stefansson-wrangel-09-31-067v

98 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

But this was a day of calm, with airs fluctuating from
one direction to another. A change of wind would bring
my scent to the caribou; the silence would enable them
to hear me walking at half a mile, for the weather was
still cold, and it is one of the characteristics of the arctic
winter that on a still day you can hear any given sound
from five to ten times as far as you can in the warm
summer. After a glance at the trail which assured me
that the band numbered between fifteen and twenty-five,
I turned in the direction opposite to the one they had
been traveling and walked rapidly a mile or more to the
top of a high hill. From the hilltop I examined the
ground carefully in every direction with my field glasses,
hoping to see the band in question and thinking it pos-
sible that another might be somewhere else. But nothing
was to be seen except the white lowlands and the gray
hills where the grass was not completely covered by the
snow—for we were now in a country very different from
that of yesterday. Then it was barren gravel, and now
it was grassy prairie.

Without actually remembering it, I would judge, from
the general method of arctic hunting, that I spent per-
haps an hour on the top of that hill waiting for the
possible emergence from cover of animals that were
grazing. I next walked a mile or two at right angles to
the course the caribou had been taking, and from the top
of another hill re-examined the country with my glasses.
There was nothing to be seen. Since this viewpoint gave
me a conspicuously different angle from the previous one,
I considered it likely that I had seen all the near country
to the south and that the caribou were not no game was hidden less than
three or four miles away. I accordingly walked with
confidence a mile or two in the direction of the caribou