"This voracity must be peculiar to the inhabitants of cold countries," said Altamont.
"I think it is," replied the Doctor. "In the Arctic regions people must eat enormously: it is not only one of the conditions of strength, but of existence. The Hudson's Bay Company always reckoned on this account 8 lbs. of meat to each man a day, or 12 lbs. of fish, or 2 lbs. of pemmican."
"Invigorating regimen, certainly!" said Bell.
"Not so much as you imagine, my friend. An Indian who guzzles like that can't do a whit better day's work than an Englishman, who has his pound of beef and pint of beer."
"Things are best as they are, then, Mr. Clawbonny."
"No doubt of it; and yet an Esquimaux meal may well astonish us. In Sir John Ross's narrative, he states his surprise at the appetites of his guides. He tells us that two of them--just two mind--devoured a quarter of a buffalo in one morning. They cut the meat in long narrow strips, and the mode of eating was either for the one to bite off as much as his mouth could hold, and then pass it on to the other, or to leave the long ribbons of meat dangling from the mouth and devour them gradually like boa-constrictors, lying at full length on the ground."
"Faugh!" exclaimed Bell, "what disgusting brutes!"
"Every man has his own fashion of dining," remarked the philosophical American.
"Well, if eating is such an imperative necessity in these latitudes, it quite accounts for all the journals of Arctic travellers being so full of eating and drinking."
"You are right," returned the Doctor. "I have been struck by the same fact; but I think it arises not only from the necessity of full diet, but from the extreme difficulty sometimes in procuring it. The thought of food is always uppermost in the mind, and naturally finds mention in the narrative."
"And yet," said Altamont, "if my memory serves me right, in the coldest parts of Norway the peasants do not seem to need such substantial fare. Milk diet is their staple food, with eggs, and bread made of the bark of the birch-tree; a little salmon occasionally, but never meat; and still they are fine hardy fellows."
"It is an affair of organization out of my power to explain," replied Clawbonny; "but I have no doubt that if these same Norwegians were transplanted to Greenland, they would learn to eat like the Esquimaux by the second or third generation. Even if we ourselves were to remain in this blessed country long, we should be as bad as the Esquimaux, even if we escaped becoming regular gluttons."