Kabloona (The White Man)
THE story of my journey into the North and out again is a long one. Between the time I left Ottawa on my way in, and the day I reached Vancouver at the end of the voyage out, fifteen months elapsed. There were weeks, sometimes many of them, of enforced idleness and hebetude about which no one would wish to hear. For, as I traveled with nothing of my own, I was constantly dependent upon the journeyings of others to furnish my chance means of transport. A Royal Canadian Police boat, a Hudson’s Bay Company supply vessel, might or might not be present at a given moment to give me a lift in a given direction; and if it was not, I was forced to wait until it turned up. If, at a Hudson’s Bay post, an Eskimo arrived who was about to join others at a seal camp thirty or sixty miles away, I seized the occasion, and, for the value in trade of a few fox skins, was able to share the life of the camp. And once there, it was again a matter of chance whether or not I should find another native to take me either back to my base or to another point I wished to reach. All this, I hope, will be clear enough in the pages that follow.
‘To think,’ a man will say to himself as he lies on a subtropical beach in February, ‘to think that three days ago I was fighting my way against a snowstorm at home!’ My own reflections were often of this simple-minded order, but with a higher degree of intensity. I, a child of civilization, had wandered in the course of a few weeks into the Stone Age. This was I who squatted beside a stone vessel in which seal oil burned and gave off its warmth and light. I who had so lately been surrounded by Paris, by all that Paris means, sat here clad in the skins and furs of animals in a shelter built of snow, in a land and a season where a temperature of forty degrees below zero was the normal thing — and I was relaxed, content, happy.
Let me excuse this intrusion of the first person singular by a word of explanation. My concern is with the Eskimo, with his life and traits, his broodings and ruminations, his invincible serenity in the face of the hardest physical existence lived by man anywhere upon earth. It was because of the simplicity and directness of his existence that I went into the Arctic to live with him; and living with him was not easy. Hardest of all was not the severity of the climate, not the intensity of the cold, not the physical anguish which, often, I endured as every man from Outside must endure it. The cold was a problem; but a very much more difficult problem was the Eskimo mentality. There was no getting on with the Eskimo except on his own terms; and as I was not a tourist concerned with externals, but a man concerned to find himself with the aid of the Eskimo, I had to got on with him. I sought to live the Eskimo life, not to measure it with instruments of precision.
A good part, of my story, therefore, becomes of itself the story of the encounter of two mentalities, and of the gradual substitution of the Eskimo mentality for the European mentality within myself. Of course this substitution never became entire for long at a time. Again and again the European in me would protest, would rage, and, particularly when the physical strain seemed too great to be borne, would refuse abruptly to accept the need for the adoption of the Eskimo view of life — and would suffer certain consequences. But, within the limits of what was possible for me, I believe I succeeded.
I
In the spring of 1938 I stood one afternoon before the house of the Oblate Fathers in the rue de l’Assomption in Paris. It is the particular mission of the Oblate Fathers to evangelize the most distant and disinherited peoples of the earth. For generations Christian priests have gone out of this house to the confines of the world — to central Africa, to the Brazilian jungles, to the Arctic. Here in this house you would never have guessed it. Not a footfall sounded, not a map hung on a wall. Someone, a shadow, had opened a door and vanished, shutting the door behind me. I stood alone in an old-fashioned reception room, waiting in the company of three green chairs, and, on the wall, the enlarged photograph of a dead bishop.
A man came in, obviously a religious, and one look at his face and bearing told me that he was a chief. He signed to me to sit down, and we sat in two of the three straight-backed chairs. Without a preliminary word, I blurted out the purpose of my visit, which was to go to live with the Eskimos. Not those of Greenland, who, I gathered, were domesticated under governmental tutelage; nor those of Alaska, who carved souvenirs for tourists; but the Canadian Eskimos, those of the Central Arctic who, because they inhabited regions so remote and difficult to reach, still lived their primitive life of thousands of years ago, knowing of the white men only an occasional solitary missionary. I knew that their islands in the Glacial Ocean formed part of the immense diocese of that Oblate father who was celebrated in Canada as ‘the Bishop of the Wind’; that the bishop toured his diocese in his own airplane; and what I wanted was to be flown in by the bishop. Could the Oblate Fathers help me to realize my wish?
