PHOTOGRAPHED BY FLASHLIGHT]

While I stood in front of the dogs with a whip in each hand, to keep
them from dashing away--for the Eskimo dog knows the meaning of
"_nanooksoah_" as well as his master--the three men were throwing things
off the sledges as if they were crazy.

When the sledges were empty, Ooblooyah's team shot by me, with Ooblooyah
at the up-standers. Egingwah came next, and I threw myself on his sledge
as it flew past. Behind us came Koolatoonah with the third team. The man
who coined the phrase "greased lightning" must have ridden on an empty
sledge behind a team of Eskimo dogs on the scent of a polar bear.

The bear had heard us, and was making for the opposite shore of the
fiord with prodigious bounds. I jumped to the up-standers of the flying
sledge, leaving Egingwah to throw himself on it and get his breath, and
away we went, wild with excitement, across the snow-covered surface of
the fiord.

When we got to the middle the snow was deeper, and the dogs could not go
so fast, though they strained ahead with all their might. Suddenly they
scented the trail--and then neither deep snow nor anything else could
have held them. Ooblooyah, with a crazy team and only himself at the
up-standers, distanced the rest of us, arriving at the farther shore
almost as soon as the leaping bear. He loosed his dogs immediately, and
we could see the bear in the distance, followed by minute dots that
looked hardly larger than mosquitoes swarming up the steep slope. Before
our slower teams got to the shore, Ooblooyah had reached the top of the
slope, and he signaled us to go around, as the land was an island.

When we reached the other side, we found where the bear had descended to
the ice again and kept on across the remaining width of the fiord to the
western shore, followed by Ooblooyah and his dogs.

A most peculiar circumstance, commented on by Egingwah as we flew along,
was that this bear, contrary to the custom of bears in Eskimo land, did
not stop when the dogs reached him, but kept right on traveling. This to
Egingwah was almost certain proof that the great devil himself--terrible
Tornarsuk--was in that bear. At the thought of chasing the devil, my
sledge companion grew even more excited.

On the other side of the island the snow was deeper and our progress
slower, and when we reached the western shore of the fiord, up which, as
on the island, we had seen from a distance the bear and Ooblooyah's dogs
slowly