THROUGH THE PRESSURE RIDGE 159 
plies ten miles nearer the land, returning to the 
igloos on the big floe for the night. We found 
that at one of the temporary caches along the way 
two bears had destroyed a case of coal oil and scat¬ 
tered two tins of biscuit over the ice. 
It was hard luck, after getting the oil so near the 
island, to have bears to contend with in addition 
to the elements, especially as our dogs were not 
trained to follow a bear, so that there was no use 
trying to go after them. A polar bear has a very 
acute sense of smell and can scent a human being 
in plenty of time to get away from him, and as a 
bear can go faster than a man it can escape easily, 
unless the hunter has dogs trained from puppy- 
hood to follow a bear and round him up, the way 
the dogs of Greenland can do. Of the bears that 
the McKinlay party shot the meat was simply cut 
off the bones, to have no useless weight to carry and 
some of it was cached on the ice, with the skins, 
and the rest brought with us. We expected to be 
able to get it later on but never did because we did 
not go back over the trail again, and we expected 
to get more bears on our way to the island. 
On the tenth we kept up the task of sledging 
the supplies forward. We worked from daylight 
to dark, some with pickaxes, others with sledges 
with light loads, for the going was rough. The 
Eskimo built the igloos and by night we had all 