The man had not stirred. ‘You have only to write to the bishop,’ he said in a curiously depersonalized voice; ‘he will reply.’ As if the Arctic lay round the corner!
It was in April that I wrote, addressing my letter to the bishop’s episcopal seat at Fort Smith, on the sixtieth parallel. At the end of May came the bishop’s reply. His Grace would be pleased to fly me in, provided there was space; ‘for,’ he wrote, ‘the plane is small and there will be another passenger. Meet me at McMurray, in northern Alberta, at the beginning of July.’ And he added a charming postscript; ‘You may wish to bring along a camera: there are things here worth photographing.’
This precious letter, and equally essential documents from the Paris Geographic Society and the Director of the Trocadéro Museum attesting to the Canadian authorities my status of ethnographer, were virtually all my baggage. I had not much more money than baggage, for it was no great American foundation that had subsidized me. I had no equipment, for I was not an expedition. No agents were buying dogs for me; none were preparing caches of food and feed, hiring interpreters, engaging native women to sew the skins and furs I should be wearing, fitting out a boat to meet me in season at this point or that in the Glacial Ocean. I had not even made plans, for I had long ago discovered — in India, in China, in the South Seas — that Life abhors our plans and knows better ones than we can imagine.
I left Paris on June 11, 1938. It was on July 9 that X took off from Fort McMurray with Bishop Breynat, his chaplain, and Bisson, his pilot. My seat in the bishop’s plane was a sort of platform jutting inward from the instrument board, and here I crouched as we galloped over the surface of Lake La Biche, all four of us tense and leaning forward, like jockeys urging on a horse. As the plane rose finally above the treetops, Bisson made a sign with his hand; we fell back, and I, looking behind, saw the chaplain purple with tenseness and the bishop quietly absorbed in his breviary.
Below us spread a wide land of forest sown with thousands and thousands of shining pools, an unfinished world from which the waters had still to recede, and where you would have said that no man lived. But the airplane is radioactive and itself a creator of life. We did not drop down from time to time because life suddenly appeared below us, for wherever we looked no life was to be seen. Yet, wherever we stopped, life sprang up as if spontaneously generated by our coming; and it died again when we rose as if we were carrying off the seed.
In this wise I saw Goldfields born and die again; then, after Goldfields, Fort Smith and the Mackenzie River, the Mississippi of the Northwest Territories, its muddy waters a mile wide, the great highway up and down which pass the barges of the Hudson’s Bay Company, carrying in supplies and bringing out furs. We had flown fifteen hundred miles when I saw one night, shining in the Arctic sun, a pool bigger than any I had seen before. This was the sea, the Glacial Ocean. Again the pilot dived, again a little cluster of huts sprang up; and exactly at midnight, on July 14, I was set down in Coppermine. Father Delalande took us to his mission house, and without a word the old bishop climbed the wooden ladder into the attic and went to bed. Next day he was off. He had done what he could for me in dropping me here at the last outpost of civilization.
At Coppermine, the white man’s world ended. Here money, though only a little, could still be spent. Here the most northerly radio station stood, a government station that broadcast on Sunday afternoons in happy-go-lucky fashion, hoping but not certain that its messages would reach those scattered missionaries, policemen, and Hudson’s Bay post managers for whom they were intended. Here a dentist turned up once a year, with an Eskimo boy carrying his pedal drill. Here there was not even an inn, and I was housed by the grace of the Roman Catholic missionary.
