r
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED AND KAYAK
A WONDERFUL SIGHT
The Aurora Borealis is a fairly familiar sight to the Eskimos and is
sometimes seen in warmer climes.
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
AND KAYAK
A DESCRIPTION OF A MISSlONARrS
EXPERIENCES fcf ADVENTURES
IN LABRADOR
BY
S. K. HUTTON, M.B., CH.B.VICT.
FELLOW OF THE ROVAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
With Thirteen Illustrations and a Map
LONDON
SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED
38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET
1919
MISSIONARY LIBRARY FOR
BOYS & GIRLS
WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS &> COLOURED FRONTISPIECE
A HERO OF THE AFGHAN FRONTIER. Being
the Life of Dr T. L. Pennell, of Bannu, told for Boys &> Girls. By
A. M. PENNELL, M.B., B.S.(Lond.), B.Sc.
" This is the glorious life-story of Dr T. L. Pennell retold for boys and
girls." Church Family Newspaper.
" The life-etcry of a fearless Englishman of the beet kind."
Daily Telegraph.
JUDSON, THE HERO OF BURMA. The Life cf
Judson told for Boys <& Girls. By JESSE PAGE, F.R.G.S.
"A stirring life-story." Schoolmaster.
"There is not a dull page in the whole book." Life of Faith.
" Most interesting and fascinating." Record.
ON TRAIL 6- RAPID BY DOGSLED 6- CANOE.
Bishop Bom pas's Life amongst the Red Indians and Esquimo told for
Boys * Girls. By the Rev. H. A. Cf DY, M.A.
" A book of golden deeds, full of inspiration." n, i( f,,.
" An admirable picture of a great career." spectator.
' ' The astonishing adventures of Bishop Bompas amorgst Eed Indians
and Eskimos." The Challenge.
MISSIONARY CRUSADERS. Stories of the Daunt-
less Courage and Remarkable Adventures which Missionaries have
had in many parts of the World whilst carrying out iheir duties. By
CLAUD FIELD, M.A. (Cantab.).
MISSIONARY KNIGHTS OF THE CROSS. Stories
of the Indomitable Courage 6- Stirring Adventures of Missionaries
with Uncivilised Man, Wild Beasts, & the Forces of Nature in many
parts of the World. By J. C. LAMBERT, M.A., D.D.
MISSIONARY HEROINES OF THE CROSS. True
Stories of the Splendid Courage <5- Patient Endurance of Lady
Missionaiies. Ey Canon DAWSON.
LIVINGSTONE, THE HERO OF AFRICA. By
R. B. DAWSON, M.A.(Oxon.). With many Illustrations.
BY ESKIMO DOGSLED < KAYAK. The Adventures
<fc Experiences of a Missionary in Labrador. By Dr S. K. HUTTON.
SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I . .... 17
CHAPTER II .28
CHAPTER III . 42
CHAPTER IV . 53
CHAPTER V . .67
CHAPTER VI ... 82
CHAPTER VII 92
CHAPTER VIII . . .... 107
CHAPTER IX 120
CHAPTER X .133
x CONTENTS
CHAPTER XI . .... 14
CHAPTER XII 157
CHAPTER XIII 169
CHAPTER XIV 184
CHAPTER XV 196
CHAPTER XVI 208
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A WONDERFUL SIGHT : THE AURORA BOREALIS . Frontispiece
SKETCH MAP OF LABRADOR
A FISHING CAMP .
THE AUTHOR
THE UNWILLING PUPPY
A SLED PARTY
DOGS FISHINO
JULIUS AND A SNOW HOUSE
SPRING FLITTING .
SEAL FISHING
ESKIMO HARPOON
. 13
Facing page
32
32
. 56
. 56
. 64
. 88
. 128
. 136
142
XI
Facing -fiage
160
xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
HOME FROM THE HUNT
WINTER FISHING .
ESKIMO BOY l76
MAP OF LABRADOR
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
AND KAYAK
CHAPTER I
With the Harmony to Labrador Ramah The Happy Eskimos
The Messengers and their Food Eskimos on Board Landing
at Okak Aksunai The Eskimos at Work.
THE beginning of this book is in the
cabin of a small steamer somewhere
on the North Atlantic Ocean. To be a
little more exact, the ship was the Harmony,
belonging to the Moravian Missions, of London,
and we were on our way to the coast of Labra-
dor. It was in the month of October, in the
year 1903 ; and if you have been upon the
Atlantic in October, even in a great liner,
you will know something about the roughness
of the sea. But the plucky little ship plunged
her nose into the waves, and shook her sturdy
shoulders like a dog, and rolled along in the
teeth of the winds that seemed always to be
howling. " Head winds," the captain called
them ; and it was not until afterwards, when
B 17
18 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
we were snug in the shelter of a Labrador
harbour, that he told me that those winds
were some of the famous equinoctial gales.
But in spite of the winds, and in spite of the
roaring and pounding and battering waves,
the little ship battled along, as though she were
a living thing and knew how much depended
on her. For the Harmony was carrying food
and stores for the villages where the mission-
aries of the Moravian Church are preaching
the Gospel to the Eskimos of Northern Labra-
dor, and she was carrying, too, the beginnings
of a hospital for the Eskimos.
So day by day we tossed and rolled along,
always nearer, when night fell and we laid us
down to rest, to the frozen land where our
work was waiting : and you may imagine
how pleased we all were when land was sighted,
and when the steward woke us up from our
afternoon nap with a great shout, and we
rolled over and looked through our port-
holes at the bare black rocks and snow-covered
hills in the distance. This was Labrador, the
land of the Eskimos.
In the morning we were at anchor off
Ramah, in a deep little harbour among the
hills. The solitary missionary was in trans-
ports of delight. " I had almost given you
up," he said, " you are so late " : and he went
AND KAYAK 19
on to tell us how only the night before he had
told two men to make ready to tramp over the
hills to Hebron, seventy miles away, to ask
for news and stores.
No wonder he was pleased : all his worries
had vanished away in a moment. He had been
anxious, poor man, about the winter. " Our
butter was nearly done," he said, " and we
had no fresh vegetables or eggs " for Ramah
is too cold for gardening, and as for hens, well,
the poor things get such rheumatism in their
legs that it is not possible to keep them through
all the bitter cold of the winter. " We had
flour," said the missionary, " and I think the
Eskimos could have managed, for they eat
seal-meat and dried fish ; but I do not know
how the children would have gone on, for we
had not much tinned milk." And so he was as
pleased as could be, for here was the Harmony
with the stores ; and not only that, for the
captain was handing over a great bulging
bag of letters and papers and parcels, and so
once more the lonely little settlement of Ramah
had news from home. There was no doubt
that the Eskimos themselves were as pleased
to see the ship as the missionary was : they
had been banging away with their guns since
daybreak, and now we could see flags on the
houses in honour of the day, and the people
20 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
themselves were around us, on the deck and in
their boats, beaming with happiness. Soon
the work of unloading was begun, and every-
body, men and women alike, was hard at
his task, while the little children capered
about on the jetty, watching and shouting and
trying to help.
While we sat chatting in the cabin two
Eskimos came in ; small shock-headed men,
clad in corduroy trousers and oily blanket
smocks.
Their little restless eyes gazed about with
wonderment, the while they gabbled strange
words in an endless stream.
As fast as one paused for breath, the other
took up the tale, and I could not help
smiling at their obvious earnestness about
something. The missionary sat gravely listening
to their speeches, occasionally giving a laconic
" Ahaila " (yes) ; and at the end they seemed
mightily pleased, for they went out grinning,
with many a sly nudge at one another, and
" Nakomek " (thank you) to the company
generally.
Then we got the explanation. " Those are
the two men that I told to go to Hebron, and
they have been to ask whether they need go,
now that the ship has come. I expect there
will be feasting in Ramah to-day, for their next
AND KAYAK 21
question was whether they might eat the pro-
visions I had given them for the journey."
It came out later in the day that one of the
men had eaten his pork and biscuits as soon as
he got them, I suppose as a sort of foundation
for his journey. Actually on the road, he
would have been content to chew an unpro-
mising slab of tough dried fish ; but I think
he must have felt rather relieved when the
missionary gave him permission to demolish
the pork.
The ship did not dally in Ramah ; we only
stayed one day, because of the lateness of the
season ; and on the morning of the 7th of
November, 1903, we dropped our anchor in
Okak Bay, in sight of the biggest of the Eskimo
villages ; and there, at the old settlement of
Okak, among the dull little huts that dotted
the hillside, and close to the tapering tower
of the Mission Church, I saw my future
home.
There seemed to be plenty of bustle and stir
at Okak. The paths between the huts seemed
alive with people, all dressed in proper Eskimo
style, with hooded smocks and knee-boots.
Men and women were running from their
homes, crowding to the little wooden jetty in
front of the storehouse, and the children,
dressed like small copies of their parents, were
22 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
racing in the same direction. Soon the sea
was dotted with boats, big boats and little
boats, all looking as though a touch would turn
them over, so crowded with people they were.
Here and there came a man in a skin canoe,
bent on the same errand as the boats. The
people were coming to greet the new-comers,
and to take a good look at the ship.
They came tumbling aboard, with smiles
and hand-shakes and shouts of " Aksunai "
which we all repeated because it seemed the
proper thing to say ; and when they spoke to
us in their queer long words, of which we
could not understand one single syllable, we
just smiled, smiled our broadest, and they
smiled back at us and seemed quite well
satisfied.
There was a crowd around the door of the
cook's galley, where the smell of cookery and
the sight of the pots and pans seemed to be
causing a good deal of excitement. One old
soul, who seemed to be a cripple, was smiling
so broadly at the cook that he secretly gave
her a ship's biscuit and a piece of cold pork,
which she pocketed with broader smiles than
ever, and mutterings of " thankee, thankee."
" Pocketing " is the only word I can find to
describe what she did with the pork and the
biscuit ; for she seemed to have no pocket as
AND KAYAK 23
we understand things : she simply dropped
her prize into the depths of the great hood of
her smock, and wandered along the deck to
see more sights. Presently I saw her with a
crowd of others peering down the open sky-
light of the engine-room, wide-eyed with
wonder at the strange and shining things she
saw down there, and evidently enjoying the
warm and steamy draught that came blowing
upwards.
When we went ashore there was an Eskimo
waiting to hand us into the boat. He stood at
the bottom of the steps ; and as I trod care-
fully down the wooden gangway all crusted
with hard black ice and all a-move with the
swaying of the ship, I looked down at him.
Here was a real Eskimo, just like the pictures
that I had in my mind ; a black-haired,
shaggy-headed little man, with broad shoulders
and strong arms, a heavy, muscular little
figure not more than five feet tall, and when
he looked up at me it was a face from the
picture-books that looked into mine, a square
smooth face with an oily-looking yellow skin
and ruddy patches on the cheeks. His lumpy
cheek-bones seemed well padded with fat ; his
nose was a small flat dab ; and he had a pair of
restless little brown eyes that twinkled out of
narrow slits. I handed my wife down the
24 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
slippery steps, and the little man helped her
into the boat. His smattering of English had
a quaint ring with it : ' Take care, lady, boat
plenty wet fine day, sir"; and I shook
hands with this characteristic-looking Eskimo,
and thought that I should like to know him
better. My wish came true, for Paulus and I
became very good friends, and his face is in
many of the pictures that come to my mind
from the years that I spent in that little village
of Okak. He was a really human Eskimo,
kindly and generous, easily angry, but as
easily smiling again. He was sometimes
quarrelsome, sometimes awkward, but friendly
at heart : he gave me some troublesome
moments, but he did me many a little kind-
ness and he saved my life once, but that is
another story.
There was a keen wind blowing as the men
rowed us across from the ship to the shore, and
they had hard work to get along. " Aksuse "
shouted the steersman, and the rowers bent
their backs and pulled their hardest. Every
time they flagged, every time he saw a gust of
wind coming, his cry was the same " Ak-
suse." Aksuse be strong ; it was the Eskimo
greeting, the same word that met us at Ramah
when we first touched land, the " Aksunai "
of welcome given to several at once ; and I saw
AND KAYAK 25
that the meaning has not dropped out of it as
it has out of some greetings.
" Aksuse," shouted the steersman ; '' be
strong put your hearts into it do your
best," and the oarsmen obeyed with a will.
What more noble greeting could you imagine
than this old Eskimo password, the people's
greeting through all time ?
" Aksuse," shouted the folk as we walked
along the jetty, and we could not but feel
heartened for our task by the very sincerity
of the welcome. One man thought to go one
better ; he had a trifle of English to air : he
touched my wife's arm, and held out his hand.
" Good evening, sir," he said !
And this in the middle of the morning :
I was very much interested in the great
corner-stones of the foundations for the new
hospital ; they were so ponderous that I
wondered however they had been raised into
place, for in a land like Labrador there are no
great cranes and engines such as we sec in
England. I asked the missionary about those
stones, because the building had been his work.
He looked at me with a smile : " We just
pulled all together," he said. Then he went
on to explain how they had made a tripod of
tree-stems, slung a pulley from the top, passed
a thick rope over the pulley and tied it to the
26 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
stone, and then got hold of the rope and pulled
all together !
It sounded very simple ; but I looked again
at those great corner-stones and wished that I
had been there to see the pulling.
I understood it better during the afternoon,
for the wind grew stronger, and the oarsmen
were unable to row the lighters ashore. The
work of unloading threatened to come to a
stop, and the captain dared not delay with the
Labrador winter treading on his heels. " Ajor-
narpok " (it cannot be done), said the men at
the oars. " All right," said the captain,
" get a rope get the women get everybody,
and let them all pull." As soon as the word
went round there was a stampede to the jetty ;
women came rushing out of the huts, tying
bandanna handkerchiefs over their heads to
keep their hair tidy in the wind ; children
raced from house to house, gathering their
friends. " Come and pull," was the password.
By the time the people were ready the rope
had been tied to the lighter and passed ashore.
The mate on the ship blew his whistle ; the
man in charge of the rope on the jetty waved
his hand in answer and yelled to the people.
" Atte " (get at it), he shouted, and the people
began to pull.
They tramped along the jetty, clinging to
AND KAYAK 27
the rope, and singing in time to the march-
like beating of their boots on the boards.
