The Worthington advance. [volume] (Worthington, Minn.) 1874-1908, 1889-01-31


This day we left the head Of a
deep inlet and thought that by
the tine another four days had
passed we would be. at Dangerous
Rapids at the mouth of Backs Great
Fish river, where natives catch fish
and where we could therefore replen-s
ish our supplies for our dogs without.
using more of our precious sreindeers
meat. Still we were travelling across
a wholly unknown country, and every
thing was purely conjecture. =:
The four days faded into five, then
six. On the seventh my dog-driver,
Toolooah, fed the dogs from the rein
deer meat. had felt as if I must have
them fed before, but I fully compre-
hended that he knew the best and I
must let him have his own way about
the poor beasts. ~
Then came another long stretch of
six days, till November %, before the
dogs were again fed, and now only
lightly.
Then came the third stretch without
food-an interval OF seven days, which
ended on the fifth day Of December
when we reached the Rapids, and found
a huge cairn Of fish put up by the
Eskimo. This we bought, and gave
our poor polar puppies a most royal
feed. The thermometer had been as
low as minus forty degrees. We had
travelled nearly two hundred miles,
and the intervals of feeding had been,
for three times, about week apart
yet not single dog of the nineteen in
my sledge had succumbed, although
each one had dragged over double his
own weight through it all. Such a
trip would have killed every dog OF
any other breed but these from this
part of Eskimo land, while white men
pulling such a sledge with such
a load would have starved before they
had made one-third of the way. Little
enough do We know about winter
travel, in comparison with the northern
natives. In as cunning a way as one
could devise they cover the bottom of
their broad sledge runners with ice
which makes it so slippery that a dog
can pull four or five times his own
weight on sledge on the best snow;
without this ice he probably could not
pull one-quarter as much. One who
has not seen this great aid to sledging
can not imagine what a help it is; and
when / read of the many Arctic sledge-
trips by those who know nothing of it
my admiration for their doing so we'll
under such difficulties as many of them
have had, is fully equal to my pity that
they did not know how to wipe half or
two-thirds their labors away. 1t is an
intricate and delicate affair, known
only to perfection among tho Eskimo.
We left the kind Eskimo on Back S
liver December II, having been joined
oy my other two sledges, From now
on, the thermometer sank to 600
60 and once go, and the contest
zephyrs cut like razors. We had sup
posed we would make twenty or thirty
miles a day on the level ice of the
river and be home by New Years. But
instead OF being better sledging it was
much worse than on the rolling land,
aud We seldom made over five or six
miles day. So at last we left the
river and started straight-away across
the hills.
On the third of January it was
seventy-one below zero-one hundred
and three degrees below freezing-the
coolest weather on the trip and the
coolest ever endured by white men
travelling, for that day we moved camp
ten or twelve miles further on. Our
fish were now rapidly disappearing.
and coupled with the intense cold and
hard work our poor dogs were faring
badly. At the time we left the river
we had lost one fine dog. We were
stripped of all but nineteen when we
reached Hudson's Bay. Worst OF all
our fatty food was entirely gone.
With a goodly amount of this
person or an animal cal re-
s;st bitter cold; but the lean and
blue reindeer meat gave but little
sustenance to the poor brutes doing
such hard work in such severe weather.
There was none too much to give them
either, so short were the days-bu,
two or three hours long-in which our
Eskimo could hunt them. All this told
terribly. Hardly a day past that We
did not lose dog or two.
They were through all this horrible
time perfect respectors of their human
allies, and the little children used tt
go among them and play with them by
pelting them over the back with their
toy whips; and yet the Same dogs were
starving and should one of them die
his comrades would eat him. I notice
this particularly as some sensational
writer's have tried to make their readers
believe that the Eskimo dogs are liable
to become dangerous fellows even to a
powerfully built man, when simply
hungry, and to be worse than wild
beasts when ravenous. It is true that
SO wild are they for food after long de-
privation that their actions might be
taken by people with ti1norous natures
Tor intentions to devOur person; but
any onslaught of Eskimo dogs is un-
known among the northern natives
where I travelled. It was pitiable in
the extreme to see their sufferings
rs they SO devotedly helped us
slong, many of them up to the
very minute they had to be taken from
the harness and abandoned on the
road. Our Eskimo hunters made
heroic efforts at hunting, but the
Arctic day was 50 short and reindeer
and musk-oxen so scarce that in order
to give the poor dogs any we often had
to reduce our own food-supply which
we cheerfully did.
As they dropped out along the way,
we harnessed ourselves in their places
to the sledge traces, and it was only
thus we were not compelled to aban
don important parts of our load.