l requirements and emergencies could be met as they arose, and their
expeditions were few throughout the years. The Mounted Police, on the
other hand, were incessantly at this work, not in parties and highly
equipped, but in twos and threes and sometimes singly, with nothing
beyond their winter and summer uniforms and dependent largely on their
own efforts for food, as they were not possessed of the means of
carrying any large quantity. Many of these men probably said, as
Inspector F. H. French recorded in his diary during the famous Bathurst
Inlet patrol, of which we shall read later: "Have had no solid food for
two days, and every one is getting weak; dogs are dropping in their
harness from weakness. This looks like our last patrol." Only a brave
man could write down words like that, and it detracts nothing from the
splendid courage of him and his men that the words were not long written
when providentially some deer were sent across their path and saved
these men for future work. These men who went out on patrol only gave
the barest outline of their experience in the reports which they had to
make to their superior officers, and through them to Ottawa, but those
who know the country could read between the lines and feel the thrill of
admiration and wonder. And these same officers, when not on the
particular patrol they were commenting upon, paid unstinted praise to
their men in their own reports, but even these reports were buried in
the mass of material in the Department, so that the public did not see
them. But once in a while we get hold of some comment, as when
Superintendent Perry referred to one patrol and said "nothing greater
had been done in the annals of Arctic exploration." Or when Inspector
Sanders referred to the leader of another patrol and said his action
"was in keeping with his brave and manly character." And I like the way
in which Superintendent A. E. C. Macdonnell, with some manifest
diffidence, introduced into a report from Athabasca Landing the
following quotation from the _Toronto Star_:

"The world takes a lively interest in Polar expeditions, but Canada
supports a Northern Police patrol of which very little is heard,
and the journeyings of some of these men is quite as daring as
anything connected with searches for the North or South Pole. They
contend with the same conditions, are inexpensively equipped, and,
as a rule, succeed in all that they undertake. A sheet