We found many eggs, and Dad and some of the others, on the other island, found great caches of eggs, hundreds of them evidently gathered by Eskimos who had visited the islands earlier in the season and left them there to get them later. They were put away in a sort of hole with rocks piled up around and over them so that they were perfectly protected, and with the chinks of the rock packed up with moss. They also found the skull of a polar bear. [[61]]
We found three eggs with little ducks just hatching out. These we brought back to the boat. I put one under a mother duck which I had found alive in an Eskimo trap and the other two behind the galley stove where it was nice and hot. Two of them lived quite a while and then they were killed, painlessly, and put away for specimens. We got some nests for the Museum and I got one for my own collection.
[[62]]
CHAPTER VI
ACROSS MELVILLE BAY
By the twentieth of July we were pretty nearly across Melville Bay. That was just exactly a month from the time we started from home which is most awfully good time. Of course we were very lucky for all the way we had practically no real trouble with ice.
Melville Bay usually is about the most dangerous and hardest place in the north. Lots of years it may take weeks to make the passage, and sometimes there just isn’t any way to get by it. Later Dr. Rasmussen told me that he has been drifting, frozen in the pack ice, for six weeks solid while trying to get through to the north, and in mid-summer at that. [[63]]