Remains or fragments are unknown in Arctic regions. The dead are consumed by the living, and the living find their never-ceasing occupation in the toilsome search for food. In my three Arctic expeditions, I very seldom indeed found the remains of animals, never the remains of a bear or a fox. The man who visits these wastes must do homage to the principle of eating everything, and throwing away nothing. Franklin was unsurpassed in this, but I believe we were little behind him. Franklin and his people found the flesh of a white fox as pleasant to the taste as young geese—a proof how entirely they had forgotten how geese taste. They preferred foxes, too, to lean reindeer; and they considered the flesh of a grey bear exceedingly palatable, though even the Eskimos eat it only in dire necessity. Reindeer marrow, even raw, was to them a great delicacy, and they ate animals in a state of decomposition. Barentz and his crew were very modest in their tastes; they compared whale-flesh to beef, and foxes to rabbits, as articles of diet; bears’ meat they utterly detested. Once only it seems they partook of the liver of a bear, and three of his men became exceedingly ill in consequence, their skin peeling off from head to foot. Kane was prejudiced against bear, notwithstanding the great straits to which he was reduced, and complains of this food as being absolutely uneatable. The testimony of Dunér is more favourable. “If,” says he, “a bear has not been eating walrus or seal in a state of semiputrefaction before he is killed, his flesh, though somewhat coarse, is yet palatable, and not at all prejudicial to health.” Parry thought whale-flesh and walrus-flesh equally distasteful: he makes an exception in favour only of the heart of the walrus; but he speaks of the tenderness and excellence of the flesh of young seals. As for ourselves, we disdained nothing that we could get hold of, after the manner of Sir John Ross, who thought the fox the best of all food, better than the gull (_Larus tridactylus_). [Illustration: DINING ON BEARS’ FLESH.] 17. The continued moisture of the last few days had completely saturated our canvas boots; and those of several of us were besides nearly worn out, and in the morning when completely frozen, to put the foot into one was as bad as putting it into an ice-hole, so that we were obliged to thaw them over a spirit-flame, and to knock their heels with a hammer continually during the march. Sussich had made himself a pair of new boots out of a cloth jacket. It would, however, be a mistake to think that we should have been any better off with leather boots. In fact, we could not have put them on, and in the increasing cold of the following weeks our feet would certainly have been frost-bitten. Our clothes were completely saturated in like manner, and whenever the temperature fell they became stiff with ice. I suffered the least of any, for my bird-skin garments were the best preservatives against the penetration of moisture.