ailure of these parties to obtain game was a serious matter. In
order to save food I had still further to reduce the number of dogs. We
overhauled them, and fourteen of the poorest--they would not have
survived the winter--were killed and used as food for the others.

I am often asked how the wild herbivorous animals, like the musk-ox and
the reindeer, survive the winter in that snow-covered land. By a strange
paradox, the wild winds that rage in that country help them in their
struggle for existence, for the wind sweeps the dried grasses and
scattered creeping willows bare of snow over great stretches of land,
and there the animals can graze.

December 22 marked the midnight of the "Great Night," the sun from that
day starting on the return journey north. In the afternoon all the
Eskimos were assembled on deck, and I went to them with my watch in my
hand, telling them that the sun was now coming back. Marvin rang the
ship's bell, Matt Henson fired three shots, and Borup set off some
flashlight powder. Then the men, women, and children formed in line and
marched into the after deck house by the port gangway, passing the
galley, where each one received, in addition to the day's rations, a
quart of coffee, with sugar and milk, ship's biscuit, and musk-ox meat;
the women were also given candy and the men tobacco.

After the celebration, Pingahshoo, a boy of twelve or thirteen, who
helped Percy in the galley, started confidently south over the hills to
meet the sun. After a few hours he returned to the ship, quite
crestfallen, and Percy had to explain to him that while the sun was
really on its way back, it would not get to us for nearly three months
more.

The next day after the winter solstice, our supply of water from the
Cape Sheridan River having failed, Eskimos were sent out to reconnoiter
the ponds of the neighborhood. The English expedition on the _Alert_ had
melted ice during their entire winter, and on the expedition of 1905-06
we had been obliged to melt ice for a month or two; but this year the
Eskimos sounded the ponds, and about fifteen feet of water was found in
one a mile inland from the _Roosevelt_. Over the hole in the ice they
built a snow igloo with a light wooden trap-door, so as to keep the
water in the hole from freezing too quickly. The water was brought to
the ships in barrels on sledges drawn by the Eskimo dogs.

As Christmas fell in the dark of the moon, all the members of the
expedition were