Although our larder was now well stocked with meat for food and blubber for fuel, we were still in need of furs and skins to prepare a new equipment with which to return to the Greenland shores. The animals whose pelts we required were abundant everywhere. But they were too active to be caught by the art and the weapons evolved earlier in the chase of the walrus, bear and musk ox.
E-TUK-I-SHOOK WAITING FOR A SEAL AT A BLOW-HOLE
A series of efforts, therefore, was directed to the fox, the hare, the ptarmigan and the seal. It was necessary to devise special methods and means of capture for each family of animals. The hare was perhaps the most important, not only because its delicately flavored meat furnished a pleasing change from the steady diet of musk ox, but also because its skin is not equalled by any other for stockings. In our quest of the musk ox we had startled little groups of creatures from many centers. Their winter fur was not prime until after the middle of October. Taking notes of their haunts and their habits, we had, therefore, reserved the hare hunt until the days just before sunset.
TOWARD CAPE SPARBO IN A CANVAS BOAT
WALRUS—PRIZE OF A FIFTEEN HOUR BATTLE—4,000 POUNDS OF MEAT AND FAT
We had learned to admire this little aristocrat. It is the most beautiful, most delicate of northern creatures. Early in the summer we had found it grazing in the green meadows along the base of bird cliffs. The little gray bunnies then played with their mothers about crystal dens. Now the babes were full grown and clothed in the same immaculate white of the parents. We could distinguish the young only by their greater activity and their ceaseless curiosity.
In the immediate vicinity of camp we found them first in gullies where the previous winter's snow had but recently disappeared. Here the grass was young and tender and of a flavor to suit their taste for delicacies. A little later they followed the musk ox to the shores of lagoons or to the wind-swept hills. Still later, as the winter snows blanketed the pastures and the bitter storms of night swept the cheerless drifts, they dug long tunnels under the snow for food, and when the storms were too severe remained housed in these feeding dugouts.
An animal of rare intelligence, the hare is quick to grasp an advantage, and therefore as winter advances we find it a constant companion of the musk ox. For in the diggings of the musk ox this little creature finds sufficient food uncovered for its needs.
With a skeleton as light as that of the bird and a skin as frail as paper it is nevertheless as well prepared to withstand the rigors of the Arctic as the bear with its clumsy anatomy. The entire makeup of the hare is based upon the highest strain of animal economy. It expends the greatest possible amount of energy at the cost of the least consumption of food. Its fur is as white as the boreal snows and absorbs color somewhat more readily. In a stream of crimson light it appears red and white; in a shadow of ice or in the darkness of night it assumes the subdued blue of the Polar world. Nature has bleached its fur seemingly to afford the best protection against the frigid chill, for a suitable white fur permits the escape of less bodily heat than any colored or shaded pelt.