Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/284

270 they were, trusting to their guns and the spears of the Eskimos to supply them.

Geoff wondered whether he could, as Eric put it, starve like a savage. Though for many weeks now he had recognised that starvation might be close ahead, still he could not realise it as a way for him to die.

In the Eskimo life, death by starvation was an any-day possibility, constantly and calmly considered. And when such death was inevitable it was met by these savage men with resignation. Geoff knew it was true, as Eric had said, that in parties of civilised men, starving in the Arctic, unspeakable horrors were done. As he lay in the dark he thought of Rae's report of the finding of the final camp of the last of Franklin's men who starved; of the subjects silenced in the public reports of some of the great expeditions; of the record left by another captain of the discovering of a plan among his men to kill their Eskimo hunters when they brought in no more food, in order that the remaining provisions need not be shared with those who had provided them. As he read the account at home such things had