Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/148

 Hans and Peter have been setting fox-traps and shooting rabbits. The foxes, both the white and blue varieties, appear to be quite numerous, and there are also many rabbits, or rather I should say hares. These latter are covered with a long heavy pelt which is a pure white, and are very large. One caught to-day weighed eight pounds.

October 17th.

McCormick, who is general tinker and the very embodiment of ingenuity, has been making for me a surveyor's chain out of some iron rods; and a party, consisting of Sonntag, McCormick, Dodge, Radcliffe, and Starr, have been surveying the bay and harbor with this chain and the theodolite. They seem to have made quite a frolic of it, which, considering the depressed state of the thermometer, is, I think, a very commendable circumstance. Barnum and McDonald have been given a holiday, and they went out with shot-guns after reindeer. They report having seen forty-six, all of which they succeeded in badly frightening, and they also started many foxes. Charley also had a holiday, but, disdaining the huntsman's weapons, he started on a "voyage of discovery," as he styled it. Strolling down into the bay above Crystal Palace Cliffs, he came upon an old Esquimau settlement, and, finding a grave, robbed it of its bony contents, and brought them to me wrapped up in his coat. It makes a very valuable addition to my ethnological collection, and a glass of grog and the promise of other holidays have secured the coöperation of Charley in this branch of science. Charley, by the way, is one of my most reliable men, and gives promise of