44 Atte, atte," they cried when the pace began
to slacken, and then sang and tramped the
faster. There was a constant stream up one
side with the rope, and down the other side to
get a fresh hold, and as fast as the rope came
ashore the man at the end was coiling the slack
into a neat pile. A jollier lot of people I have
never seen ; they sang and tramped, and
laughed and sang again, as if they had not a
care in the world ; and all the while the lighter
came steadily on, rising to the waves and
breaking them down, stopping for nothing,
but riding shore wards. I went on board the
ship to watch their work, and from the
deck I could hear the sound of their singing
borne on a wind that whistled through the
rigging. This was " pulling all together," a
practical illustration of the old proverb,
" Where there's a will there's a way " and
that seems to be how difficulties are overcome
in Labrador.
CHAPTER II
Living iu teuts Tents and dogs Bob's tent The tent-stones
A teut in a tangle Bob's family Bob's boots In the rain
Old Tuglavi.
THE first missionaries who went to
Labrador, now nearly a hundred and
fifty years ago, must have found
their work made all the more difficult by the
way in which the Eskimos are used to wander
from one place to another. But the mission-
aries made the best of it : they built their
churches where the people had their winter
homes, and so there came to be a number of
what we might call mission villages here and
there along the coast. It is much the same
to-day as it was in those olden times : the
Eskimos spend the winter in their wooden
huts, within sound of the church bell and with-
in reach of the mission store ; but when
winter is over they go off to some favourite
hunting or fishing-place of their own, and live
in tents.
Tents are ideal summer dwellings for a
people who are, at heart, wanderers ; and the
28
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED 29
s
Eskimos are restless beings they like to
follow the call of their hunting, and to make
their temporary home where their work is.
Not many years ago the tents, all along the
coast, were of reindeer skins stitched together
with sinew and stretched on poles with the
hairy side outward ; and no doubt some of the
people will live in skin tents to the end, so
loth are they to give up the customs of their
lives.
But calico tents are becoming very popular
and a good thing, too. They are lighter and
airier than skin tents, and afford just as good
a protection from the weather ; but the
Eskimos like them because they are so easily
mended. If an August storm tears a tent to
ribbons or hurls it bodily into the raging sea,
the owner and his family have no need to
spend the rest of the season packed like
sardines on the floor of some other man's tent,
waiting for the next year's reindeer hunt to
come round before making a bid for a new
one ; no, when the storm has passed, the
father takes his boat and hies him to the store,
and spends a few dollars of his fish-money on
a roll of calico which his wife will very speedily
turn into a tent.
But even this is not the chief reason to
Eskimo minds. Portability is the thing ; and
30 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
a tent that packs up into a neat little bundle,
and can be stowed away in the bottom of a
boat or can be used to cover the load on a
sled without making the pile too high and
top-heavy for the passengers, is a grand thing
compared with the bulky heap of reindeer skin
that takes up so much room. And another
great thing that makes calico the favourite
stuff for tents is that calico is not particularly
tempting to the appetite of the dogs. I can
quite well imagine that a tent of dried deer
skins might prove a toothsome meal for a
pack of famished sled - dogs ; but I have
never heard of dogs devouring a calico tent
wholesale, though they are not at all averse
to an occasional chew at the oil - sodden
margins.
You may see the tents in the summer-time
as you pass along the coast by ship lonely
tents, and tents in groups and clusters, some
white and new, others grey and smoke-be-
grimed and rain-soaked pitched by the edge
of the sea, just out of reach of the tides. Out-
side the tents are the great sled-dogs, idle
because it is summer-time and the sleds are
put away ; they skulk about and quarrel,
while among them the little children are play-
ing, building houses with the smooth stones
of the beach, or gathering grasses, or dress-
AND KAYAK 31
ing and undressing their quaint little native
dollies.
The children are not in the least afraid of the
dogs ; indeed it is quite the other way about,
for I have seen a tiny mite of a child go and
slap a great shaggy dog with his baby fists,
whereupon the fierce-looking brute got up and
went slinking away, howling and whining as
though some awful punishment had come
upon it.
Bob, the Eskimo who led me to see the
sights when I first visited the village of Killinek
in the far north of Labrador, took me to see
his tent. He pointed along a winding stony
path, and trotted amiably in front of me.
" My tent," he said, as he waved his hand to-
wards a smoke -blackened tent among the
rocks. This was Bob's home : it was no more
than a bunch of poles with a calico cover
thrown over them ; the poles stuck out
through a hole in the top, and the cover was
kept in place by big stones laid upon its edge.
The ground was too rocky for tent-pegs, and
doubtless stones were the next best thing ;
but I thought with a shiver of the prob-
able fate of the tent on some wild autumn
night.
" Does your tent never blow over ? " I
said.
32 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
He laughed. " Oh yes, it sometimes blows
over when the wind is strong ; but never mind,
what does it matter ? We can soon crawl out
and set it on its poles again, and it is all right.
The stones do not blow away ; they stay there
all the time. When the winter comes, and we
can find snow to build snow houses, we leave
the stones lying until we come again in the
spring. I always put my tent in the same
place, for it is a good place. That big rock
shelters us from the north-west wind, and we
can drink from that stream of water near by ;
besides, we are close to the sea, and I can soon
launch my skin canoe and go hunting the
seals. Yes, it is a good place, and I shall come
again next year. Some of the people do not
find good places ; they go to fresh places each
year ; but my place is good."
His face was aglow, and I caught some of his
emotion ; I felt the glamour of his simple life.
I thought of the many times when I have come
across the rings of stones, relics of deserted
tenting-places. They are generally in some
grassy nook near the seashore. The rank
grass grows over and among them, and the
sandy space which they surround is strewn
with fishbones and shells and all the other
litter of Eskimo tent life. There is an air of
desolation about those rings of stones. Their
{!,> 5-g
1-2 If. 2
J*|
fe -StTS
11"'
85?
-5
i-2 c
5 d u
I'll
to. 5 ?
.c- c
~ JU'-
M
AND KAYAK 33
owners have sought better places for their
tents ; they have had no fortune at the fishing,
and have gone to try elsewhere ; perhaps they
have passed away and are forgotten.
I need hardly have asked Bob that question
about his tent blowing over, for I have seen the
same thing happen. I was passing along the
village one day, battling my way against a
howling wind, when suddenly the cover of a
tent close by began to flap loudly ; the gale
tore the edges from under the stones, and in
less time than it takes to tell the whole thing
collapsed. One moment it was a tent ; the
next, before my eyes, there was just a shape-
less heap of tent poles and wet calico, all in a
tangle, with strange writhings going on under-
neath. The writhings became more lively,
and presently three little Eskimo girls wriggled
out at different places, all very tousled, and all
looking very much surprised. They got up
and shook themselves and looked at one
another ; then they burst out laughing and
began to try to put their home upon its legs
again. I wondered what things were like
underneath the tent, for poles and calico were
all in a heap, and the things that had been on
the floor must have been in a fine pickle if I
was to judge by the way in which the ruins
lashed and rocked in the wind ; but the little
34 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
girls seemed to take it all as a joke, for they
shrieked with merriment as they pulled at the
comers of the tent-cover and tried to get the
poles clear. While they were busy at their
work a woman came out of a tent close by. I
suppose that she was their mother, for she held
up her hands and said, " Ai, ai," as much as to
say, " What a thing to happen " ; then she,
too, burst out laughing and went to help the
girls.
However, to go back to Bob and his tent.
As we went along the path, Bob trotting in
front and I following sedately behind, we came
upon a little girl squatting on the ground,
solemnly stirring the contents of a big cooking
pot which stood upon a rough fireplace of
stones. She fed the fire with bits of brush-
wood, and " shooed " the hungry dogs away.
She looked up shyly as we passed, and I saw
the family likeness at once. She had the same
tumbled mop of black hair, the same little
twinkling eyes, the same small nose and plump
ruddy cheeks, the same expression of face, as
her father. The sound of our footsteps brought
three or four other small folks scrambling out
of the tent, each one a repetition of the others
on a different scale. They joined hands and
stood in a row, gazing with awestruck eyes at
the stranger. This was evidently Bob's family,
AND KAYAK 35
or a part of it, and a most interesting sight
they made. Bob and his wife evidently
practised economy at home by handing on each
child's clothes, as soon as it grew too big for
them, to the next on the list. The trousers that
adorned the bigger boy were obviously Bob's,
patched and puckered to the proper size ; one
little girl had a woman's skirt on, all the way
up, which gave her the appearance of having
stepped out of a picture-book ; and every one
of the children seemed to be wearing some-
body else's boots. And quite right, too, I
thought. These children are scrambling over
the rocks all day long, romping with the dogs,
and getting their clothes torn and muddied and
soaked ; so I rather admired the wisdom of
their mother in dressing them up in non-
descript garments for their play.
The children stood in a row, hand in hand,
and stared at me as I came along the path :
they only grunted when I said " Aksunai " to
them, though a grunt is quite polite as an
Eskimo way of answering ; so I went past
them and peeped into the tent. The half
furthest from the door was evidently the sleep-
ing-place, for it was filled by a sort of plat-
form built of earth and moss, and spread with
skins.
The mother was seated by the edge of the
36 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
bed, kneading one of her husband's boots.
She looked up as we appeared, with a good-
humoured smile on her handsome, ruddy face,
and quietly went on with her kneading. Other
boots, turned inside out to dry, hung from the
poles above her head ; they were waiting to be
rubbed. That is one of the things that an
Eskimo hunter expects of his wife : she must
keep his boots soft. In he comes from his
latest chase after seals or walrus or bears : he
is wet and tired and sleepy : soon he is sprawl-
ing on the platform bed, snoring great snores,
while his wife is turning his wet boots inside
out, to make them dry and supple for his next
expedition. A good Eskimo housewife always
takes a pride in her husband's boots. And
Bob's wife reached for another boot, and went
on with her kneading.
Close beside her, on an upturned tub, stood
the seal-oil lamp. It was no more than a half-
moon-shaped trough, hollowed from a soft
stone, and half filled with thick brown seal-oil.
A flat wick of moss leaned on the edge of the
trough, dipping into the oil, and burning with
a steady flame. Mrs. Bob seemed to be doing
a little cookery, between whiles, over her primi-
tive lamp. A battered meat -tin, a castaway,
no doubt, from the Mission ship, hung by a
string from one of the tent-poles, and twisted,
AND KAYAK 37
bubbling merrily, over the flame. From time
to time she picked up a spike of bone which lay
beside her, and poked the wick. This seemed
to be all the attention the lamp needed. On
the floor I saw a pot of seal's blubber, from
which the oil was oozing. From this she could
easily fill the lamp if it should burn low. I
warrant she licks her fingers after the filling ;
and more than that, if she happens to fill the
trough of the lamp too full I can well imagine
her taking a few sips.
I could not do much more than look into
Bob's tent ; there was no room. The floor was
strewn with relics of work and of meal-times ;
scraps of sealskin, fish-bones, chips of wood,
bits of calico, either flung down as useless or
left by the children when we interrupted their
play. A fat, pale-faced baby was crawling
about, exercising its sturdy limbs before re-
turning to that queerest of queer cradles, the
hood of its mother's smock. It found a bone,
and squatted to gnaw it, cutting its teeth and
acquiring a taste for the fishy flavour of seal
meat at the same time. A family of pups
romped and tumbled and snarled in their own
corner ; and all around the edge of the tent lay
dogs' harness, spare clothing, sails for the boat,
and pots of seal meat and fish heads.
And Bob was proud of his calico home.
38 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
The walls flapped in the breeze and strained
against the poles.
" Does not the rain come in sometimes ? " I
asked.
Bob looked up at the hole in the top of the
tent, where the cover was gathered round the
bunch of poles. " Oh, yes," he said, " the
rain sometimes comes in and trickles down the
poles, but we get out of the way."
Admirable idea ! Just think of the tent-
dwellers on a rainy night ! With real Eskimo
good humour they arrange themselves between
the poles, so that the raindrops can collect and
trickle and drip beside them. What care they ?
They are dry, and that is something to be
thankful for. And if sometimes they are wet,
well, they do not mind so very much : like true
Eskimos, they are content to take the rough
and the smooth together.
The mention of Bob and his tent reminds me
of the famous old heathen chief of that same
village of Killinek. Tuglavi was his name,
and I saw him many a time as I wandered
about among the rocks and the tents ; a
weird, wild-looking old man, with a childish
smile on his face. He used to follow me by
hours at a time, muttering strangely to him-
self, and answering all my questions with only
a broadening of his constant smile. Poor old
AND KAYAK 39
Tuglavi ! I gave up trying to draw any in-
formation out of him after I had tried to take
his portrait. I armed myself with a ship's
biscuit, and went in search of Tuglavi. I
found him near his iglo (hut), and offered him
the biscuit.
He took it with a most delighted " Thank
you " : " Nakome-e-e-ek," he said, " nako-
mek."
" Adsiliorlagit-ai " (let me take your photo-
graph).
" Sua ? " (what ?)
" Will you let me make a likeness of
you ? "
" Atsuk (I don't know). May I eat the
biscuit ? "
" Yes, presently ; just stand over here."
44 Nerrilangale " (let me eat it), and he
turned his back on me.
" All right ; just turn round and stand still
a moment."
" Nerrilangale, ner-ri-langa-le-e-e-e " ; and
the poor old man broke down into sobs and
ambled off home munching his precious biscuit.
I was left gazing. I never caught him again.
Once or twice I heard his shuffling step behind
me, and a querulous voice said, " I want another
biscuit," but not another word could I get out
of Tuglavi. What I know about him I have
40 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
heard from the missionary. He is a famous
old heathen chief. He has spent all his life
camped among the rocks of the northern
Labrador, and nobody knows how old he is.
His people have come to the Mission station,
bringing him with them ; they have heard
from other Eskimos of the preaching of the
Word of God, and they have come to
hear it ; but Tuglavi cannot understand. His
mind has failed : he is in his second child-
hood, and spends his time in aimless wander-
ings and in watching whatever there is to be
seen.
I wish you could have seen those rough
people of Killinek trooping to church on a
Sunday. The missionary rang the bell that
hung in the little turret above the church roof,
and from every tent the people came. Many
of them were heathen, and most of them were
in {heir working clothes because they had no
other Sunday was a new idea to them.
They sat in rows upon the benches in the
church, with eager eyes fixed upon the mis-
sionary, and ears all alert to catch every word.
And the singing : they knew no music but
their own old heathen chantings, but they
loved to hear the sound of the harmonium,
and they were learning to sing the hymns we
all know so well. But how very shy they
AND KAYAK 41
were ! When the organ played loudly they
sang out well ; but when the player used the
soft stops their voices ceased and the hymn
nearly came to a standstill.
CHAPTER III
After the ship has gone The smoke upon the sea Ice The
village tailor Cold weather Fetching water Our daily walk
The Labrador road.
