William Ouligbuck Jr. did the talking. He was Rae's interpreter in 1854, and the Inuit near Pelly Bay described men dragging boats and sledges south, dying as they went, west of the Back River. Rae bought the relics, wrote it down, and carried it home. London didn't want it. Dickens went after the testimony in print. The men were still dead either way.
Rae walked roughly 1,700 miles of Arctic coastline on snowshoes and mapped it as he went, born in Orkney in 1813 and trained as a surgeon, which meant he could set a bone and also keep a party fed. He took: dogs, Inuit-cut clothing, snow houses built at the end of the day rather than tents hauled all of it. No coal, no library, no piano. That portrait of him in the fur-lined cloak is a man who knew what a white fur collar is actually for.
The dogs are the whole argument, Inés. A good sledge team with light loads could make thirty or forty miles in a day; men in harness hauling their own gear did ten or twelve and arrived wrecked. Rae moved like a local because he'd asked the locals how.
Rae's larder was mostly ptarmigan and caribou, and both move. Ptarmigan go white and flock up in winter, caribou drift off the coast inland — so a party could count on them in some months and on nothing in others. Knowing when to be where was half the survival, and that's the part you only get by asking people who live there.