President. On the 11th of May we killed seven reindeer, and on the 13th
nine. The country seems to be filled with game, and nearly every day we
saw two or three large herds. Our dogs get well fed, and are really in
finer condition than when we left Camp Daly. We had the misfortune to
lose one of our best dogs, Toekelegeto, Toolooah's leader, on the night
of the 13th, who choked to death with a piece of bone in his throat. He
had eaten a piece of the shoulder-blade of the reindeer, which is thin
and breaks into fine splinters. The Inuits usually hide this bone in
the snow, as they say such accidents are frequent, especially when the
dogs eat rapidly, as they always do when there is a number together.

[Illustration: THE SOURCES OF THE HAYES RIVER.]

The northern shore of the river is here bounded by high hills--in fact,
almost a mountain range, and as I walked along the crest on the 14th,
the sleds moving along the river at my feet looked like toys. Inland I
could see the rocky hills piled together, barren and forbidding, and I
could not help feeling grateful that we had found so good a road out of
this country, for it would have been next to impossible to have crossed
these ridges with our heavy sledges. About noon we came upon a freshly
cut block of snow turned up on end, an unmistakable indication that
natives had been there within two or three days, and a little farther
on fresh footprints in the snow led us to a cache of musk-ox meat, and
near by a deserted igloo. Equeesik knew by these signs that we were in
the Ooqueesik-Sillik country, and as the natives never go far from
Back's River, or the Ooqueesik-Sillik, as is the Esquimau name, this
was joyful news and we were all excitement at the prospect of speedily
meeting the natives. We followed the tracks upon the ice, and could see
that they had used dogs to drag a musk-ox skin for a sled. This is a
usual mode of travel with these people, who have very little wood with