MY first real feeling of loneliness, in the
land which we call " Lonely Labrador,"
came to me on the day when the
Harmony went away. In the small hours of
the morning, when the sun was making ready
to rise, the ship steamed out of the bay on
her way to the next station, and I awoke
that morning to a view of wide grey water
that seemed strangely empty. The black hull
and spidery rigging of the ship, that had been
in sight of my window for the past few days,
were gone ; the place felt quiet ; the village
seemed suddenly deserted, for the Eskimos
were away to their seal hunting, which they
had left when they came to help at the un-
loading of the ship. But, happily, there was
work to be done : all the things that the ship
had brought were waiting to be unpacked and
looked through. There was no time to be
lonely with three barrels of potatoes to sort,
42
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED 43
and we spent a good part of that day in
putting the sound potatoes carefully away in
straw, while the bruised ones took a more
prominent place in a box in the kitchen to
be eaten first. I was astonished when I
looked through the kitchen window to see a
number of tousle -headed little Eskimo boys
and girls outside.
44 Whatever do you want ? " I asked them.
They all grinned sheepishly and said 44 Paun-
gatannamik." It seemed that they had spied
a box of apples on a truck coming our way,
and so they were in hopes of a taste of the
44 fruit with the plump cheeks." They, poor
mites, never see any fruit in their own land
excepting the berries that grow on the brush-
wood that straggles among the stones ; so
they were to be forgiven for taking an interest
in the wonderful ; ' paungatannamik," and
they devoured what I tossed through the
window to them with great gusto, skin and
core and pips complete.
We had to hurry on with the safe storing
of the eggs and potatoes and apples in a room
where they would not freeze, for the autumn
weather had begun. As I took my daily
walks upon the hills the cold struck dismal
indeed. The land was all covered with hard
snow, and the beach was crusted with a
44 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
coating of ice that crackled and boomed as
the tides lifted it and left it. The sea had a
queer haze hanging over it ; it looked exactly
as if the water were getting ready to boil,
and the vapour was gently drifting with the
wind. " Ah," said the people, " the sea will
soon freeze ; it is smoking already. That is
always a sign that the ice will soon cover it."
At last, one morning towards the end of
November, the sea was frozen : still grey ice
took the place of the tossing waves and the
rustling tides, and the silence of that grey sea
was painful. It was a relief to hear a dog
yelp, the whole world seemed so still.
All the morning the new ice was deserted ;
there were children playing near the edge, but
they seemed afraid to venture far, and nobody
took any notice of them. It was not until
midday that the grown-ups began to take an
interest in things, and then I saw an old man
go hobbling over the beach with a stick.
With proper Eskimo dignity and deliberation
he inspected the ice and prodded it ; then
he walked upon it, at first feeling his way
cautiously, but soon more boldly, and came
back to say " Piovok " (it is good). He had
done his duty, which was to test the new ice,
for the people have great faith in their old
men as judges of ice and weather. As soon
AND KAYAK 45
as the children heard " Piovok " they gave
a scream of delight, and went racing over the
bay perhaps freed from the shadow of a
thrashing that had hovered over them as
long as the ice was dangerous and spent the
rest of the day romping and playing " tig "
and " sleds " without a fear in the world, and
as if there were no such thing as nine or ten
fathoms of icy water under them. I took a
very short and cautious walk on the ice that
first day, but I cannot say that I enjoyed it
it was too nerve-racking by half. The
surface had a queer elastic feel and gave way
under my feet, like walking on cushions (such
was the sensation), and swayed so horribly
that I was glad to get off it. On the next
day I tried a little skating on it, and thought
to myself that nowhere in the world could
there be such a place for skating as Labrador,
with its hundreds of miles of tough grey ice
and its sheltered channels and Norway-like
scenery. But I was mistaken about the
skating. No enterprising syndicate will ever
exploit the North Atlantic Ocean as a skating
rink, for on the third day the surface was
slushy the salt was working out ; and on
the day after that there was a snowstorm
which covered the ice a couple of feet deep
with hard waves and ridges of snow, and not
46 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
all the sweeping in the world could have
brought the skating back again.
Now was the time for warm clothes, thought
I ; so I sent for the village tailor. In she came,
a square-faced, brisk little Eskimo woman.
There was no awe, no aloofness about her :
she had made clothes for too many successive
missionaries to feel anything but businesslike ;
so she stood me up, and measured me with
her arms, and bolted out satisfied. " A bit
taller than my husband, and not so fat "
that was her comment ; and the outcome of
it all was that after a few days she turned up
again with a big bundle, and I found myself
the possessor of a " Dicky " (blanket smock)
and a complete suit of sealskins just like those
that the Eskimos wear, and all for the outlay
of a modest sum in return for the good
woman's excellent needlework. Meanwhile I
had got several women to work at making
boots. Their method of measuring was much
the same as Juliana the Tailor's : they came
in, gazed at my feet, and went out ! I was
quite unable to see the sense in this, so I
laboriously made paper patterns with the aid
of the store-keeper and his stock of boots.
I gave the patterns to the next woman who
came to measure me for boots, and she
accepted them with a smile but the boots
AND KAYAK 47
she made from them were either too big or
too small, and desperately ugly. I always got
a proper fit when I let the women do their
work in their own way, and Juliana explained
it easily enough. " Some women," she said,
" take up more in the sewing than others,
and they are not used to patterns. Now I will
make you some good boots." And without
pattern or measure, or anything else beyond
her bare word, away she trotted, and in a
few days she brought me the best pair of
boots I ever had.
So I got my clothes and my boots.
With the freezing of the sea there began
the real Labrador cold ; not the bleak, biting
cold of autumn, when the wind blows from
the east over the freezing sea, but the grim
cold of winter. Oddly enough, it does not
feel so very cold ; it is a dry air, coming from
the trackless desert of the interior of Labrador,
bracing and keen, and lacking some of the
sting of the sea wind ; but night by night my
minimum therometer sank lower, until, to-
wards the end of January, it could go no
further, and the indicator used to stick each
night at minus forty. It is the little things
one does not think of that show best the power
of the winter cold.
On those cold mornings the bread was often
48 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
frozen, so that cutting it was like cutting
stone, but by much hard work we managed
to get slices, and these we thawed by toasting
them over the stove, and so we got our break-
fast.
Our sitting-room was rather stuffy one day,
after a visit from a merry crowd of Eskimos,
so I opened the window for fresh air. In a
twinkling the pictures on the walls were
covered with frost, and the plants on the
side table my wife's own pet little hobby
drooped their heads with one accord and
died. I shut the double window with a slam,
but it was too late ; the plants were dead,
and tears began to run down the faces of the
pictures. That was my first lesson about
King Frost in his own country !
There was a little pantry built next to our
kitchen, a tiny room with a felt-padded door
and a huge brick stove, and there we stored
the potatoes and eggs and other things that
must not freeze.
On the windy nights I used to make a
chilly pilgrimage at one or two o'clock to fill
up the steppe and save the potatoes.
And ours was a warm house, built of boards
and felt in alternate layers.
Early in December the Okak brook was
frozen solid, and the people, instead of fetch-
AND KAYAK 49
ing water, came with hatchets and buckets
and carried away lumps of broken ice to thaw.
One little girl used to come every day with a
sack on a little sled, and drag it home filled
with the smaller bits that other people had
pushed aside : it seemed a strange idea the
family's drinking water kept in a sack. As
for ourselves, we were rather more squeamish
than the Eskimos, who took no notice of the
fact that the dogs were constantly trampling
their chopping-place on the brook ; we sent
a couple of men, with an iron tank on a sled
and twenty dogs to pull it, across the bay to
the big river. They reached water by jabbing
a hole in the ice with a tok a sort of enormous
chisel with a six-foot handle and ladled it
out with a tin mug. By February the ice
on the river was eight feet thick, and they
had to make a pit with steps up the side :
one man stopped in the pit, and ladled the
water into buckets, while the other man
carried the buckets up the steps and emptied
them into the tank. So we got our water.
The men were able to bring about two hundred
gallons at a load, and they made it their duty
to keep the Mission house and hospital supplied
all through the winter.
Every day we went for a walk on the frozen
sea, unless a blizzard was blowing, and then
50 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
we had to stay at home. We dressed in
mottled sealskins and fur caps caps made of
the skins of musk rats seemed to be the most
fashionable and so we braved the coldest
days, and took our nice level walk upon the
smooth hard sled track. If we got off the
track we were over our ankles in soft snow,
and so we kept to the slippery path that the
Eskimos had worn, and looked forward to the
time when we should be sure-footed like they
are, instead of treading so gingerly for fear
of falling down. We used to meet the sleds
as we stumbled along : " Aha," the drivers
used to say, " you will have proper legs some-
day." As long as the wind was behind us we
did not feel it, but as soon as we turned to
face the wind we had to watch one another's
nose. Ears were covered with flaps of fur-
lined blanket tied beneath the chin, but noses
and cheeks must go bare, and they used to
ache and burn and tingle as the keen air
nipped them. And because you cannot tell
for yourself when your nose is frozen it
simply turns white, and the pain does not
come until afterwards we used to do our
neighbour that kindness, and tell him when
his nose was white, and maybe rub it for him
with a handful of snow.
It seems queer to think of a country that
AND KAYAK 51
has no roads, but that is the way with northern
Labrador. You may see a tiny path in the
summer-time, winding away among the rocks
or along the edge of the seashore, and if you
follow it you are sure to come to somebody's
tent : the people who live there have worn
the path by their trampings to and fro
between their tent and the store-house. But
if you want to know the way to the next
village, sixty miles away in the north, the
Eskimo will scratch his head and look at
you, and tell you if it be summer-time that
he has a very good boat and will take you
gladly if you will only give him time to get
some food for the journey ; if it be winter-
time he will offer you the use of his sled and
dogs, and will grin with delight at the thought
of coming with you as your driver. For that
is the only road that he knows anything
about ; the sea, tossing and stormy in the
summer, frozen and still and covered with
drifts of snow in the winter. I was almost
saying that wheels were unknown to the
Eskimos, for even the children of the mis-
sionaries are pushed about in perambulators
on sled-runners, but I was forgetting. I know
myself that there were two things with wheels
in our village. One was the truck that the men
used for dragging the heavy boxes along the
52 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
jetty to the store-house ; the other was the
Mission wheelbarrow. This you might meet
some fine evening in the summer, pushed by
an old Eskimo woman in sackcloth overalls ;
coming up from the garden to fetch a load
of empty tins with which to cover the lettuce
shoots, so as to keep them from the night
frosts and the teeth of the busy mice. But
all this is by the way. In spite of the truck
and the wheelbarrow, and the narrow path
that leads to the tents or to the missionary's
garden, the sea remains the Great Labrador
Road ; and when the sea is frozen the Eskimo
begins to mend his sled and to look out the
harness for his dogs, and the boys are about
with their toy dog-whips, teaching unwilling
puppies to pull toy sleds.
CHAPTER IV
An Eskimo sled My first sled journey Sled dogs and their queer
ways The passenger The end of the journey.
AS soon as the winter was fairly established
/-\ I began to think of visiting some of the
other stations by sled. With this idea in
mind I consulted Jerry and Julius, the two
men who made it their business to fetch our
drinking water, and asked them about a sled.
There was a respectable-looking sled about the
premises, a year or two old, maybe, but good
enough for us to take on our occasional trips
about the bay, and I asked the men whether
this would do for a trip to Hebron.
They were unanimous and very emphatic.
" Piungitoarluk " (it is awfully bad), they
said, and besought me to let them make me
a good sled. " Very well," I told them, " you
shall make me a good sled, and I will take
you with me to Hebron." They were delighted,
beaming and chuckling with glee, and could
hardly be persuaded to finish filling the water
tanks, so eager were they to be at work on
the new sled. They were prepared to take
53
54 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
the whole thing in hand, from start to finish,
and next morning were off to the woods at
daybreak in search of a big, straight tree for
the runners. I happened to tell the store-
keeper about their objections to the old sled,
and he, being a man well used to the ways of
the Eskimos, smiled rather broadly. " The
sled is not so bad," he said ; " our postman
carried the mails to Nain with it last week ;
but the postman made that sled, and your
water-men did not. That makes a good deal
of difference."
" Just so," I thought ; " the Eskimos are
like everybody else : every man likes his own
handiwork the best ! "
In the dark of the evening Jerry and Julius
came home from the woods, helping the
dogs to haul an enormous tree-stem. I was
astonished that such a big tree was to be
found in Labrador ; but the men only smiled.
They had been a good many miles that day,
struggling through the soft snow of a sheltered
valley that they knew, where the trees are
shielded from the winds and have managed,
in the course of centuries, to reach a useful
size.
Next morning I found them sawing the tree
into planks ; Jerry, being the more learned
man, was playing top-sawyer and guiding the
AND KAYAK 55
saw, while Julius stood underneath and knotted
his great muscles with the power of his pulling.
They had a workshop all ready close at hand ;
it consisted of two blocks of frozen snow set
about six feet apart, and on these they laid
the planks to be shaped and smoothed. I
offered them the use of the carpenter's bench
in the hospital, but they declined the offer
with scorn. They were better used to the
open-air work-bench, and seemed to use the
tools quite well with their hands cased in
thick sealskin gloves ; at all events, the sled-
making went on apace, and each time I went
out I found them a little further on with it.
All the men who had any time to spare were
clustered round to watch, and they kept up
a constant fire of remarks ; but their chatter
was always good-humoured, and the workmen
seemed to get on the faster for it.
As the sled grew under their hands I found
that they were making it sixteen feet long,
and two and a half feet broad. It had twenty-
six cross-pieces, and never a nail did they use.
" Kappe," they said, " nails no good : plenty
soon break : seal-hide ananak " ("splendid ").
They set the runners on the blocks, and bored
holes for the binding : then stood them up
a couple of feet apart and bound the cross-
pieces to them, first the front and back ones,
56 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
then the middle one, and then the others to
fill up the spaces. There was a gentle upward
curve from back to front to make the sled
rise better to the snowdrifts, they said ; and
the runners were not set quite upright, but
splayed slightly outwards to keep the sled
from slipping sideways ; and every bit of the
work was done with a neatness and exactness
that the most skilled of carpenters might envy.
Jerry and Julius screwed the irons on to the
runners, and sand-papered them till they
shone ; and then, exactly four days after the
fetching of the tree, they dragged the sled up
to the door of the hospital, and left it standing
on the snow. " We dare not take it indoors,"
they said, " because it would warp."