Yet Coppermine, which I had reached after seven thousand miles of travel, was not to be my base. It was still too remote from the regions inhabited by the Eskimos I had come to live among. My ultimate base, the Hudson’s Bay post at Gjoa Haven, on the island called King William Land, lay seven hundred miles north and east from here; and to reach it I had still to travel — such were the fortunes of wandering in the Arctic — some two thousand miles.
II
A world lay ahead of me, but when and how I was to enter that world I did not know. As far as Coppermine, man is master in the North. Whether on skis or on floats, he can come thus far by plane. Beyond, it is Nature that is the stronger. You may go north from here only in certain seasons, and, of them all, summer is the worst.
It was almost exactly two weeks before I was able to get away. Meanwhile I lived at the mission with Father Delalande, a priest whose religious spirit wars as profound as his Parisian gayety was infectious; and I helped with the housekeeping. One day I came in and found him on all fours, scrubbing the floor and chanting the ‘Ave Maria Stella.’ He began to soliloquize.
‘What a trade ours is!’ he said as he scrubbed vigorously. ‘We go from our breviary to dog disease and back again, from prayers to the Primus stove, from Christian charity to a sound thwacking of the huskies because they are fighting and their howling annoys us. “Thou shalt not kill,” we repeat; and we take our 30-30 and bring down as many caribou as we can, because even a priest must eat, and so must his dogs. I tell you, it’s enough to make a man die laughing.’ And into my boots he flung half the contents of his water bucket.
I was cook, among other things, and every day, when time came to eat, my Parisian missionary would say to me solemnly: —
‘Monsieur de Poncins, what are you preparing for us today? Did you say roast turkey? Or was that lobster Thermidor I heard you rolling over your tongue?’ With that we would finish off the remains of a tin of chipped beef. We were able to make some toast one day: it brought France to mind, and I asked Father Delalande if he ever thought of going home. He was in high spirits, playing old French airs on his harmonium, but at the question he stopped, shook his head soberly, and said: —
‘No, I think probably it wouldn’t suit me. I might as well end here. The snow, the dogs, everything . . . there’s nothing like it.’
A frequent visitor to the mission was a police sergeant called Frenchy Chartrand. He and Father Delalande were the best-liked men on Coronation Gulf. Only the Arctic existed for them; and everything that lay below the Mackenzie River was to them the remote, the virtually nonexistent ‘Outside.’ Their concerns, even their words, were quasiEskimo. The subject of their discourse was Eskimo — the freeze, the breakup, the sled, dog disease, the price of furs. A sick leader of a dog team was infinitely more significant than the peace of Europe; for in the North a leader is everything. Father Delalande himself had been here six years, he told me, before getting a good leader, and now he talked about the dog constantly and never made a plan to visit the outlying natives without bringing the prowess of his leader into the conversation.
He was, in this respect, no different from the others. Often, as we chatted together, his eyes would stray to the window, and in the middle of a sentence he would go out of doors to see if that was really a seal he had caught sight of on the water. Seal meant food, and food was more important than conversation. When Father Delalande soliloquized to himself in the next room, the subject of his soliloquy was always dog or fish; and when he spoke of fish it was always about the quantity he would have to send up in advance and cache at different points on his winter route. Eat and keep warm were the two rules by which men lived in the North.
I still lacked the proper clothing for Arctic life, and Father Delalande advised me to buy my skins here in Coppermine, for caribou had been rare on King William Land and I might find that I had no wardrobe when I reached Gjoa Haven. He sent for Krilamik, the best seamstress in the village, and told her what was wanted.
