other. I was one cartridge to the good and this I gave to the big bull as an act of mercy to put him out of his misery, standing there with braced feet, and blood-clogged nostrils, struggling for breath. I could not help thinking, as he went down, that it was a shame to enter their quiet lives in this murderous way. But their lives had been peaceful and their end was quick, while we had walked through the outskirts of hell, and had been dying by inches, and anyway what would it matter to any of us a hundred years from now—their bones bleaching here on these Arctic slopes, mine—where? I had been through this same thing eleven years before, but such experiences do not increase a man’s elasticity. I threw myself down on the body of the bull as being less cold and hard than the snow, and heard the shouts of my Eskimos as they rushed at the carcasses; then the clicking of the knives and smacking of lips. Then the cold compelled me to pull myself together. Wet with perspiration next the skin and coated with frost outside, I knew the unpleasant hours before me and eating a few mouthfuls of raw meat, hastened to roll myself in one of the skins in the effort to get warm. It was no use. Wet as I was and weak and tired, the green skin seemed to be no protection against the biting wind, and for the next twelve hours I shivered and ached in my blanket shirt while the Eskimos and dogs ate till they were near bursting. Then the tent, the little remaining camp gear, and the remainder of the party were brought up. Perhaps an hour before they arrived the wind came sweeping across the land with still greater force, increasing my discomfort, and I was more than glad to be able to crawl into the tent, where the night (owing to the wind), seemed the coldest of the entire trip. This herd of musk-oxen comprised one large bull, one smaller bull with slightly deformed horns, two adult cows, one with a calf a few days old; the other ready to calve in a day or two, one small cow, and two yearlings, one male and one female. All the animals were very thin, looking almost like skeletons when their skins were removed, but their paunches were full, and their coats in good condition, not at all ragged as were those of the Independence Bay musk-oxen at the same time of the year in 1892 and 1895. The animals were also smaller and the patch on the back perceptibly whiter than the Grant Land musk-oxen.