Now that I had a sled I was ready to begin
my journeys, and the word soon went round
the village that I was making ready to go
to Hebron, and that Julius and Jerry were to
be the drivers.
Quite a number of the people made up
their minds to see us go, and so it came
about that our sled started at the head of a
procession of fourteen. At the outset I knew
nothing about it, for we set off in pitchy dark-
ness at five o'clock in the morning. Julius
called it a " fine morning," but as far as I was
concerned it might have been midnight. I
THE UNWILLING PUPPY
The puppies receive their training at the hands of the Eskimo boys, who harness them and
compel them to drag small sledges or blocks of ice. The puppies resent this treatment with
piteous howls and a most aggravating stubbornness, but after a few days they fall into
proper habits.
A SLEDGE PARTY
This shows the Eskimo method of harnessing the dogs, each on a separate trace. The dogs cross
and recross incessantly as they run, until the traces are bunched into a great frozen mass ; then the
driver stops them and undoes the knot with his teeth.
AND KAYAK 57
could see nothing but some black and shadowy
shapes moving to and fro in the dim glimmer
of a lantern, and if it had not been for the
spice of new excitement I could have wished
myself back among the blankets. I was well
padded with woollens and sealskins, but the
night air nipped my nose a little, and I was
glad to keep furtively rubbing with my seal-
skin glove.
Julius, like the experienced traveller that
he was, went over the list of necessaries to
make sure that we had got them all aboard,
and then told me that he was ready to start.
Immediately hands came thrusting forward
from all parts of the darkness, and I realised
that a huge crowd of people had silently
collected to see us off, and to shake our hands
and wish us " Aksunai." " Aksuse," I shouted,
" Taimak (ready), Julius," and at the word
away went Jerry along the track, and the
dogs went racing after him. The line tightened
with a jerk, and the sled started with a bound
that nearly threw me off. Some good friend
seized the lantern, and ran along with it to
show the way among the boulders, but he had
to be nimble to keep out of the way of the
boisterous dogs.
Sled dogs, unless they are very tired, are
always eager to be on the move ; and ours
58 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
were in such a hurry that they tried to take
short cuts of their own, leaping over great
snowdrifts and frantically straining to climb
huge hummocks of ice, and we might easily
have lost some of them, or at least have had
some broken harness, if it had not been for
the willing help of our army of spectators.
That dash between the hummocks to the sea
ice was like a nightmare : the flickering
lantern, darting hither and thither ; the dim
shapes of men and boys rushing about, chasing
the unruly dogs ; the yelping and shouting,
with the pad-pad of footsteps and the grind
of the runners the whole scene comes back
to me as I write. And all the while the people
were sticking to the sled like flies, sitting,
standing, kneeling, clinging, getting a ride
somehow, all in a great good humour, and
dropping off one by one when we reached the
sea ice.
So I got my first send-off.
We were fairly on the way ; and Julius
struck a match and lit his pipe. In the flicker
I got a glimpse of his face, all glittering with
frost ; his stubby beard was decorated with
icicles, and his eyebrows were crusted with
frozen snow ; and when I passed a hand over
my own face, I found that I was in the same
plight. Julius was on the watch : he leaned
AND KAYAK 59
over to me and said, " Did you wash your
face this morning ? "
" No," said I, " the missionary told me
not."
" Good," said Julius, " now your face will
not freeze."
I shivered to think what would have hap-
pened to my face if I had washed it : as it
was, my cheeks and chin ached with the cold,
and I could not help raising a furtive hand
from to time, just to make sure that I was not
yet frozen.
By seven o'clock the sky was beginning to
lighten, and we made our first halt at the
famous ten-mile point Parkavik (" the meet-
ing-place "). There the men disentangled the
dogs, which by continual crossing over had
plaited their traces together like the strings
of a maypole ; and I thought it well to drink
some hot coffee. The coffee was not hot,
although it was in a stone jar wrapped in
a dogskin, but it was drinkable, which is more
than I can say for it a few hours later, when it
had assumed the form of ice-cream not
particularly tempting under the circumstances.
The drivers did not want any : they had
taken a good draught of water and a lump of
frozen seal meat before starting, in addition to
the breakfast of bread and meat and weak tea
60 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
that I had given them, so they were content
to wait a while. During their tedious un-
ravelling of the knotted harness the other
sleds began to come up, and soon the whole
fourteen were assembled at Parkavik. We
waited until all were ready, for the very
simple reason that if we had started no exer-
tions could have kept the other teams still,
and so it came about that the starting again
was by way of being an imposing spectacle.
My sled, with the drivers swelling with pride,
headed the procession along the frozen fiord,
and the others followed at proper intervals.
Not the least interesting part of this unique
sight was the shadow : the sun was just up,
and there was a marvellous string of spider-
legged dogs and top-heavy sleds and weird,
thin men sharply outlined on the pink snow.
K is only necessary to spend a day on a
sled behind an ordinary team of Eskimo dogs,
to get to know something of the ways of those
queer brutes. There was no quietness about
that run to Hebron, for all the drivers seemed
to be shouting all the time. They seem to
think that the dogs must be told constantly
w r hat they are to do, and so a driver's work is
a constant repetition of such orders as " Ouk-
ouk-ouk " (go to the right), " Ra-ra-ra " (to
the left), or " Huit-huit-hu-eet " (go straight
AND KAYAK 61
on), and with some dogs it takes a great deal
of shouting to get obedience.
The leading dog has a heavy responsibility
on its shoulders : Geshe, my leader, had a
trace about forty feet long, and needed to be
very wide awake to catch her driver's voice
at that distance. When I shouted to her she
looked over her shoulder in a surprised sort
of way, as if to say " Julius is in charge of
this team : what are you shouting for ? '
but when Julius murmured " ouk " away she
curved to the right with the whole team
wheeling after her, until his cry of " huit ' :
checked her. However deaf they may seem
to be to " ouk " and " ra " and " huit," there
is one word of command that the dogs will
obey on the instant. If the driver says " Ah "
they all lie down with one accord, a surpris-
ingly sudden sort of thing to do. Another
thing that they are ready for at all times is
food : they seem willing to eat anything. Let
the driver run ahead and pretend to sprinkle
something on the snow : away tear the dogs
as fast as they can scamper, straining at their
traces so as to get there the sooner, and the
men have a way of playing this little trick
on them when they begin to tire.
One thing that we saw on nearly every
journey, and that always set the dogs off at
62 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
a gallop, was the Arctic raven. That seems a
solitary bird, for we nearly always saw one
only. The great black bird used to stand on
the snow, cocking its head this way and that,
and perhaps stalking a step or two in an
unutterably grave manner ; and the dogs, as
soon as they caught sight of it, were off with
futile haste, each striving its utmost to get
there first, and all held in fixed order by their
traces. The leading dog had the best chance,
but the raven had a wary old eye upon the
danger : it waited until the dogs were within
a few feet of it, and from the sled it looked
as if it were caught, and then with leisurely
flappings betook itself off to a fresh stand,
to wait with unruffled calm for a repetition
of the same performance.
I have no doubt that the raven would have
been demolished, bones, feathers, and all, at
a single gulp, if it had waited another second ;
but it never waited. My fur cap was swal-
lowed whole one day, because it blew off my
head in the track of a team of dogs belonging
to a sled following close behind us ; I have
lost fur gloves, too, laying them down for a
moment, and turning to find the gloves gone,
and a great hulking dog licking his lips in a
sly sort of way ; and dogs are even ready to
eat their own harness if they get the chance.
AND KAYAK 68
I verily believe they would have been willing
to eat me, for once when I stumbled among
the traces the whole team was on me with a
pounce, and I have just a memory of a con-
fused moment of snarling, fighting dogs and
shouting, kicking drivers. A whip cracked,
and the dogs spread in terror, while the drivers
tried to calm them with deep-toned " Ah's " ;
and after that they told me never to go among
the dogs unless I had the whip in my hand.
Our sled caravan got rather scattered as the
day wore on ; in fact, with some of the men
who had only a few dogs it resolved itself into
an earnest race to do the sixty miles in the
one day. My drivers took no notice of their
hurry. " Let them go," they said, " we are
all right, we shall get there."
Just in front of us there was a curious
erection in the shape of a house on runners,
a sort of square tent, somewhere about the
size of a Punch and Judy show only not so
tall, built on a sled. This contained the
driver's wife, and his idea was that she should
sit tight and not feel the cold. The idea was,
no doubt, an excellent one ; but it had the
disadvantage of boxing the lady up in the
dark and depriving her of all view of the out-
side world, and consequently she was unable
to take proper care of herself. We came to
64 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
a boulder-strewn beach, all ice covered, one
of those places where the ,dogs try to go fast
and are constantly getting their traces caught
round points of ice. Off went the dogs with
a rush, and the man after them to keep them
straight. The sled had nobody to guide it ;
it ran up the side of a great hummock and
over it turned. My view of the proceedings
from twenty yards behind was of a sled up-
setting and a heavily-padded and very sur- v
prised-looking Eskimo matron being somer-
saulted out of the top of her canvas house.
She sat on the hard snow, gazing ruefully at
her sled as it bumped along at a good ten
miles an hour ; but she managed to collect
her wits sufficiently to pick herself up and
make a flying leap on to my sled as it passed
her. A mile further on we came on her hus-
band sitting on a lump of ice and puffing
unconcernedly at his pipe, while his dogs
enjoyed a rest after their scamper. Hebron
is admirably placed for a sensational arrival.
The track turns sharply round a jutting point
of land, and then runs for a straight mile and
a half over the frozen harbour to the Mission
station ; consequently the keen-eyed people
saw us as soon as we came round the point,
and a good many of the men and boys started
over the ice at a run to meet as, while the
tffl
o. a
AND KAYAK 65
rest of the population gathered on the slope
in front of the village to watch.
From our point of view it was a relief to
see the houses among the snow and rocks after
our cold day's travelling ; and to them it was
the biggest excitement of the winter. You
can imagine how they would shout when they
first saw our sled ; the big team of dogs and
the three men on the sled would be enough
to tell them at once that it was a European.
Presently we got within sound of their shout- ,
ing : " Kablunak, Kablunak " (European),
they yelled, and their outbursts came boom-
ing over the ice in the still evening air. " Amalo,
amalo " (another) they roared, as each sled
came round the point ; and by the time we
reached them and looked back along the track
the thirteenth sled was just in sight, with its
trotting little mannikin driver and its bunch
of little black dots of dogs, and the excite-
ment was afr fever pitch. There had never
been anything like this before. Such a pro-
cession ! It was a sight to remember ; a long,
dull streak across the clean, bright snow, alive
with a series of crawling dots, the nearest
easily distinguishable as men and dogs, shout-
ing and yelping and racing towards us, the
furthest mere black specks almost seeming to
stand still. There was no mistake about the
66 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
welcome ; each sled as it came up the slope
was pounced upon by a laughing, gesticulating
mob, who whisked it off, dogs and all, towards
one or other of the Eskimo houses.
It is their way of inviting ; seize the guest
and take him along ; and the boys ran in
front of the dogs crying, " Hau-hau-hau," and
leading them on until at the sound of " Ah "
they drew up at the proper door.
CHAPTER V
Exciting news Johannes The race along the ice-edge Johannes
in a storm Finding water Johannes and the deer tracks
Hero's lift.
IMAGINE the excitement one cold winter's
night when a sled came bumping over
the frozen beach, with the tired dogs
pattering in front of it, and we heard a story
of a great storm roaring in from the East,
and the sea ice all broken by the swell of the
waves ! But such was the news that the
drivers told us, and there on the beach in the
darkness the Eskimos came clustering round
to hear. " The storm seemed to chase us,"
said the drivers, as they loosened the harness
from the weary dogs, and unfastened the
strappings of their sled load ; " sometimes it
nearly caught us, and the thick ice was crack-
ing underneath our sled but never mind,
here we are and we are very hungry ! ' :
Somebody led the men away to give them
a proper Eskimo supper, while I stood wonder-
ing at the power of a storm that could break
that tough sea ice, for I knew that the ice
67
68 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
was fully six feet thick. And I was the more
disturbed because my drivers and I were all
ready to travel to Hebron in the morning with
one of the missionaries ; and how were we to
go if the ice was broken ! We had a long talk
over it, and decided at the least to go in the
morning and have a look at things. Then we
went to bed.
Five o'clock came all too soon : I was hardly
warm among the blankets before thumps
resounded on the door, and I crawled out of
bed to find the drivers dressed in their seal-
skins, the dogs in harness, and the sled stand-
ing ready for its load.
It was a bleak and dispiriting business, this
pulling on of cold clothes and boots by the
lamplight ; but there was work ahead, and
we were eager to be at it ; and by the time
I was dressed the sled was ready, and a crowd
of people were keeping the dogs from running
away.
It was anything but a pleasant morning,
if morning it could be called. It was pitchy
black, with never a star and no glimmer of
moonshine ; and only the fact that the dogs
could smell their way along the beaten track
made it possible for us to start at all.
For two hours the team trotted on through
the darkness, and then the sky began to grow
69
light in the East, and we saw the wide stretch
of white ice beside us, and the dogs with their
spidery shadows and a black and awful sea
in front of us.
Then it was, as we stood talking and planning
and trying to find a way, with the dark sea
before us and the ice heaving and groaning
under our feet, that we heard the quick
pattering of the feet of dogs in the gloom
behind us, and we turned to greet a short
light sled with an active little driver, and we
heard a cheery voice say " Aksuse." It was
Johannes. What was he doing ? " Oh," said
Johannes, " I heard that you were going to
Hebron, so I thought that I would come with
you. I hear they have plenty of walruses at
Hebron, and I want some walrus skin for
drags for my sled. I think they will sell me
some."
What a day to choose to go a-shopping !
I wonder if there was more at the back of
that little man's mind. He joined our con-
ference, and listened with nods to all that the
drivers had to say. They wanted to turn back.
4 There is no road," they said, " the ice is all
broken around the headland across the bay.
Let us turn homewards." " A-a-atsuk," said
Johannes, with a slow shaking of his head ;
" I know a track over the headland ; let me
70 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
see whether we can get to it." He walked
along the ice at the foot of the rocks, now
standing for a moment, now running a few
steps, now clinging to the stones, and we
watched him in silence. He came back pre-
sently and called to us to follow ; and then
began the race along the fringe of ice at the
foot of the cliffs. On the left the wall of rock
rose steeply ; on the right the black water
churned and tumbled and ground the floating
pans of ice together ; the ice beneath rocked
and heaved with the force of the waves, and
here and there the water came swilling over.