Limping, grinning, smoking cigarette upon cigarette, the old Eskimo woman walked with me to the store. There are few sights more engaging than a craftsman practising his craft, displaying his professional resource upon wood, or marble — or hides. Krilamik bowed over the piles of hides inspired confidence. Half the skins were rejected at a glance, not even touched. Here was one her eye judged possible, but when she had rubbed it between her fingers, hefted it in one hand, turned it over to peer at the nether side, it was discarded. One by one, she went over the whole stock, and after two hours a good-sized pile had been set aside. Out of this pile a second selection was made; and finally she straightened up, waved a careless hand to indicate that she had made her choice, and we counted the lot. There were seventeen full hides, three white bellies, and thirty legs, all of caribou. In addition, one big sealskin for boot bottoms, a moose skin, and, for trimming, a wolverene skin. My sleeping bag and other odd pieces would be made for me at Gjoa Haven.
We bought also a packet of caribou sinew that looked to me like a dead flounder and was a common article of stock in the Hudson’s Bay posts. From my flounder, Krilamik would draw out the nerves, one by one, and, twisting them with her teeth, would make the strongest possible kind of thread.
All this was carried off to her tent; and without a word to me about measurement she proceeded with her sewing. Not to have been measured for my clothes worried me, and I spoke of it to Father Delalande. He laughed and said I need not fret. ‘She’s had a good look at you. Eskimo seamstresses never go wrong. As tailors, they beat even the Chinese.’
I had been twelve days at Coppermine when it became clear that I could reach King William Land only by shipping with Art Watson in the Audrey B. I should sail seven hundred miles west to Tuktuyaktuk, the same distance back to within sight of Coppermine, and then proceed, doing a total of nineteen hundred miles to reach a point five hundred miles distant!
The explanation was as simple as the journey was complicated. I have already said that the Mackenzie River is the single highway down which supplies in bulk can be brought to the Arctic. Those supplies are landed at Tuk. There a part is transshipped on board the Audrey B., and by the Audrey B. distributed to certain posts on the Glacial Ocean.
On August 28 we dropped anchor before the Hudson’s Bay post at Perry River, and on the twenty-ninth the Audrey B. was off again. One month had brought change in the Arctic summer. Sleet and snow were falling; there was not a moment to lose if the vessel was to be back at Coppermine before the freeze came. The chill of a wind that whipped us, the swell at sea, spoke of an early winter; and, all of us working in a sort of frenzy, we tumbled the cases overboard and heaped them up on shore, our hands freezing while the August storm blew. Next morning the whistle of the Audrey B. cut the air, and I ran to the point of the island and watched her glide heavily and noiselessly along the horizon. As she moved out of sight, I thought of the mate’s casually dropped farewell (‘So long: I feel sorry for you already’), and I thought also of the bishop’s warning at Tuk: ‘Your lungs will freeze. You will be locked up in an icy prison, unable to get out.’ The Audrey B. was mere smoke on the horizon when I walked back to the Hudson’s Bay post, aware that my last tie with the Outside had been snapped.
Yet even Perry was not the end of the trail. I spent a week there as the guest of Angus Gavin, the able and philosophic Post Manager, before a half-civilized Eskimo named Angulalik took me in his motorboat over the two hundred and fifty miles that still separated me from King William Land. On September 9, finally, at five in the afternoon, we rode into the tranquil and majestic bay of Gjoa Haven, the first true harbor I had seen in the Arctic.
The bay was the shape of a long bean, surrounded on three sides by low ridges cut with deep gullies. Spread wide in every direction lay a colorless plain, static, stony, void of life, empty of every promise except the promise of solitude. On shore, as we moved slowly in, two white men stood. They did not wave, they did not call out: they stood waiting. One of these men, I knew, would be going out next day with Angulalik. But the other! What sort of man was he? In that brown shack that rose among its outbuildings on the ridge, he and I were to spend days and weeks together, cut off from all the world.
I stepped out of the boat and shook hands for the first time with Paddy (born William) Gibson. One look at his face told me there was nothing to fear. We should get on.
