noon
Occasionally there were hills to climb , and some of these were so steep that it was necessary for Bob and the Eskimos to haul upon the traces with the dogs , and now and then they had to lift the komatik over rocky places , and on one river that they crossed they were forced to cut in several places a passage around ice hills , where the tide had piled the ice blocks thirty or forty feet high . But for the most part the route lay over a rolling country near the coast . Only at long intervals were trees to be seen , and these were very small and stunted , and grew in sheltered hollows . At noon they halted in one of these hollows to build a fire , over which they melted snow in one of the kettles and made tea , with which they washed down some hardtack and jerked venison . That night when they stopped to make their camp , sixty miles lay behind them . The going had been good and they had done a splendid day 's work . Before unharnessing the dogs , which would have immediately attacked and destroyed the goods upon the sledge had they been released , the Eskimos went about building an igloo .