In front was a racing sled, with Johannes
sitting on it and yelling " Hu-it (go on), hu-it,
hu-it " to his dogs ; and our teams were
following at safe intervals, galloping as fast
as their feet would carry them. " Sit tight,
sit tight," said the drivers ; and there we sat,
bowling along over the heaving ice. Some-
times one of the men pushed out a leg to
guide the sled round a bend or to check it
where it seemed likely to slip sideways : they
said nothing ; just sat there and chewed at
their pipes, and left the dogs to follow the
voice that shouted unceasingly in front. At
the place where the guide led us on to the
headland the ice was broken away from the
rock, and was rising and falling with the swell.
AND KAYAK 71
One moment it came groaning up to the level
of the land ; the next it sank away and left
a leap of several feet. The dogs went scram-
bling over, glad to get on to something firm ;
but the drivers held the sled back until the
ice began to rise, and then with a yell they
started the dogs again and bumped across the
crack just as it came up level. A second too
soon or too late would have meant smashing
the front of the sled to splinters ; and as we
drew on to the land I looked back and saw
the ice dipping again behind us, and my com-
panion's dogs coming on to take their turn.
Johannes looked over his shoulder to see
that we were safe, and then started on foot,
ahead of his dogs, to show the track. It
seemed a long way over the headland, uphill
and down, and always through soft snow ;
and all the morning that little man trotted
on, knee-deep in snow, lifting his feet high to
run the more easily, and keeping the same
steady pace, hour after hour, with the dogs
hard at his heels. Sometimes he got on faster
than the dogs, especially where the snow was
deep and they had practically to swim because
they could not get a foothold, and then they
had much ado to catch him up again.
So through the day we toiled on, with
Johannes ever leading, and in the dark of the
72 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
night time we came to Hebron, with the trim
little figure in his sealskins trotting tirelessly
on ; and such was my first meeting with
Johannes.
I got to know him better later on, for after
that run to Hebron I took him as driver on
all my journeys, and the better I knew the
little man the more I liked him. He was
always cheerful, which is a great thing,
especially when your lunch sandwiches are
frozen like stone, and make your teeth ache,
or when your toes are cold and you dare not
jump off and run to warm them, because if
you did you would sink in the soft snow up
to your neck. But those were the times when
Johannes was more cheerful than usual ; and
I think that he was really at his best when a
storm was blowing.
On one of our journeys we had come through
a biting wind upon the mountain passes, and
were happy to be on the sea ice again and in
the cold winter sunshine. But as the after-
noon wore on and the sun sank the wind began
to follow us again. The air had a queer
threatening chill in it ; little eddies of snow
came whirling along the floor, whisking round
us and poking up our sleeves and down our
necks, and the dogs dropped their tails and
huddled together and whined as they ran.
AND KAYAK 73
Within half an hour we were in the thick of
the drift, and I found that running before a
storm is no more pleasant than facing it.
Johannes, who was sitting by me, pulled his
sealskin dicky over him, and shouted " Anan-
aulungitok-ai " (this is not nice), and I shouted
my " Ahaila " back at him with some little
apprehension ; I knew that it is something
out of the ordinary that makes an Eskimo
driver put on sealskins over his blanket and
calico, but the men always had a word of
explanation for me. " All right," shouted
Johannes, " very cold now : get to Nain soon,"
and then he turned his back to the wind, and
sat drumming on the runners with his feet
to let the dogs think that the driver had his
eye on them. As a matter of fact the dogs
were out of sight ; I could hear no sound of
them above the roaring of the wind, and there
was nothing to be seen but the main hauling
trace quivering away into the drift and the
white floor slipping past.
As long as daylight lasted I could under-
stand how the drivers found the way, because
all the flying snow seemed to be whipped up
from the floor, and in the occasional lulls of
the wind we caught sight of the cliffs and
mountains of the land. In fact, when the
sled rose up to cross a neck of land we gradually
74 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
drew above the drift, and could look back
and see the sea ice covered with a rushing
cloud of powdery snow that seemed like
driven smoke. But when night fell, and the
storm roared louder, I began to wonder how
we should fare. The dogs were tiring, and
would not turn ; they wanted the storm behind
them ; and when all landmarks were swallowed
up in the drift and the darkness, and there
was nothing for me to see but an occasional
glimpse of the stars or the dull glow of the
drivers' pipes as they stuffed the tobacco
down with their thumbs, little Johannes pulled
off his sealskin dicky and I knew that he
was going to run ahead. " Sit on the sled,
or you will get lost," he yelled, and trotted
into the dark. It seemed hours before I saw
him again, and then I suddenly found him
beside me. " Are you cold ? " he shouted,
and slipped off the sled again to join Julius
where he was wrestling, with hands and teeth,
with the frozen and tangled traces. I hardly
knew that the sled had stopped, but presently
Johannes ran off again, and there was a
mighty jerk as the dogs got up to follow him.
The next stop was dramatic. Miles and miles
we seemed to have run, when suddenly the
sled went grinding over pebbles, and I heard
the great voice of Julius, the other driver,
AND KAYAK 75
shouting " Ah." I ran forward, and found
that we had stopped close to a huge boulder
about the size of a cottage. Johannes ap-
peared from somewhere in the darkness ahead,
and said, with a jerk of his thumb towards
the boulder, " We ought to be on the other
side of that." " Quite so," answered Julius,
and swung the nose of the sled around. " Ha-
ha-ha," piped Johannes, and the dogs jumped
to their feet and went after him round the
boulder. I could see very little from my seat
at the back of the sled ; even Julius, a few
feet in front of me, was no more than a silent
shape, a sort of petrified man ; though I knew
that he was very wide awake by the sudden
lurches and heaves and kicks that he gave
when the sled needed turning one way or the
other. His eyes were open, too, in spite of
the darkness, for now and again he leaped
from the sled and hauled it sharply round, to
guide the runners over some awkward crack
in the ice. Apart from these little outbursts
of energy he seemed content to sit still and
chew his pipe, with his back to the wind and
his feet dangling close to the snow. If I had
asked him whether his toes were cold he would
have raised his eyebrows in astonishment,
and would have said " Cold ? Not I, I am an
Eskimo ! " As for myself, my toes were so
76 BY ESKIMO JDOG-SLED
cold that I should have liked to run, but that
was a thing I could not do because of the
darkness and the unevenness of the snow.
No doubt Johannes was running quite com-
fortably, but then, you see, Johannes was an
Eskimo, born and bred in Labrador, and he
had the fine high-stepping gait that serves the
Eskimos so well in rough and soft snow. But
I had to sit still, as Johannes had told me :
so, in the hope of getting warm, the next time
the sled stopped I got the polar bear's skin
that was lashed over the load, and wrapped
myself in that for warmth. The little man
from ahead had his usual word of encourage-
ment for me : " Nain in one hour," he said ;
" no more stops." " However will you find
Nain ? " I asked him. He waited until the
next lull in the wind, and pointed upwards.
" Do you see that bright star ? " he said ;
" that star is right over Nain : the people say
that if it were to fall it would fall on the village :
we go under that star " and away he went,
and I felt the jerk as the sled started after
him. Sure enough, in one hour we raced up
the slope to the village of Nain, and the dogs
roused the people out of their houses with
their yelping.
Sometimes on our journeys Johannes would
begin what seemed to me the queerest of capers
AND KAYAK 77
and antics. One day he suddenly drew a great
snow-knife from among the lashings of the
sled a knife with a blade a yard or so in
length and ran at the top of his speed towards
a little valley that sloped down from the hill-
side close at hand. Julius took no notice,
and the dogs went trotting on. Johannes ran
hither and thither, and began to plunge his
knife into the snow. He waved it towards
us, and Julius stopped the dogs with his
gruff " Ah " : then he asked me to find him
a drinking cup. Johannes, it seemed, had felt
thirsty, and had been finding water. I ran
to where the little man was digging in the
snow : he plunged the blade in again for me
to see, and drew it out wet ! In a few minutes
he was ladling mugfuls of water out of the
hole, the coldest water that I have ever tasted.
One day we were crossing the pass over
the Kiglapeit mountains when Johannes sud-
denly jumped off the sled, rushed up a hillock
of snow, and fell down on his hands and knees.
The sled trailed quietly on, leaving him
crawling about on the snow-bank. After a
short time spent at this queer game he jumped
to his feet and came running after us. He
laughed when he saw the surprised look upon
my face ; but there was a twinkle of excite-
ment in his eyes as he told me, " There are the
78 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
footprints of deer on that bank of snow.
Between fifteen and twenty of them have
passed towards the East this morning."
That night we slept in a hut a few miles
from the foot of the pass, where an Eskimo
was spending the winter to be nearer to the
hunting places. As I lay in my sealskin
sleeping-bag, trying to find a soft spot on the
hard floor, I heard the Eskimos talking about
those deer tracks ; and when we got up in
the morning the owner of the hut was making
ready to go and see them for himself. Before
we left we watched him drive his dog-team
away towards the mountains, turning every
now and again to wave his hand to us. I
think that he had a special smile for me that
morning, because I had given him some hand-
fuls of hard biscuits, which he said would do
splendidly for food for his trip. " Biscuits
never freeze," said he, and he put them in a
little bag and tied them to his sled, popping
a piece in his mouth meanwhile He munched
his biscuit very happily while he put the
harness on his dogs ; and I thought of my
frozen bread and butter of the day before,
for I knew that the biscuit was almost as
hard. But that hunter had Eskimo teeth,
which are made for chewing hard things.
He drove away, and we watched him out
AND KAYAK 79
of sight. A few days later we passed that
way again, and I asked him how he had fared
on his deer hunt. " I found the tracks," he
said, " and I followed them until I saw the
deer, and there were seventeen of them and
I got a fine fat one, and here is deer meat that
my wife is cooking for your supper."
We had a boy with us on that trip home.
He had come by himself as far as the hut at
the foot of the pass, and now he wanted " a
lift over the mountains." Might he come with
my sled ? By all means, said I. This youth
had the unusual name of Heronimus, and how
he got it I do not know. I do not think that
he knew much about it himself, for he said
his name was Hero ; and as the drivers and
the hunting people all called him Hero, Hero
he shall be. In the morning there was a
powdery snow upon the ice, and when we
were ready to start there seemed to be no
Hero. The drivers took no notice of his
absence : they shouted " Aksunai " to the
people, and then with a roar of " huit " to
the quarrelling dogs they set the sled a-going.
But no Hero, in spite of his having asked
so eagerly the night before for a lift. I
asked Johannes, " Where is the boy, Hero ? "
" Running in front," said Johannes, and he
pointed to the soft snow through which we
80 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
were moving. And there I saw footprints, the
footprints of Hero somewhere away in front,
guiding the dogs towards the pass.
Later in the morning we came upon Hero
sitting on a lump of ice. He seemed very well
pleased to take a share of our lunch, and trotted
alongside chewing the frozen bread as easily
and contentedly as the hunter w r ith the hard
biscuit. As for myself, I put the bread inside
my coat to thaw for I wanted no more tooth-
ache, because I think that a freezing day in
Labrador and a lonely trail over the mountain-
tops make toothache a more miserable com-
panion than ever. But Hero had good Eskimo
teeth : he seemed quite happy to be chewing
frozen things. When we stopped at midday
to disentangle the dogs, he undid the knot in
the main trace with his teeth, because it was
too stiff and hard for fingers ; then he trotted
away again, and was lost to sight in the dis-
tance ahead. We followed his footsteps all
the afternoon, until they turned away from
the usual track in a direction that Johannes
did not like. " Hero has gone wrong," said
he ; and with much shouting and waving of
the whip, he got the dogs away from the foot-
prints and drove them in the way he wanted.
At the further side of a rocky island we came
upon Hero again. He jumped on the sled with
AND KAYAK 81
a laugh, and said, " You should have followed
me : snow much firmer the way I came." We
sat in a row upon the sled and ate more of
our frozen bread and meat : then Hero trotted
away again.
When we reached our resting place, a tiny
hut half buried in the snow, he was waiting
for us. He had the snow cleared away from
the door and the fire burning ; and he was
busy breaking branches to make a bed for the
night.
He slept on his share of the bed of branches,
slept like a top ; he was up to boil the kettle
in the morning ; he packed away the break-
fast things while the drivers put the dogs into
harness, and away he went again. And so we
came home again to Okak ; Hero first, trotting,
trotting, trotting.
And as the sled went grinding up the beach
to the houses, Hero came shyly to me, with a
frank and pleasant smile upon his ruddy,
boyish face to thank me for the lift !
CHAPTER VI
Building a snow-house Feeding the dogs Adventures with snow-
houses Evening prayers Our hard beds A wolf among the
dogs.
WE had not often the good fortune to
reach a nice warm house and a com-
fortable fireside for our night's rest ;
many times on our journeys evening came upon
us while we were still miles from the nearest
dwelling, and then I was thankful to do as the
Eskimos have always been happy to do spend
the night in a snow-house. I got quite used to
seeing Johannes work himself up to snow-house
pitch. When the afternoon light began to grow
dull, he pulled out one of the big snow knives
that he kept under the lashings of the sled. A
fearsome-looking knife it was, with a bone
handle and a blade a yard long. Brandishing
this, he trotted from side to side, prodding
here and jabbing there. He was " finding
snow."
Soon Julius stopped the sled, and they held
a consultation.
Then the building began. It was generally
82
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED 83
on a gently sloping hillside, for there the snow
hardens the best ; and Julius told me that a
number of places are famous among the
Eskimos for good hard building snow, and
travellers do their best to reach one of these
spots for their camping.
When once the place was chosen, my drivers
were soon at work. Each man armed himself
with his huge snow knife, and between them
they marked a circle on the snow. Then
Johannes retired to the middle and began to
dig. He first made a wedge-shaped hole to
give himself a start ; and then from the sides
of the hole he carved great slabs of the frozen
snow. I judged them to be about six or eight
inches thick, two or three feet long, and eighteen
inches high, and they were nearly as heavy
as stone. Johannes just tumbled them out
of his hole as fast as he could cut them, and
as the hole grew I saw that the slabs were all
slightly curved. Julius seized each slab as it
toppled out, and carried it gingerly to the
edge of the circle. He set the slabs on edge,
side by side, and chipped them a little from
the top so that they leaned inwards. He pared
away the first few with his knife so that the
lowest ring, when finished, formed the begin-
ning of a spiral. He followed the spiral up,
propping each slab against its neighbour, and
84 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
chipping its edge so that it leaned well inward.
