from the
bones, and minced it. Then we melted a can of butter, added pepper and
salt to it, and rolled a handful of the minced meat in the butter and
moulded it with the hands into a ball about as large as a baseball. We
made a couple of hundred of such balls and froze them, and they kept
perfectly. When all the boiling was done we put in the hocks of the
animals and boiled down the liquor into five pounds of the thickest,
richest meat-extract jelly, adding the marrow from the bones. With this
pemmican and this extract of caribou, a package of erbswurst and a
cupful of rice, we concocted every night the stew which was our main
food in the higher regions.

[Illustration: Some heads of game killed at the base camp.]

[Sidenote: The Instruments]

Here the instruments were overhauled. The mercurial barometer reading by
verniers to three places of decimals was set up and read, and the two
aneroids were adjusted to read with it. These two aneroids perhaps
deserve a word. Aneroid A was a three-inch, three-circle instrument, the
invention of Colonel Watkins, of the British army, of range-finder fame.
It seems strange that the advantage of the three-circle aneroid is so
little known in this country, for its three concentric circles give such
an open scale that, although this particular instrument reads to
twenty-five thousand feet, it is easy to read as small a difference as
twenty feet on it. It had been carried in the hind sack of the writer's
sled for the past eight winters and constantly and satisfactorily used
to determine the height of summits and passes upon the trails of the
interior. Aneroid B was a six-inch patent mountain aneroid, another
invention of the same military genius, prompted by Mr. Whymper's
experiments with the aneroid barometer after his return from his classic
climbs to the summits of the Bolivian Andes. Colonel Watkins devised an
instrument in which by a threaded post and a thumb-screw the spring may
be relaxed or brought into play at will, and the instrument is never in
commission save when a reading is taken. Then a few turns of the
thumb-screw bring the spring to bear upon the box, its walls expand
until the pressure of the spring equals the pressure of the atmosphere,
the reading is taken, and the instrument thrown out of operation
again--a most ingenious arrangement by which it was hoped to overcome
some of the persistent faults of elastic-chamber barometers. The writer
had owned this instrument