, as McGary worded it, 
“ meat on the hoof,” and “ able to carry their own fat 
over the floes.” Once, near Weary Man’s Rest, I had 
been on the point of killing them; but they had been 