Meanwhile Johannes got nearer and nearer the
wall with his digging, and his work got harder
and harder, for instead of tumbling the slabs
out he had to pick them up and hand them to
Julius over the leaning wall. I thought the
wall looked frail and unsafe, but Julius seemed
to think otherwise, for I have often seen him
crawl upon it and lean over to see how
Johannes was getting on inside. As a matter
of fact, his weight only pressed the slabs
together a bit more firmly ; and I got so used
to it that I have sat placidly in a snow house
while he crawled over the top.
At last the spiral was finished, all but the
" keystone." Julius sprawled on the side of
the house, while Johannes's hands pushed a
big slab through the opening that still re-
mained at the top. Julius laid it over the
hole, and chipped the edges with his knife
until it gently dropped into place, and the
building was ready. A scraping and trampling
noise inside was the next thing ; that was
Johannes smoothing the floor. Meanwhile
Julius was filling all the crevices with handfuls
of snow. " To keep the wind out," he said ;
" boy's work, this " ; from which I gathered
that the Eskimo boy learns to build by filling
the crevices with snow as his father fits the
AND KAYAK 85
slabs together. " Yes," said Julius, " and boy
has to follow quickly, too ; if he gets behind,
he is no good. Soon learn to be quick. Now,
my boy " and Julius was off into an
anecdote of his boy's quickness.
Soon Johannes was ready to come out. I
always knew when he was ready, because he
used to light his pipe ; and a weird and rather
pretty sight it was, to see the glow through
the snow walls, with all the joints and crevices
marked out because the snow was softer there
and let the light through.
It was usually dark by the time the house
was ready.
Johannes's sword poked out suddenly and
slashed a doorway in the wall, and the man
himself crawled out and made straight for the
sled. Then the dogs began to sit up. They
knew that feeding time was near. They were
usually quiet while the building was in pro-
gress, but the finishing of the work seemed
to wake them up. They began to whine and
prowl about, and Julius often had to show
them the whip to keep them in order. They
would collect into a bunch and sit on their
haunches, wistfully eyeing the preparations for
their supper, and uttering a queer whistling
sound. Julius needed only to trail the whip
lash behind him as he walked, and the dogs
86 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
nearest to it would slink off to the other
side of the group. Meanwhile Johannes was
chopping a frozen seal into fragments. He
spread the pieces on the snow, and called
" Taimak " (ready).
There was a pricking of ears and a lolling
of tongues : Julius quietly moved to one side,
and with a mighty pounce the dogs were on
top of their food. Yelping, snapping, snarling,
gulping, the wise ones bolted the frozen meat,
bones and all, as fast as they could pick it
up. Some showed a little more refinement,
but the dog that picked up a chunk and
wandered aside to eat it at leisure got only
a poor share. It was evident that the only
way to get enough was to be quick ; and it
was marvellous how soon that frozen seal was
demolished. It was the work of a few seconds.
One of the drivers always stood by to see fair
play, while the other carried the load off the
sled and piled it inside the snow house.
I used to sit in my sleeping-bag to have my
supper, and the house was so cold that I had
to wear thick woollen gloves a new fashion,
you may well think, for the supper table ; but
then, you see, we had only a thin wall of snow
between us and the cold night air, and we
dared not have a fire for fear of melting the
house and bringing the whole of it tumbling
AND KAYAK 87
about our ears in a very wet and chilly heap.
Such a mishap with a snow house I never had ;
and the credit, I think, must be given to those
two faithful Eskimos, for my drivers had the
name of being two of the very finest builders
on the whole coast. But I met a missionary
in Labrador who had sat in a snow house for
two whole days while a blizzard roared out-
side. Neither he nor his drivers dared to go
outside, for nobody could stand against the
terrible wind, and there was nothing to hear
but the roar of it and nothing to see but the
whirling snow. So there they sat, the three
of them, while the blizzard blew. And
gradually the wind ate away the wall of snow,
making it thinner and thinner, until all of a
sudden, with a roar and a swoop, the snow
house fell to pieces and was scattered in a
million fragments by the storm. The travellers
scraped for themselves a hole in the snow, and
there they lay, perishing with the cold and
half buried by the drift, until happily the wind
grew less, and they were able to gather their
dogs together out of the snow and so go on
with their journey. Sometimes on a windy
day my drivers would say to me, "Blizzard
to-morrow, maybe," and they would set to
work and build a wall of snow around the
windy side of our snow house, and the blizzard
88 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
would spend its force upon that. And some-
times on the warm spring nights I have heard
the water drip, drip, drip from the walls and
the roof, and when the daylight came there
has been a patch as thin as a window pane
through which the morning sunbeams came
dancing, and I have thought that, but a little
longer, and our snow house would have
tumbled in upon us and thawed about our
heads. But the protecting hand of God has
been over us ; and in all my journey ings, and
in all the queer huts of turf and stones buried
under piles of snow, and in all the strange
shelters of boughs and branches, and in all
the frail little beehive houses of snow in which
I have spent my nights, far from the homes
of men and amid all the wild scenery and
wilder weather of lonely Labrador in all
these times of peril and hardship no mishap
has overtaken either myself or my faithful
Eskimo drivers or my patient plodding team
of dogs. Night by night, as we sat in our
cold and solitary shelter, with supper eaten
and the snow-door closed, and the well-fed
dogs seeking their rest on the snow outside,
we have taken the Bible from the box where
our food was stored, and we have read our
evening portion and said our evening prayer
together. And as we have laid us to sleep in
AND KAYAK 89
the darkness we have known the presence of
God, that Great Father who keeps his children,
of whatever people and language they be.
Once when a caravan of sleds was crossing
the mountains my drivers made a big snow
house, and we called the people together and
sang hymns. It must have been a strange
sight, if there had been anyone to see it
the rounded snow hut, with the crevices in
the walls all lighted with the candlelight
within ; and a strange sound it must have
been in those mountain solitudes, the sound
of lusty voices singing hymns. But there were
no listeners save, perhaps, the wandering
wolves ; none to see but the owls, if they were
about, or the great buzzards that sometimes
c d out upon the rocky crags as we passed
thv, i by.
Snow houses were never very comfortable.
For one thing, a snow house is cold, never
much better than freezing ; and for another
thing, sled drivers always misjudged my length,
at least until they got used to me. They
persisted in building snow houses to fit
Eskimos, and I had usually several inches of
spare leg to tuck away into some cramped
and awkward position. Julius and Johannes
got to know my measure, so to say, and used
to build me a house in which I could at least
90 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
stretch comfortably if I lay across the middle.
But cold and cramped though our snow
houses might be, we ate our evening meal
with an appetite, for hunger is a splendid
sauce ; and we were glad to lie down and rest.
The drivers used to make the beds by
spreading all the harness on the floor and
covering it with a bearskin. Then across the
middle of the house they laid my sleeping-
bag, and I crawled in. Last of all they made
a little hole in the top of the house for ventila-
tion and blocked up the door, and we were
ready for sleep. I was never very cold in a
snow house, in spite of the chilly surroundings,
for a threefold sleeping-bag like mine, seal-
skin, deerskin, and blanket, was as snug as
the warmest of beds. But, oh, the floor !
Dogs' harness may be all very well as a bed ;
the Eskimos used to lie on it without any
extra covering, and snore the snores of the
weary ; but I used to roll from side to side,
vainly searching for a soft spot, and feeling,
I suppose, very much as the poor princess
must have done in the fairy story, when she
had to sleep with a pea under the mattress.
On one of those wakeful nights I heard a
terrible scuffling among the dogs outside.
There were constant snarlings and howls,
mixed with a most weird trampling noise.
AND KAYAK 91
At last the turmoil came too near for my
peace of mind : scraping, shuffling feet padded
over the snow house, bringing down showers
of snow on to my face. I got rather alarmed.
I woke Johannes and he took some waking,
too.
He rubbed his eyes, and then as the noise
dawned on his ears, "'Kingmiarluit " (those
awful dogs), he said, and shoved his way
through the door. There was a sharp yelp
and a brisk scuttering, and then silence again.
Johannes crawled back, and plastered up the
doorway with handfuls of snow.
44 A wolf among the dogs," he laconically
told me ; " too much fight, all the time.
Fine night : start soon," and he tumbled into
his slumbers again.
CHAPTER VII
Running downhill A breakdown on the mountain The beautiful
plank John The scraping noises Evening in John's house
The little cloud The hand of God Johannes in the dark-
ness.
THERE are plenty of thrills on a sled
journey, and coasting downhill is one
of them. As soon as we began to
descend, the drivers moved to the front of
the sled, and sat one on each side. Their main
concern seemed to be to keep the sled from
running away. They dug their heels into the
snow, and tugged and shoved to keep the
track ; and all the while they were yelling
and screaming at the dogs, which raced on
in front in a frightened effort to get out of the
way.
As the pace grew faster the drivers put on
the brakes.
On my very first journey I had noticed two
heavy loops of walrus hide, tucked under the
lashings at the front of the sled, and had
wondered about them. I soon knew what
they were. Looped over the front of the sled
92
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED 93
runners they make powerful drags. One is
enough to check the pace on any ordinary
hill, while with two the sled will stop on slopes
that look quite alarming. It is only seldom
that the drivers really let the sled go, because
they dare not risk a smash over an ice hummock
or a wave of frozen snow.
The stronger man of the two drivers always
has the lion's share of the actual guiding of
the sled ; while the smaller man is always
ready to run forward to the dogs. Big Julius
and little Johannes worked together like two
parts of a machine. Johannes was always on
the watch. " Kollek, Kollek," he would
shout, " keep to the track : keep to the track,
you rascal. Ra-ra-ra-ra, go round that rock ! "
Kollek was a foolish dog ; his place was the
outside one in the team, and there he would
be ! He did not seem to like running with the
others ; and not all the shouting in the world
would bring him into line if he had made up
his doggy mind to straggle. And round that
rock he would not go. Perhaps he was in a
brown study : perhaps he was sulky : straight
on he went, outside dog right enough, but the
wrong side of the rock. Now came the trouble.
Away rushed Johannes to lift the trace over ;
but before he could reach it Kollek was
whining and whistling with terror as the
94 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
weight of the sled drew it tight and dragged
him backwards. Poor dog ! he planted his
feet as firmly as he could on the frozen snow,
and did his best to withstand the strain ;
but the sled went calmly on, and Kollek
slithered frantically backwards. In a twinkling
he was plump up against the rock, and then
he could go no further.
There was a twang as of a giant fiddle-
string when the trace broke, and Kollek
was free. The trace trailed limply behind,
while the dog scurried away to his place in the
team.
There he trotted, with shoulders forward
and nose down, looking as if he were pulling
as hard as the best dog in the country, but,
sly old rascal, looking back every now and
again to see if Johannes was after him with
the whip.
There seems always to be wind in the
mountains, and on one of those mornings,
after a cold night in a snow house, the wind
was much too strong for comfort, though the
men assured me that it was quite safe to travel.
But the mountain stream, which is the winter
road, was clear of snow, and the dogs could
not keep their feet upon it. Each puff of wind
sent them skidding about, howling with terror,
and the sure-footed little Johannes was kept
AND KAYAK 95
hard at work lifting the traces over rocks and
points of ice while the heavy sled came bowling
after him.
Things were even worse with the sled. Julius
and I were clinging to it, trying to keep its
nose to the front, but the gusts swirled it
hither and thither and flung us from side to
side like corks. At last we came to a frozen
waterfall, and the dogs took to the bank.
Julius tugged and strained and put forth all
his strength and cunning, but the ice was
like glass and the sled would not turn ; the
runners could get no grip upon the slippery
surface, and we were helpless in front of the
wind.
After a short few moments of anxious
clinging we came up against a boulder, and
over we went with a crash. I remember quite
well that as I was flung from my hold on the
sled and went sliding down the frozen river
I heard Johannes's voice from the bank
shouting " Ah ah ah " to make the dogs lie
down.
I picked myself up and made my precarious
way to the sled by clinging to the boulders
it was impossible to walk in the ordinary way
because of the wind whistling down stream
and found the drivers holding a palaver over
a smashed runner. They displayed no con-
96 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
sternation at our plight, and had very little
to say ; at times like that the Eskimo is a
man of action, and it seemed quite natural
that with a short grunt of explanation little
Johannes pulled an axe from among the load
firmly lashed to the upturned sled and trotted
off on an errand of his own.
Meanwhile, Julius was looking for his gun,
which he had tucked along the floor of my
travelling box, and I was amazed to see him
load it and start firing at the broken runner.
He was using great bullets that he had most
likely intended for shooting deer, and the effect
of each shot was to bore a good-sized hole in
the wood. He placed eight of them at intervals
along the runner, some near the top and some
near the bottom, and then coolly polished out
his gun with a wad of tow and made it fast
on the sled again. By this time Johannes was
in sight on the river-bank, carrying a long,
thin tree over his shoulder ; and Julius set
to work to find a spare length of seal-hide trace
somewhere among his belongings. The two
Eskimos chopped the tree to the proper
length, and flattened it a little on one side ;
then they threaded the line through the shot
holes and bound the tree to the broken
runner.
" Taimak " (that will do), they said, and
AND KAYAK 97
moved away to get the dogs ready. In a few
minutes they were lighting their pipes for
another start, and we bumped and slid and
twisted down the river as if nothing had
happened. Julius kept the sound runner
towards the boulders, so that the patched one
had none of the bumps, but when once we
were off the slippery ice of the river we went
jolting over the ridges and racing down the
slopes in quite an ordinary way, and the
travelling was none the slower for the tree-
trunk splice on our broken runner.
On the morning after our arrival in the
village of Nain, while the dogs were sleeping
off their tiredness, waking every now and again
to lick their frosted toes and wonder when the
next feeding time would come, those two busy
drivers were on the look out for a new runner
for the sled.
They had the good fortune to meet with a
man who was the proud owner of a beautiful
plank of the fine tough Labrador wood that
never warps if you leave it out in the snow ;
and over several pipes of black tobacco in
that good man's hut Julius and Johannes had
made their bargain. Before noon they came
along to see me : they had the beautiful plank
on their shoulders, and they dumped it care-
fully on the snow outside my window ; then
98 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
they ushered in the owner of the plank and
told me the price of it. I paid the man right
gladly, and out he went, chuckling and grin-
ning, with his mind filled with visions of all
the things he would buy when next the trading
store was open. " Beautiful plank," said
Johannes ; and out the two of them went to
borrow tools from the cooper. Then followed
a couple of days of sled-mending. They sawed
the plank to the shape of the old runner ;
they bored holes in it in the proper places,
using an awl this time instead of bullets from
a gun ; they bound it in place with thongs,
and left my sled standing on the snow looking
as good as new, while they carried the old
broken runner and its tree-trunk patch home
to their lodgings and chopped them up for
firewood.
