Hunting in the Artic and Alaska (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 Excerpt: ...day is illumined by the pale light of a mist-veiled sun. "But he who transfers his gaze from the distance to an examination of the foreground, sees here and there little spots of bloom of the delicate heather, water berries or the clustering dryas. Here and there the white corallike reindeer moss bedecks the ground and now and then a half-buried dwarf willow and other low, close-clinging plants. Occasionally also are seen brilliant poppies, mostly in the neighborhood of places where water trickles in the early summer. At such localities a luxuriant growth of grass takes the upper hand. The tussocks increase in size to a diameter of about three feet and a height of some eighteen inches, similar to the common niggerhead of our swamps. Otherwise the bright green coloring of the grass in more temperate climates is replaced by brown and yellow which do not relieve the dreariness of the landscape." Irkaipy, just east of which we now were, was the farthest point reached by the celebrated Captain James Cook on his last voyage of discovery in 1778 and called by him Cape North. It has no other right to this distinctive title and is better known by the native name. We turned south and wound a tortuous way through the closing pack toward the shore, where a lead of clear water a few fathoms deep separated the land from the heavy grounded ice. All day long we threaded this passage, thanks to the "Abler's" shoal draft of only seven feet, with the pack a mile seaward of us. We passed three igloos on a high beach at the mouth of a river. But this good going ended, for we came to the mouth of the Amguyema River, flanked by lagoons in the tundra, and against the easterly point formed by silt from the stream the southeast wind had jammed the ice even up to ...