III
The morning after my arrival I stood at a window and stared at a bird as it tacked and wheeled in the storm over the wide and empty tundra. It was a hawk; its game was the snowbird; and because the snowbirds were still here the hawk was here. Everything in this place was a link in the chain of death. Man was here because the white fox was here. The white fox was here because it hunted the lemming. And the lemming, that diminutive Arctic rat, was here because of a still smaller prey. Inland it was the same: the wolves followed in the track of the caribou; behind came the fox to eat what the wolf left, and then the wolverene who cleaned up what the fox disdained. Along the ice floes the polar bear hunted the seal, and the knowing fox followed the bear because the bear — that ice-inhabiting gourmet — ate only the blubber and left the rest. And behind the fox came man, setting his traps.
Once again my world had shrunk. From the wide Arctic it had narrowed to the dimensions of this little bay, Gjoa Haven, where in this season three quarters of a mile was as far as the eye could see. (It was to shrink, later, down to the circumference of the Post itself, and even to the tiny circle round the stove.) A little like a detention camp, I thought; and wherever I set my eyes the limits were visible, as if the whole thing were a décor planted there to serve for a film and then be taken apart. It was grim, barren, inexorable, and virtually lifeless. There was an owl, a single white owl that hunted the lemming and spoke of death and desolation. It flitted from beacon to beacon, — a beacon here is not a light, but a landmark, a pole held in place by heavy stones at its base, — and this winged menace, companion to the Post as long as the autumn lasted, was so ominous a sight that somehow no one dared to shoot it.
We had a receiving set at the Post, but no sending apparatus; and it was not until the next day that I was struck by the fact. If I went mad, to whom could Paddy appeal? If Paddy’s appendix went bad, over what wire or by what wireless could I cry out to the nearest surgeon at Aklavik, fourteen hundred miles away, ‘Tell me: how do you open an abdomen with a kitchen knife?’ We had surrendered the right of man to have recourse to his kind. We had not the right to fall ill, to become restless, to ask to be diverted.
Then there was the matter of incoming mail. Paddy had buried himself in it for two days. Letters and papers were strewn on the floor. Sitting in an armchair, dressed in sealskin boots and an old sweater, Paddy bent down and rummaged in the pile. He would open an envelope, begin a letter, read a page or two, toss it aside, open the next envelope. There is an eagerness for contact which has nothing to do with eagerness for information. Whom is this from? What is he saying that I care to hear? . . . The magazines are piled to one side. They will be read in the course of the winter.
I had no letters, but sat looking at Gibson. Suddenly he picked up an envelope and gasped; and this letter he read carefully through to the end. It was from his father. But his father — he had had the news by radio — had died in Ireland six months before. He sat motionless, and I looked away. Here, I thought, is a corner of the world where the dead still write letters; a place where no man knows what has happened to his country, his village, his father. At Gjoa Haven we are the tail of the lizard, cut off from the body and continuing to wriggle.
All such thoughts — the roving hawk, the grisly owl, the sense of isolation — were, I know now, the frettings of a man from Outside; no man of the Arctic let them upset him. But I had not yet reached this point.
Winter had not yet come with its feeling of permanence and of something settled. We were in the fall of the year, the dread season of squall and high wind, of cold without snow, and of shivering discomfort (the only season in which men shiver in the North), when the motionless Eskimo crouches in his flapping tent and prays for the coming of winter as we outside long for the signs of spring.
Somewhere inland the Eskimo has cached his riches — that is, buried in the earth under heaps of stones his sled, his harpoons, his harness, and all the paraphernalia of the rich and severely magnificent winter months. As a great lady of the world, once the season is over, sends her jewels to her banker for safe custody, so the Eskimo confides his treasures to the earth until the revolution of the seasons calls for disinterment in October. Until that time the Eskimo is a miserable creature, a wretched gypsy clad in rags and waiting for purification by snow. And when the snow comes, the shabby tent is abandoned, the white igloo is built, the skins and furs are sewn into handsome clothes, and a metamorphosis takes place: the seedy gypsy becomes a hunter, the beggar round the Post is now an Inuk —‘ a Man, preeminently,’ as these Eskimos call themselves.
