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whenever he wakes up. At something over a hundred yards the seal will see you. He then studies you carefully for several minutes, occasionally lowering his head and pretending to sleep but really watching intently. During this period you must behave exactly like a seal. After dropping your head on the ice, you should raise it and look around for several seconds before dropping it on the ice again. It is preferable also to wriggle around as if you were itching and trying to scratch yourself on the ice, for seals are infested with a sort of louse which makes them wriggle and scratch continually. With care and patience you should be able to get within fifteen yards of a seal in two hours. An expert hunter gets at least two out of three and sometimes three out of four of the seals he goes after.

When within shooting distance you wait till the seal raises his head and put a bullet through his brain. Then you drop your rifle and run as fast as you can, for the seal is lying on an incline of wet, slippery mound of ice. The mere shock of instant death may start him slipping and it happens occasionally that the body will slide into the water and be lost. Sometimes you get there just in time to manage to grasp a flipper as it is disappearing. This sliding of the killed animal is the reason why a shot at a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards is impracticable even for the best marksman. You may kill your seal but you won't get him. even though There is enough buoyancy in the lungs and blubber to make him rise but the original dive will send him twenty or thirty feet diagonally down and he will come up under the ice where you cannot reach him.

Knight has a typical entry of this spring under date of May 28th. "After breakfast four seals appeared on the ice and Crawford, Maurer and Galle each went after one. Crawford fired at too great distance and his seal went down. Maurer's and Galle's seals went down (before they had a chance to fire) and they each lay near the holes but the seals did not return. A fog then arose

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and all hands returned to camp. While they were away I saw a great many bands of geese flying north. Three bands of ducks flew west. One band, I am sure, were “old squaws” but the others I was unable to determine. A single tern also flew west. I later took a walk up the .... river and saw the first snipe of the year, a "kill deer," I think. Saw one fresh fox track. A lemming came out of his hole near camp, making the first one of them that we have seen this season. Needless to say, I am still cooking dog feed."

By the end of May the Wrangell Island summer had come. The maximum in the shade was 52° although the minimumon the last of May was ten degrees below freezing (22° F.). This maximum of 52° on the seacosat which probably meant that fifteen or twenty miles inland the temperature was around 70° or 75° in the shade.

After nearly a month's failure in sealing, Knight writes on May 30th: "At last!!! Crawford got a seal while out taking a few soundings through cracks and seal holes. A nice shot of 80 yards. A medium sized male, not very fat." After this, success became more constant and during the spring and early summer over forty seals were secured. By now the party seem to have been impressed with the importance of making use of every hunting opportunity and of saving everything they secured. They handled the seals carefully. The first that were caught they skinned by the "casing" method. These animals have a small head and the skin is elastic while the body is warm. The skinning is begun at the mouth and no opening is made with the knife, but the hide is stripped back over the head somewhat as one may pull off a long glove. You have now a bag which may be filled with any liquid. Even in mid-winter seal blubber, which looks much like very fat bacon, will gradually try out and the oil will be lost unless it is put into a container. According to good Eskimo custom, the Wrangell party now cut up every seal immediately, removed the blubber from the outside of the body, cut it into strips and put it into the sealskin bags. In this way they saved

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all the fat. It may be estimated that forty seals would give from fifteen hundred to them at least two thousand pounds of oil, equivalent in food value to that many pounds of butter or bacon. The meat was also saved, some of it probably by drying, although Knight does not tell us so, the rest by being packed with ice. It did not seem necessary to make any special effort to keep it fresh, for it would be needed for dog feed and other animals could be relied upon to supply fresh meat in the fall.

Knight's account of the weather the summer 1922 reads strangely. Either it must have been a very exceptional summer in Wrangell Island or else Wrangell Island has a very exceptional kind of arctic climate. I have been in northern islands of varying size, some the same latitude as Wrangell and others as much as five hundred miles farther north, and in these it has been the rule, as it generally is in the northern hemisphere, that June is warmer than May and July warmer still. But the Wrangell summer of 1922, the latter part of May was the warmest period of the summer. There were frequent snow squalls in June and even in July, with the temperature seldom more than ten degrees above freezing and going down below freezing at night not infrequently. Certainly the season must have been very different from that of 1921, for when the party landed that year they saw only a little snow on the highest of the distant mountains, but in 1922 large patches of snow were constantly on the ridges inland.

