Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/161

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than any one of his male subjects. In return for this devotion he allows her to do pretty much as she pleases. She may steal the bone out of his mouth, and he gives it up to her with a sentimental grimace that is quite instructive. But it happens sometimes that he is himself hungry, and he trots after her, and when he thinks that she has got her share he growls significantly; whereupon she drops the bone without even a murmur. If the old fellow happens to be particularly cross when a reindeer is thrown to the pack, he gets upon it with his forefeet, begins to gnaw away at the flank, growling a wolfish growl all the while, and no dog dare come near until he has had his fill except Queen Arkadik, (for by that name is she known,) nor can she approach except in one direction. She must come alongside of him, and crawl between his fore-legs and eat lovingly from the spot where he is eating.

So much for my dogs. I shall doubtless have more to say about them hereafter, but there is only a small scrap of the evening left, and I must go back to "My Brother John's Glacier."

Halting our teams near the glacier front, we proceeded to prepare ourselves for ascending to its surface. Its face, looking down the valley, exhibits a somewhat convex lateral line, and is about a mile in extent, and a hundred feet high. It presents the same fractured surfaces of the iceberg, the same lines of vertical decay caused by the waters trickling from it in the summer,—the same occasional horizontal lines, which, though not well marked, seemed to conform to the curve of the valley in which the glacier rests. The slope backward from this mural face is quite abrupt for several hundred feet, after which the