Three weeks had now passed since the party had left Kalutunah, and the attempt to live on the resources of the country had utterly failed, the only game killed by the hunter Petersen being eighteen ptarmigan (arctic grouse). With food for a week only, "to appease the gnawing pains of hunger we resorted to the expedient of eating the rock-lichen, which our party called stone-moss. Black externally with a white interior, it is an inch in diameter and the thickness of a wafer. When boiled it makes a glutinous and slightly nutritious fluid. Poor as was this plant, it at least filled the stomach and kept off the horrid sensation of hunger until we got to sleep." By the middle of October the situation was impossible, with the cold forty degrees below the freezing-point, their bedding damp, the stone-moss disagreeing with some, and one man sick. They talked of a desperate foot journey to seek aid at Netlik, the native encampment forty miles to the north, but food and strength seemed equally lacking. Even if made, would the journey be profitable? Hayes had already noted that the Eskimos "were poor beyond description. Nature seems to have supplied them with nothing but life, and they appear to have wrested from the animal world everything which they possessed. Clothed wholly in skins, with weapons fashioned of bone, they subsisted exclusively on animal food. [He adds:] There seems no hope for us save in stone-moss." During an awful blizzard, when hopes were feeblest, two native hunters burst into the hut equally to the astonishment and relief of the boat party. Hayes says: "Invested from head to foot in a coating of ice and snow, shapeless lumps of whiteness, they reminded me of my boy-made snow kings. Their long, heavy fox-skin coats, surmounted by head-hoods, their bear-skin trousers, their seal-skin boots and mittens were saturated with snow. Their hair, eyelashes, and few chin hairs were sparkling with white frost. Each carried in his right hand a whip and in his left a lump of frozen meat and blubber. Throwing the meat on the floor, they stripped off their outer garments and hung them on the rafters. Underneath their frosty garments they wore a shirt of bird-skins. One of these new-comers was the Angekok, the sturdy, good-natured, and voluble Kalutunah. Soon we were rejoicing in a good substantial meal at the expense of our guests." The next morning when the Inuits were leaving the starving sledge dogs attacked Hayes, who says: "An instant more and I should have been torn to pieces. I had faced death before, but never had I felt as then; my blood fairly curdled in my veins. Death down the red throats of a pack of wolfish dogs was something peculiarly unpleasant.... The poor animals, howling piteously, had been tied separately for thirty-six hours and were savagely hungry. Every line or piece of skin or article of food was out of their reach. One, however, had already eaten the trace by which he was tied."