For the time being, however, the Eskimo is unimpressive, and King William Land is flat, desolate, and stormswept. Sown with millions of skullshaped stones, this barren ground is as sinister as an antique battlefield, a dead earth almost colorless in its brown monotony.
Was it for this that I had come ten thousand miles by ship, by rail, by plane, by river boat?
IV
And who were these Eskimos I had come so far to see?
Gibson, who was all kindness, had let me know that there was a fish camp thirty miles away where I might make my first acquaintance with the Eskimo world. Utak had been engaged to guide me there and bring me back. Here was a young and, I thought, a friendly man. Though there was something sly and almost subtle in his glance, I felt I should get on with him and regretted that I knew so little of his language. To Gibson I said, ‘I like this fellow. He’ll do very well, I think.’
‘Mm, yes,’ Gibson said dubiously. ‘He knows a fair lot about white men. Been round quite a bit. Killed his stepfather, you know. Spent three years in prison at Aklavik, over near Alaska. Learnt how to smoke tailor-mades, and two or three words of English. Not a dangerous chap, probably, but he’s rather well known for his fits of temper.
I dare say you’ll get on with him all right. Anyway, there’s nobody else round to take you to the fish camp.’
Not very consoling. I took a sharper look at my man. Each time that I looked at him, he grinned. I did not need to be told that the Eskimo grin was a mental attitude, a convention, a sign of good breeding. There was nothing awkward about Utak. He felt perfectly at home with the white man. Rolling himself a cigarette, he sat squinting and smoking while Gibson and I talked.
I shall have more to say later about how the Eskimos make a start on the trail. What I was witnessing here was the packing of the dogs in preparation for an autumn journey. The process is almost comically laborious. First, you must catch your dogs. Eskimo dogs love to pull a sled, and with equal intensity they hate to carry a pack. When they smell the coming of a pack they are off in all directions. There was one now running over the plain, followed by two women who were employing all the ruse and cunning of the red Indian to catch him. Another had slipped on his belly under the shack and was being dragged out by one paw while he howled like a man being murdered in a cellar. A third saw a native coming towards him with a carefully balanced pack ready for his back, and he rolled over barking and squealing while the man kicked him again and again until the dog surrendered, stood up, and let the pack be strapped on his back.
The poverty of the natives of King William Land is so wretched that the least bit of string, the least stick of wood, is a treasure in their existence. There was a time when they were rich, when they hunted the whale and killed hundreds of caribou every summer. All this is in the past. The land here has risen, the waters have become shallow, the whale comes no more, and the caribou trail is far away. These Netsilik are now the most abjectly poor people in the world. Yet they stay; they do not think of migrating to better hunting grounds. King William is their land, the land of their ancestors. As tramps and gypsies rummage through the dustbins on the outskirts of towns, so these sharpeyed Eskimos find scraps of treasure in this barren landscape; and especially here round the Post this sort of hunting is good. Whenever they come here to trade their white foxes, they wander round and round, scrutinizing the ground, and their wives and children follow the shores of the bay ready to pick up any stray bit of timber, of wire, of rope. All this goes back to their camp, where of an old crate they will make a treasure chest, of a broken file the point of a harpoon.
It is the fruit of this patient rummaging that the dogs carry, along with hides and tent poles and harpoons — a broken kettle, three sticks of wood, torn bits of tar paper; and the dogs disappear under their loads, moving on unseen legs like ambulatory junkshops.
Finally this comical bustle was ended and we were ready to be off. I shouldered my pack. Utak, for the honor of the Eskimo, carried more than any of us: piled up on his small tent was mine, big enough to shelter four people. And perched atop of my tent sat his little son. We started, Utak trotting in the lead, his wife at his heels, — literally with her toes at the heels of his boots, — the child perched high, and I bringing up the rear.
