To take up the story where Borup leaves it, when the first wounded
walrus had been despatched with a bullet, and the floats were all taken
in, an oar was erected in the boat for a signal, and the _Roosevelt_
steamed up. The floats and the lines were taken over the rail of the
ship, the walrus raised to the surface of the water, a hook inserted,
and the winch on deck hoisted the monster on board, to be later skinned
and cut up by the expert knives of the Eskimos. While this work was
going on, the deck of the ship looked like a slaughterhouse, with the
ravenous dogs--at this stage of the journey we had already about one
hundred and fifty--waiting, ears erect and eyes sparkling, to catch the
refuse thrown them by the Eskimos.

[Illustration: A NARWHAL KILLED OFF CAPE UNION, JULY, 1909. THE MOST
NORTHERLY SPECIMEN EVER CAPTURED]

In the Whale Sound region we sometimes obtained narwhal and deer, but
there was no narwhal hunting to speak of on the upward journey this last
time. Walrus, narwhal, and seal meat are valuable food for dogs, but a
white man does not usually enjoy it--unless he is nearly starved. Many
times, however, during my twenty-three years of arctic exploration, I
have thanked God for even a bite of raw dog.

CHAPTER X

KNOCKING AT THE GATEWAY TO THE POLE

From Etah to Cape Sheridan! Imagine about three hundred and fifty miles
of almost solid ice--ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat
ice, ragged and tortured ice, ice that, for every foot of height
revealed above the surface of the water, hides seven feet below--a
theater of action which for diabolic and Titanic struggle makes Dante's
frozen circle of the Inferno seem like a skating pond.

Then imagine a little black ship, solid, sturdy, compact, strong and
resistant as any vessel built by mortal hands can be, yet utterly
insignificant in comparison with the white, cold adversary she must
fight. And on this little ship are sixty-nine human beings, men, women,
and children, whites and Eskimos, who have gone out into the crazy,
ice-tortured channel between Baffin Bay and the Polar Sea--gone out to
help prove the reality of a dream which has bewitched some of the most
daring minds of the world for centuries, a will-o'-the-wisp in the
pursuit of which men have frozen, and starved, and died. The music that
ever sounded in our ears had for melody the howling of two hundred and
forty-six wild dogs, for a bass accompaniment the deep, low