But they shook their heads over my sled
on the journey home : " No good," they said,
" one runner new and one runner old," and
so my travelling sled, with its brand-new
runner made of that beautiful plank, had to
be cast aside when we got home, and ended
its days in the less poetical tasks of fetching
water and clearing away the snow. But we
got home, in spite of those runners that did
not agree ; and I have no doubt that Julius
and Johannes spent many an hour telling
AND KAYAK 99
their cronies all about the broken runner and
the beautiful plank.
Soon I saw them at their task again, fetch-
ing a tree, sawing two fine new runners out
of the heart of it, shaping and smoothing and
boring and binding, until they had a new sled
ready for me and were looking forward to the
next journey.
There was one man to whom those journeys
must have been a Godsend, and that was my
friend John. He lived in a wooden house on
the shore of a big bay twenty miles from the
nearest village, and he managed, by dint of
sheer hard work, to catch enough seals and
codfish to keep himself and his household in
clothes and food. And once or twice in every
winter I used to turn my sled towards the
mouth of John's bay and you should have
seen the dogs prick up their ears when they
came upon sled tracks in the snow, and smelt
the smell of a house, when, poor brutes, they
thought that they had another twenty miles
to run before they dared think of shelter and
rest and food. But so it was : once or twice
in every winter we raced up the slope to
John's house and shook him by the hand,
and heard the cheery sound of his wife's voice
saying, " Come in, come in and warm your-
selves : we saw you coming across the bay,
100 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
and we guessed you would come to us." And
as she helped to pull the snow-covered seal-
skins from off our shoulders she would be
saying, " We have some partridges for supper ;
and look, Julius, look Johannes, there are
sealmeat steaks all there, and I will fiy them
if you like." " Atte," big Julius would say,
with a merry twinkle in his kind brown eyes,
" just do so ; and let there be many steaks,
for we are hungry eh, Johannes ? "
At this Johannes used to laugh, for they
were hungry indeed : like all true Eskimos
they ate very little while on the run just a
frozen sandwich, maybe, with a tin cup of
half-frozen tea or a mouthful of icy water,
water so icy that it almost makes my teeth
ache to think of it. They ate but little as we
toiled along ; but when the day was done they
were ready for a vast supper. So John's wife
fried the seal-meat steaks and took the part-
ridges out of the pot, and set the table with
butter and home-made bread ; and we fell to
with a will. I shall always remember those
suppers, because of the scraping noises on the
roof.
Scrape, scrape, scrape, went the noises on
the roof, without any ceasing, sometimes
quietly and softly, sometimes vigorously, as
though someone were trying to dig through
AND KAYAK 101
the rafters above our heads. The drivers
looked at one another and laughed, and
laughed all the more when they saw my puzzled
face.
But John, with his quiet smile, took me by
the arm when supper was done, and led me
out into the bright and frosty night.
" Look on the roof," he said ; and I looked,
and the roof was sprinkled with sleeping dogs.
There was a great snowdrift piled against the
back wall, heaped up by the wind, and up
this drift the dogs had crawled to get near the
warmth of the chimney. The dog that lay
curled up beside the chimney-pipe had not
much peace ; he had had a hard fight for his
place, and now he was sleeping with a wary
eye half .open for possible disturbers of his
warmth. And as we sat around John's stove,
and the night grew colder and bedtime came
near, we could hear the scrambling and the
scraping of doggy claws upon the slippery
roof, as the sleepy sled-dogs over our heads
scuffled and squabbled for that snug spot by
the chimney. On those evenings, when the
house was shut for the night and the washing-
up was done, John's wife and the girls would
join us where we sat ; and then John brought
the Bible from the little bookshelf in the
corner, a well-thumbed strongly bound book
102 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
in large clear print, and we read and sang
and prayed together. The words were strange
to my two Eskimo drivers, for we read in
English, but they knew it was The Book,
and they listened with quiet reverence ; they
knew that we and they were just children of
the great Father in Heaven ; and as we
sang and as we prayed, they joined in with
their gruff voices and their queer long words
that seemed so full of " k's " and throaty
noises.
So we realised the presence of Christ in the
wilds of Lonely Labrador.
Once, I know, we made an unexpected call
at John's house ; and this is how it came
about. We had started on a clear morning,
hoping to get to Hebron, a run of over sixty
miles, in the one day. By midday we reached
the steep little neck of land that stands half-
way, and as we toiled up the slope we were
talking of how quickly we had come and how
we would be in Hebron before dark. But when
we stopped on the summit, and looked down
upon the wide stretch of ice before us, we
saw a cloud lying low upon the ice, and drift-
ing quickly towards us from the north. " We
cannot go, we cannot go," said the drivers :
"it is the Northern Storm."
44 To John's house," they said, " it is the
AND KAYAK 103
only safety " ; and they shouted to the dogs
and set them racing down the hill.
And all the time there was running in my
mind the words from the Bible, " A little
cloud, no greater than a man's hand." It
seemed a very little thing, that small grey
bank of cloud, but the drivers knew it ; and
when I looked again, after the breathless race
down the steep slope to the ice, I saw a great
grey wall come tearing along to meet us. In
a few minutes it was upon us, a biting, freezing
tempest of icy snow.
I sat with my back to the wind, for I dared
not face it ; and every time I turned to look
I saw the same sight ; a whirling wall of snow
all around us, a sight to turn one dizzy, with
a [line stretching away to where the dogs
were pulling, lost to sight in the drift, and two
brave frosted figures, clinging to the sled and
running with heads down, guiding our way
in spite of the storm. There was no landmark
to guide them, everything was blotted out ;
no voice or sound could make itself heard
above the awful roar.
How the men found their way I do not
know, but suddenly we went bumping up a
bank and left the storm behind us. In another
minute we heard the howling of dogs, and when
the sled went grinding over a patch of wood-
104 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
chippings I knew that a house must be near.
Sure enough the dogs stopped on the sheltered
side of a wooden house nearly buried in snow,
and one of the men shouted to me, " Go in
John's house." I thumped the thick of the
snow off my shoulders and made for the porch,
which was, of course, full of dogs ; but when
I " shooed " them out of the way I was
astonished to find that they were all in their
harness. I pulled the seal-hide thong that
lifted the latch, and went into the house.
There sat John, clad in all his travelling furs,
with a dejected head bowed upon his hands.
He looked up in an apathetic sort of way, but
his look changed in an instant to one of utter
consternation. Then he jumped to his feet
and shouted for his daughter, and the two
of them stared, and wrung my hand, and asked
how ever I had managed to get there. My
side of the story was soon told, and then came
John's : one of his household had just met
with an accident, and he had harnessed his
team to go to Hebron, the nearest Mission
station, for help, when the storm came up and
drove him indoors. Between us we managed
to set things to rights, and all the even-
ing John sat ruminating over the strange
happenings of the day ; and he put my
own thoughts into words when he said,
AND KAYAK 105
'' The Hand of God is very near us on the
Labrador."
I cannot tell how the Eskimos find their
way in darkness and storms : I think that it
must be by a special gift, the sense of direc-
tion, such as the bees and the birds possess.
I tried to get an explanation of it from little
Johannes, while I was crossing a wide bay
with him on a pitch dark night.
We had no track to guide us, and the powdery
snow that was falling made the night darker
than ever. We could not see anything.
Johannes sat on the front of the sled and
talked to the dogs. He told them tales of
birds and seals and foxes, and sometimes of
houses and supper, and the dogs were running
all the better for the sound of his voice.
" Johannes," I said, " how are you finding the
way ? "
Johannes waved his hand towards the front.
" That is the way," he said. " Yes," said I,
" but how do you know : have you a land-
mark to guide you ? " " You shall see the
landmark presently, when we come to it,"
said Johannes ; and he went on with his
chirping and chattering to the dogs.
On and on we went, two hours of steady
trotting through the darkness ; and suddenly
a great black shape loomed up alongside.
106 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
Johannes turned to me and pointed. " There,"
said he, " there is the landmark : that is the
rock by the side of which we find the track."
But still I do not know how Johannes found
that rock !
CHAPTER VIII
A summons home The sleepy dogs Singing us off luto the
storm A risky trick Our camp in the river-bed Lost on the
mountain Julius to the rescue A house.
I SUPPOSE that most people have wished at
one time or another that it was possible
to be in two places at once.
I know that in the life of a mission doctor
on the coast of Labrador, where places are so
far apart and travelling is so slow, there often
come times when urgent calls must be obeyed,
and when one might well wish for wings and
the power of flitting to and fro among the
villages. Once upon a time my drivers and
I had scarcely reached the village of Nain
when there came a messenger, a solitary little
man on a short light sled, to call us back again
to Okak. He must have followed hard upon
our tracks, though he had started a couple
of days later than we : his dogs were worn
out, and he was weary with the constant push,
push, push to catch us up.
Home we must go ; that was his message.
I called big Julius, and put the matter to him.
107
108 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
" How soon can we start ? " said I. Julius
held up his hands in consternation. " Start,"
he said, " we cannot start ; the dogs have
been fed ! "
I knew what that meant. Sled dogs, when
they are resting after a journey, are fed only
once every two days ; and you may imagine
the appetite with which they devour their food
when it comes. The driver flings the food on
the snow : there are a few moments of snarling,
pouncing, gulping and scuffling : then a few
minutes of eating the very snow, because it
may have the flavour of food about it : dinner
is finished, and the dogs curl themselves up to
sleep. And so my dogs had been fed ; they
were fast asleep, and no amount of shouting
or calling or even whipping would make
them fit to run until they had slept their sleep
out. " It is impossible," said Julius, " we
cannot start with those dogs."
" Never mind," said I, " if you cannot wake
them up, then borrow dogs or exchange with
the men ; go round the village and get a team
together." Off went Julius without a word,
and soon he was back to tell me, with rather
a wry smile on his face, that he had got a
team of dogs, enough for our journey and a
motley lot they looked. There were a few
of our own dogs, the ones that could be
AND KAYAK 109
roused, I suppose, very sleepy and slow ; but
the most of them were village dogs, lean and
furtive.
But those village dogs were working dogs,
used to hauling loads of seals and firewood ;
and so we made ready for the journey. Then
came another trouble : my other driver
marched in.
" Are we going to start ? Look, bad storm
coming," and he pointed towards the north.
" Never mind, Kristian, we must go."
" Ahaila," said Kristian, and went to help
Julius harness the dogs.
News soon spread, and the whole village
turned out to see the start. As I walked
down to take my place on the sled the old
Eskimo schoolmaster laid his hand on my
sleeve. " Don't go," he said, " you will all
be lost. Don't go."
His concern was real, so I called my drivers.
" What do you say ? " I asked them. " Are
you willing to go ? "
44 Illale " (of course), they said. " Ready,"
said I, "go ahead." The dogs slowly raised
themselves on their legs, and whined as they
trotted along the bumpy path towards the sea
ice ; and the heavy wrack of the northern
storm came bowling along to meet us.
44 Aksuse," shouted the people, 44 be strong,"
110 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
and we waved our hands and shouted back.
Then they began to sing.
There is a lump in my throat and a mist
in my eyes even now, when I think of that
scene : just a crowd of rough Eskimos, people
whose grandfathers had been heathen and wild,
singing a hymn of God-speed as we set out
on our dangerous errand.
" Takkotigelarminiptingnut
Gude illagilisetok "
they sang, and the charmingly balanced har-
mony came fainter and ever fainter as the
wind began to sigh about us and the snow
to beat on our faces. " God be with you till
we meet again" and we settled confidently
to our task.
That was the quietest day I have ever
spent on a dog-sled. There was none of the
chatter and banter to which we were used ;
there was work for us all to do, and we did
it seriously, and all the time the drivers
chewed pensively at their battered tobacco
pipes and said nothing.
It was slow going until the dogs had got
used to working together, but towards even-
ing the pace improved and we made our usual
six or seven miles an hour in spite of the storm.
As often as the dogs got tangled up Julius
AND KAYAK 111
straightened their traces without stopping the
sled. I had heard tell of this feat, and so was
very much interested when he set about it ;
but I thought it a very risky piece of acrobatic
work. He pulled the team back close to the
sled, so as to get the frozen knot in the hauling
line within reach of his teeth. The dogs, of
course, thought they were going to be thrashed,
and tugged and galloped most frantically, so
that the man had hard work to hold them.
We should have been in a pretty plight if
they had got away, for they would have turned
in their tracks and gone back to Nain, and we
should have been left to walk. However,
Julius tied the line to one leg and chewed
the knot loose ; then he slipped the traces
off one by one and looped them over his
other leg, so that all through the performance
it was a case of seventeen dogs harnessed to
Julius's legs, while he sat tight and made the
sled come along with him. I was glad when
the risky business was over.
All day long I sat with my back to the wind,
while the sled jolted on, and I wondered how-
ever the drivers were finding the way. Each
time that I turned my head to look I was met
by the same blinding, driving snow ; and it
was not until evening that I got any inkling
of our whereabouts.
112 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
Then the way led us uphill, and I knew that
we had left the sea ice and were on the land.
There followed a cold and dreary hour of
bumping and jolting over rocks and up sudden
little cliffs, while the men were constantly out
of sight in the storm ; then the driver's voice
said " Ah," and the dogs stopped. " Stopped "
is hardly expressive enough : at the word
their legs seemed to collapse under them,
and they curled themselves up where they
dropped.
Happily we had stopped close to a straggling
bush, so I was able to cut some twigs for a
fire without any risk of losing myself. I lit
my fire in a niche of the rock, and put on a
kettleful of snow, and then stamped up and
down to get a little warmth into me. On my
way to the snow house I trod on what looked
like a mound of snow in the river bed. The
mound got up and yelped, and I saw that I
was among the dogs. They were peacefully
blanketed by the snow, content to remain
buried until the drivers woke them up in the
morning. The one I had trodden on settled
down again as soon as he found that the dis-
turbance was neither the signal for work nor
the beginning of a fight, and in a few moments
he was, to all intents and purposes, a snow-
covered stone as before.
AND KAYAK 113
I picked my way among the other doggy
mounds that lay here and there in the frozen
river-bed, and so got my precious kettle safely
to the snow house that the men were just
finishing. Of all the snow houses that I have
ever had for shelter, that one was the smallest.
