stefansson-wrangel-09-31-115r

THE FIRST AUTUMN ON WRANGEL ISLAND 187

twenty-five pounds of clear meat and carry home, sometimes as far
as twenty miles.

Such is bound to be the ordinary routine of a hunter
who has no accumulated provisions and finds himself in a
section where game is scarce. Critics who know this have
said that the Wrangel party were in an easy situation as
hunting goes, but completely failed to meet it. The
abundance of fox and bear tracks and the gulls and ravens
mentioned by Knight as flying about everywhere showed
that any meat left exposed away from camp would be
devoured presently. The critics point out that when a
single hunter as a matter of daily routine devotes ten to
twenty-four hours to the securing of a hundred-pound-
load of meat, it is absurdly simple for five sturdy people
such as the Wrangel Island party to go out two miles and
bring home five back loads averaging one hundred pounds
each. With the bones cut out this would be all the meat
of a fairly even large bear; with the bones left in, the entire
carcass could be brought home in two such trips, each
round trip not occupying more than three hours.

He who desires to take this attitude will find more
material for criticism in the diary entries of the next
two or three weeks. In his letter to his moterh under
date of Nov. 23, 1921, Knight has the following : (quoted
in slip attached) One of them, for instance, is to the
effect that Knight stepped out of the tent and "saw bears
in every direction," but that the party decided they would
not try to kill any of these bears because snow had not
yet fallen. They would wait until the sledging was good
and then secure the meat they needed.

The correct critical word for such practices and
methods is not, however, "incompetence" nor "laziness,"
but "over-confidence" or " excessive optimism," and the
tru explanation follows: