THE MUSK-OX.
- sort of the Esquimaux. We found there several old
ruins of huts, some of them with bones strewn about them, which showed that they were not of very ancient date. Among these bones, which were mostly of the walrus, seal, and bears, I found a part of the head of a musk-ox, and in such a position as appeared to render it probable that the animal of which it had formed a part had been the food of the former inhabitants of the ruin. Upon referring the matter to Kalutunah, he told me that the musk-ox was supposed to have been once numerous along the entire coast, and that they are still occasionally seen. No longer ago than the previous winter, a hunter of Wolstenholme Sound, near a place called Oomeak, had come upon two animals and killed one of them. It would seem from this circumstance that the musk-ox is not yet extinct in Greenland, as naturalists have supposed.
One day of my stay in the valley was occupied with running a set of levels down from the foot of the glacier to the sea, by which I found the former to be ninety-two feet above the latter; and another day was passed in hunting.
It would be impossible to convey an adequate idea of the immense numbers of the little auks which swarmed around us. The slope on both sides of the valley rises at an angle of about forty-five degrees to a distance of from three hundred to five hundred feet, where it meets the cliffs, which stand about seven hundred feet higher. These hill-sides are composed of the loose rocks which have been split off from the cliffs by the frost. The birds crawl among these rocks, winding far in through narrow places, and there deposit each a single egg and hatch their young,