During the summer the party devoted most of its time to hunting seals, geese and ducks, but they also made several exploratory journeys. On June 28th, for instance, “Crawford with one dog to pack his blankets started west to look for a pass through the mountains. I went a short way with him and saw several seals to the west on the ice.” Evidently Knight was leaving Crawford to tell the story in his own diary, for the only further mention of this inland reconnaissance is under head of July 3rd: “Maurer got one seal and killed another which slid into its hole. I took a walk to the west and met Crawford coming home. Galle spent the day on the ice and, although he saw several seals.

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he did not get a shot. While duck hunting at the mouth of the river near camp I killed another seal in the water with the shotgun, which immediately sank."

At this time the hunting was going very well. On July 4th "Maurer got three seals. Galle killed five seals, three of which he secured, total six seals. . . . . As a sealing place this is getting better all the time."

Between July 7th and 12th Knight made a trip east along the south coast and north along the east coast to the northeast corner of the island, visiting the two camps occupied by the Karluk crew in 1914, Rodgers Harbor and Waring Point. Apart from natural weathering, he found everything as our men abandoned it. The tents had been left standing at Waring Point but had naturally collapsed since.

On this journey Knight encountered one of the largest streams of the island, Skeleton River. On the way north he was able to avoid crest it by an ice bridge just outside the mouth, but when he came back he found that this had melted. Thinking he might find a shallow place somewhere inland, Knight traveled west along the north bank of the stream seven hours but found no ford. "Occasionally I tried likely looking places for a crossing and, although I found places that I do not think were more than shoulder deep, the current was so rapid that to keep ones footing was impossible. Finally I decided to swim the river, so, putting my kodak, films, matches, etc., in a pair of water boots, across we went. I did not put my trusty watch in the water boots. It stopped then and I lost track of the time. After traveling about five hours more through snow, mud and water, I reached the camp|site at Rodger's Harbor. Had a sleep and rest, then went to the old trapping camp, had another sleep, and reached home at 7 P.M. the evening of July 12th, footsore and weary."

On various other journeys inland the party frequently discovered fossil ivory, occasionally the tusks of mammoth but more often of walrus.

By the latter part of July sealing conditions were bad. Most

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of the ice was in constant motion and what was left of the land floe was covered with puddles of water. Under such conditions the best hunter may be excused for not trying or for failing when he does try. When the entry for July 27th tells us that even so Maurer secured three seals, we realize that not only are they complete masters of the technique of hunting but also that the period of overconfidence is past. They are now taking advantage of every opportunity, instead of the former easy assurance that game will turn up whenever it is needed. Still, they are by no means obsessed with the necessity for hunting, for the entry of July 29th relates that Maurer hunted and killed three seals while Crawford made a journey west along the coast to take soundings in Doubtful Harbor and apparently to make a survey of the coast. This was quite as it should be, for the best judge of arctic conditions would have seen nothing serious in the situation of the party at this time. The survey of Doubtful Harbor showed that ships could enter drawing four fathoms or more and that the shelter was good from all winds but westerly.

On August 9th Crawford, Galle and Maurer set out on another exploratory journey along the coast to the east and north. Before they left walrus had been seen occasionally but the ice conditions had not been suitable for pursuing them. The day they started was foggy, and Knight could hear a large number of walrus snorting off to seaward somewhere but was unable to see them, The next day the walrus were also about and a large, fat bear walked into camp to be killed by Knight with one shot. The exploratory party party returned in four days, having gone no farther than Skeleton River. Apparently the main purpose was a geological reconnaissance and they turned back largely because of the continual rains.

August 16th "a large bear was seen on the ice offshore from camp and it took to the water, coming in towards camp. We lined up along the beach and killed it. A large, very fat bear."

The 17th was "The finest day we have had for a long time. The