Before resuming our march there was a painful scene at the sledges. Toolooah heard of the death of his mother, in whose charge he had left his little daughter when starting on the expedition, and a group of relatives and friends stooped around the sledge weeping, the women giving vent to their feelings in prolonged wails and moaning. This lasted for about ten minutes, during which I learned from the other natives that they had a very severe winter and much suffering for lack of food. Several deaths had occurred in the tribes since we left. A large portion was now at Wager River, but would be down in the spring or early in the summer. We afterward learned that they, too, had suffered for food. After shaking hands with other old friends at the camp we went into Armow's igloo and ate some frozen walrus meat and blubber that tasted delicious to us, the blubber especially, it having been so long since we had eaten fat food, though so much requiring it. They had but a short supply of meat on hand when we arrived, and the advent of twenty-two hungry travellers and nineteen starving dogs soon reduced their stores, so that, a storm at once setting in from the north-west, making it a useless task to hunt walrus, there was a famine in camp before the end of a week. They can only hunt walrus successfully at Depot Island with a southerly wind to hold the ice-pack to the floe. Seals are hunted with dogs to find the blow-hole of amog-low, or seal igloo, which, often covered with loose snow, is hidden from the hunter. When found, a wall of snow is built as a protection against the wind, while the hunter waits for hours, and sometimes for days, until the seal comes up to blow, when he is struck through the hole in the ice with a spear and held by a line attached to the boat. It is necessary for this style of hunting that the weather should be such that one can see at a short distance, or on the trackless waste of smooth ice the hunter is apt to get lost. Most of the time we were here it was blowing so that land could not be seen at one hundred yards' distance. It might be well to explain here that, when the wind blows, the dry snow fills the air so that it is thicker than the severest snow-storm in the temperate zone. The Inuits call this condition of affairs "pairk-se-uk-too", and one can witness it almost daily during the winter.