The
luxury of a cooked meal could only be indulged in on the days when we
were lying over in camp, as to gather the moss and cook the meal would
take from three to four hours.
The country began to swarm with wolves now, as well as with reindeer,
and we would meet them daily. Often they would come close to the
igloos, and one night Toolooah shot one of three that were eating the
meat he had thrown out for food for our dogs.
They killed and ate four of Equeesik's dogs, and attacked him when he
went out of the igloo to drive them off. He killed two of his
assailants with his rifle, and two others by the most infernal traps
ever devised. He set two keenly sharpened knife-blades in the ice and
covered them with blood, which the wolves licked, at the same time
slicing their tongues, the cold keeping them from feeling the wounds at
the time, and their own warm blood tempting them to continue until
their tongues were so scarified that death was inevitable. He also
prepared some pills by rolling up long strips of whalebone, bound with
sinew and hidden in meat, which freezing would hold together until it
had passed into the animal's intestines, when the meat having thawed,
and the sinew digested, the whalebone would open out and produce an
agonizing death. If anything were bad enough treatment for wolves,
these devices of Equeesik's might be so classed.
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