Once over the low ridge that skirts the bay, we marched through an endless plain that stretched as far as the eye could see. This was the Arctic tundra, a land indescribable because there is literally nothing to describe, nothing that holds the eye, that exalts, that gives promise of anything whatever at the end. Yet, where I saw space devoid of life, my Eskimos saw life. Again and again Utak and his wife — who seemed to be his double, so extraordinarily did she reproduce all his gestures — would stop, bend forward, stare at the ground, or leave the trail and go to the right and the left, then come back smiling. What had they seen? A lemming’s hole, and the lemming may be in it. We wait ten minutes. No, he is not there: we go on. Or they see traces, droppings of a fox or a bird. Nothing escapes them, and their observation is incessant. For a stone that is not in its normal position they will stop, murmur, discuss; and then on they go with me behind.
When we stop for a breather, instead of resting and rolling a cigarette, as I do, they are off exploring. The instinct of destruction drives them on. They find a couple of bird’s eggs: there must be a bird. The wife runs off to a near-by pool with a .22 rifle and brings back a dead plover which they tear apart with their hands and eat raw on the spot. They paddle in the shallow waters, carefully lifting up stones under which tiny fish are hidden, and in a moment they have caught a dozen of these fish, the biggest as long as my hand. They eat them raw, and the child cries out that he too wants a fish. The fish is too big for him and it sticks out of his mouth, the tail flapping while he tries to bite off the head. Quickly his mother runs to his rescue, chews up the fish for him, and feeds it back to him, mouth to mouth. She slakes his thirst in the same way while Utak sucks an icicle as if it were a sherbet.
It was clear that the child was master in the Eskimo family. Perched high with widespread legs, as if riding a camel, he spoke forth his edicts and he was obeyed. When he sent down a question to his father, he was answered without impatience. When he signified that he preferred to walk, they stopped, the world stopped. Each took the child by a hand, half holding, half carrying him, and the three moved with slow steps down the trail. There was no irritability in these parents, no complaint over time lost. The child’s desires were as orders, and the parents obeyed. Back on the pack again, the little boy spoke two or three words, and the father, to amuse the child, repeated them over and over again, like a nurse in a family where the heir is prince and tyrant.
All this, I say, I watched, but I was not of it. They ignored me completely, and to my great pleasure, for I did not wish to be drawn into their body; I was too happy watching them, and, by this time, too happy in my thoughts. They had in the end isolated me with such success that I walked in a world of fancy, of dreams, and one after another there passed through my mind a hundred comforting pictures out of the Bible.
The sun sank, and of a sudden the earth grew dark. Light, which was all the life of this land, had gone out of it, and the land was dead. Now my Eskimos were hardly discernible, and the night came down and blotted out the world. We had done perhaps fifteen or eighteen of thirty-five miles, and time had come to make camp. We pitched our tent on the flank of a ridge while the chilly air grew colder. On the frozen ground we spread our caribou skins, stuck a lighted candle on an empty box, and lit the Primus stove. Utak stripped to the waist; the child, naked, was already playing on the skins, and his mother had taken off her outer garments. By signs, Utak let me know that I must do as he had done, and dry my clothes lest I freeze in the chilled sweat.
The Primus was going, and soon we should eat. I slipped out. Seen from fifty yards away, the tent was tiny and the glow of the candle was a faint gleam. Without, the world seemed endless, and our habitation less than a dot upon its face. I drew a long breath, the extent of my weariness came suddenly over me, and I went back into the tent.
We brewed tea and drank it with boiled rice and raw fish. I lay on the ground, dazed with fatigue, but they were as fresh as when we started. Supper was no sooner over than they began to play with the child, hiding little things round the tent which he never failed to find and hold up in triumph. This went on for two hours in the midst of noisy laughter while I looked on at them and at the swift and silent flow of their huge shadows on the tent walls. They were still at their game when I fell asleep, thinking, as I dozed off, how strange was this gayety in the midst of infinity.
(To be continued)