I had the middle, because I was the tallest,
and even then I had to draw my knees up
to lie down at all. The drivers packed them-
selves in one on each side of me, and there we
lay. They, the sturdy fellows, snored lustily,
although they had no bed but the dogs'
harness and no covering but the clothes they
wore ; but I, well I had snow in my sleeping-
bag ! Imagine yourself, cold and tired, push-
ing your feet into the depths of a fine thick
bag of padded sealskin, and meeting with an
icy mass of half -frozen snow !
Ugh ! the thought of it makes me shiver !
I crawled down head first and scraped the
most of the snow out ; but the bag was damp
and clammy, and it took me half the night
to thaw it to a comfortable warmth.
I fell asleep before morning, and woke
suddenly to find one of the drivers pushing
a mug of hot tea into my hands, and I blessed
the kindness that had left me to sleep while
they boiled the kettle and made ready for the
journey.
114 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
A mug of hot tea is a wonderful help at a
time like that, even though the water be
smoky and clouded with grits ; and we
used to fold our hands and " say grace "
for those rough meals with real thankful-
ness.
The weather was worse than ever, but the
men were quite cheerful about it, although
they must have known that we had a dangerous
task before us. To-day we must cross the
summit of the Kiglapeit pass, with a blinding
snowstorm beating in our faces. But the
Eskimos were in their element, and at times
like those I never knew them to be faint-
hearted. Off we went into the storm, and
the sled runners groaned as they ploughed
heavily through the soft snow. For ten - or
twelve miles the way was plain, for our track
followed the course of a frozen torrent, between
high banks, and the dogs had no difficulty in
picking their way ; but when we got on to
the lake at the top of the pass the trouble
began. The wind was blowing in a circle, and
gave us no guidance at all ; and to me it
seemed that we were on an open plain of
snow, enclosed by whirling walls of white. I
could see nothing but the snow slipping past
us as the sled drove steadily on. Julius sat
with set face, continually crying " Hu-it,
AND KAYAK 115
hu-it " (go straight on, go straight on) to the
dogs, hoping by this means to hit the track
again on the other side of the lake. An hour
slipped by and still there was no land, so we
stopped the sled for a conference. " Ajornar-
mat " (it cannot be helped), said the drivers ;
"it is useless to look for landmarks, for we
are still on the lake. We must just drive on
and hope." We seemed to be travelling fast,
for the dogs were frisky and full of energy ;
but it was a very blindfold sort of work, and
I think it was a relief to us all to feel the grind
of rock under the runners, and to have the
sensation of going uphill again. We were
across the lake, though where, and how far
from our course, we could not tell. The nose
of the sled pointed up and up, and then
suddenly dipped : we were over the ridge on
the summit of the Kiglapeit mountains, and
the men were slipping the heavy walrus -hide
drags over the nose of each runner in readiness
for the slide downhill. The sled began to
gather way, and I took a good grip of the
lashings and braced myself to withstand the
jolts, for to fall off meant certain disaster.
Suddenly a cloud of powdery snow hissed up
as the drags bit the road under the runners,
and I was flung violently backwards against
my travelling box. As I fell I had a glimpse
116 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
of the drivers leaning heavily back, with heels
dug into the snow, straining their utmost to
stop the sled.
The whining, frightened dogs were all about
us.
Julius turned the sled bodily upside down,
to prevent the dogs from running away with
it, and then, as I came forward to speak to
him, he held up a warning hand. His quiet
" Ajorkok " (it cannot be done) was enough :
I knew that we had missed the channel that
runs between the shoulders of the summit,
and were on the very brink of a slope that
runs steeper and ever steeper to end in a sheer
precipice, down which we might have fallen
headlong. There was a tight feeling in my
throat as I drew back from the giddy depth
of whirling snowflakes and joined the drivers
where they stood by the sled. It had been
a narrow escape.
" We must go back," said Julius.
" No," said Kristian, " a little further to the
left we can get safely down : it is too slow to
go back."
" But no," said Julius.
" But yes," said Kristian.
It looked like the beginning of a quarrel :
they appealed to me. " Go back," I said.
Kristian heaved the sled around, and Julius
AND KAYAK 117
trotted over the crest of the slope again,
calling " Ha, ha, ha " to the dogs.
For a long time I saw no more of him ; and
more than once Kristian said, " We ought to
have gone to the left : too slow, this." On
we went through the blinding snow : even
the dogs were out of sight ; I could see the
long trace slipping over the snow, with now
and again a glimpse of the tangled, knotted
mass of lines that led away to the dogs.
The lines were always tight, and I knew by
that that Julius was somewhere ahead, and
that the dogs were following him.
Suddenly he appeared, looking a real snow
man. " Here is the track," he announced,
and flung himself heavily on to the sled and
began to charge his pipe. Now the dogs ran
yelping on, and the sled raced after them
down the slope. The drags were on, but the
way was safe, for we had recognised the passage
between two rocks which marked the be-
ginning of the descent to the sea ice, and we
drove on with perfect confidence. We reached
the ice late in the afternoon, and found the
wind blowing straight from the north. This
was a help, for it gave us our course across
the bay ; but the dogs refused to face it,
and kept edging away to one side or the other,
so that once more we had to rely on the willing
118 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
Julius. On he trotted, right in the teeth of
the wind, with the dogs scampering close on
his heels. When for a while we skirted the
land he came back to the sled for a rest and
a smoke, but in the open he dived into the
storm again, and led the dogs on with tales
of seals and foxes and a house to rest in.
At last his words came true. " Iglo, iglo "
(a house, a house), he yelled, and stood to let
the dogs race by. As he jumped on to the
sled he said, " A house ; sleep here," and the
sled drew up with a bump and a rattle at the
door of one of the craziest shacks that it has
been my lot to see. The door was off its
hinges, if it ever had any, and the doorway
was choked with snow ; but we dug our way
in with hands and snow knives. There was
a rusty iron stove without a pipe, but we filled
it with damp twigs and lit it with a stump of
candle, and sat in the horrible reek. We were
warm, and we could dry our clothes, even if
we were choked. At first it was too awful for
me, and even the Eskimos grinned at it ;
but when we got the fire nice and hot, and
turned the back of the stove to the doorway,
the house began to feel comfortable ; and we
hung our wet boots from the rafters and sat
down to our toasted but rather frost-bitten
bread and mutton with quite a feeling of luxury.
AND KAYAK 119
We were warm ; we had a roof over our
heads ; and, best of all, the mountains were
crossed and we had only twenty more miles
to go to reach our homes in the village of
Okak.
CHAPTER IX
Springtime Travelling by boat Daniel Among the ice pans
Daniel as cook A nigbt among the ice -The little whirlpool
Mutton in the kettle Singing the night away Benjie.
A") the long winter passes and the warm
spring sun begins to melt the ice on
the sea and soften the snow on the
hillsides, there comes the time when the
Eskimos begin to dig their boats out of the
snowdrifts where they have lain through all
the cold and stormy days, and make them
ready for the water.
You may hear a shuffling of feet in the
passage, and a shaggy head peers around the
corner of your door, and a voice asks you
whether you have an old saucepan to give
away, or a butter tin that you do not want,
for here is a man who wants to boil some tar
to stop the leaky places in his boat.
Day by day the tides come oozing up the
beach under the ice ; big cracks show in the
broad sheet that covers the sea, until at last
the sea ice is broken and floating in pieces,
and some bright morning the west wind
120
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED 121
drives it all away to the open ocean, there to
wash to and fro and slowly melt away. Then
the Eskimos help one another to push their
boats down the beach to the water, and the
women are all a-bustle to get things ready
for the summer's fishing. The sleds that have
been so busily going to and fro all the winter
and spring are turned upside down and put
upon the housetops ; the harness is hung up
among the rafters of the roof, where the
hungry dogs cannot reach it ; the dogs them-
selves are idle. Perhaps the dogs are happier
during the working days of winter, because
they are better fed : in summer, when they
have no work to do, they must take care of
themselves, and you may actually see them
a-fishing on the beach, perching on the stones
and pouncing on the frog-fish that flap lazily
about in the pools. The Eskimos go to and
fro on their sleds as long as the ice will bear
them ; but there comes a time when the ice
is too broken and too dangerous even for an
Eskimo, and then the people shrug their
shoulders and say that travelling is " Ajorkok "
(cannot be done). But even in such times it
may happen that a boat comes threading
between the pieces of the broken ice ; and
so it was that four men came toiling into Okak
Bay one bright July morning. They pushed
122 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
their boat along with poles, and after a great
struggle they reached the jetty and told their
story. Their missionary was ill : help was
needed : and so they had pushed their way
in a frail boat along a hundred miles of sea
all strewn with ice, and were ready to start
back again the next morning.
" But very hard work," they said, as they
clambered out of the boat and followed the
folk who had seized their baggage ; " very
hard work please find us another man, so
that we can be five, and rest by turns from
the rowing " ; and away they trotted to a
good breakfast and a good sleep.
I looked about the village for an extra
boatman, and among the few who had not
gone away to the seal hunting I thought of
Daniel. I knew Daniel as a good and handy
workman, so I sent for him. Soon he came
shyly in a short, square man with a broad
back and muscular limbs, and, above all, a
willing, good-natured face. He was not dressed
like an Eskimo ; he had on his summer
costume of an old tattered jersey, left him,
no doubt, by some fisherman from Newfound-
land ; and there he stood in the doorway of
my room ready, as he always was, for any
work that came his way.
" Daniel," said I, " are you ready to start
AND KAYAK 123
for Nain at six o'clock to-morrow morning ? '
" Yes," said Daniel, without a moment's
hesitation, and no more perturbed than if I
had asked him to do one of the everyday
things at which he is so handy. " Yes," he
repeated, and turned and went home.
When I walked down the jetty in the morn-
ing the four Nain men were at their places :
the tallest, chosen captain by his mates, was
in the bows with a pole, scrutinising the ice
field ; the others were leaning over their oars,
smoking and chatting and exchanging gossip
with the people who had gathered to see us
off. Stroke oar was vacant ; but even as I
looked about for Daniel, the man himself came
lurching along hugging a big stone.
" Aksuse," he said, and dropped the stone
gently into the boat. The others took no
notice, beyond the usual " Ah," and Daniel
ambled off again. For fully five minutes he
went on with his task of collecting stones, and
at last I asked him, " Are these for ballast ? '
Daniel grinned and twinkled. " Me cook,"
he said, and settled to his oar. " Taimak,
hai ? " said the captain. " Taimak," I answered
from my place by the rudder, and we were off.
I really think that the first few miles out of
Okak were the slowest that I have ever travelled,
not even excepting soft-snow-travelling on a
124 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
sled trip. The pace was a trifle faster than
standing still, and that is about the best that
I can say for it.
Happily the day was calm, or we could
never have moved at all. The method of
getting along was simple enough in a way.
The oarsmen stood facing the bows, so as to
see what was ahead ; sometimes they dipped
their oars in the water, but more often there
was not enough water within reach, and they
had to shove the boat along by pushing with
their oars on the ice. The captain stood up
with his pole, carefully keeping the boat from
bumping the ice, and separating the pans to
make a passage, and all the while he never
ceased from muttering orders to the rowers.
The boat's nose was never pointing in one
direction for more than a minute or two ;
north, south, east, and west we steered, and
once we were in the ridiculous position of
having to wriggle a hundred yards back
towards Okak in our search for a way. Things
went quietly enough as long as we were in
the shelter of the bay, but outside we met
the tide, and found ourselves in a field of ice
that was constantly on the move. The
captain leaned on his pole, darting this way
and that, and yelling his orders at the top
of his voice, and the willing boatmen toiled
AND KAYAK 125
and shoved. At one moment the boat was
leaping through a clear channel ; at the next,
a big ice pan would catch it and fling it round
with a shudder, while the men strove to hold
it off with their oars and perspired with the
exertion. It was an exciting time, but we got
through without much damage ; and I felt
as much relieved as the Eskimos when we
came to a stretch of open water and left the
churning ice behind us.
About midday a light breeze sprang up,
and the men heaved a great sigh of relief as
they drew in their oars. In a minute they had
spread the sails, and the captain came jump-
ing over the thwarts and took the tiller.
Two of the oarsmen made their way to the
deep bows, and sat there chatting and filling
their pipes ; another just fell asleep where he
was, sprawling over his oar ; while Daniel
looked at me with a twinkle, and said again,
44 Me cook."
He seemed to enjoy my mystification, for
his next move was to pull a great butcher-
knife from a sheath hanging at his belt, and
carefully sharpen it on the palm of his hand.
This was his hunting knife, his dinner knife,
the knife he used for cutting his tobacco and
for all other purposes possible to imagine, and
I wondered what strange new use he had in
126 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
his mind for the well-worn tool. When it was
sharp enough, he chose a nice piece of fire-
wood from a pile at his feet and began to
whittle shavings, looking up with his usual
grin to repeat his joke " Me cook, eh ? >:
When the pile of shavings had grown large
enough to earn a contemplative nod of satis-
faction, he betook himself to his heap of
stones. He cleared a space on the wet floor
of the boat, and laid a big flat stone upon it,
then he built a wall of smaller stones around it,
and filled up the hollow with shavings and
wood. Then he knelt down and struck a
match, and carefully lit his fire, poking and
puffing at it to make it burn. In a few minutes
a trail of smoke was streaming away into the
air behind us, and Daniel came to the trium-
phant climax of his joke.
" Pujolik, pujolik " (a steamer), he yelled.
The two men chattering in the bows jumped
up with a start ; the steersman awoke from
his apathy and gazed about him ; even the
man sprawling across the oar roused himself
and raised his sleepy eyes ; and Daniel roared
with glee at the success of his little plot.
" Pujolik," he shouted, pointing to the smoke,
and we all entered into the spirit of the thing
and laughed boisterously.
Soon the sleepy head dropped again ; the
AND KAYAK 127
steerman's eyes once more took on their
dreamy stare ; the men in the bows scraped
and filled their pipes, and returned to their
chatting ; and Daniel turned to his fire with
a chuckle, and said, " Now, me cook." He
seemed to have everything at hand, for he
produced a kettle and a keg of water from
apparently nowhere with the unconcern of a
professional conjuror, and then he foraged in
the provision-box for the tin of tea. Oh,
Daniel ! where did you learn to make tea ?
I am thankful that the Eskimos like their tea
weak, for Daniel's method was to put a pinch
of tea in the kettle, fill it up with cold water,
and set it on the fire. In a quarter of an hour
or so Daniel was doling the boiling tea into
tin mugs, and we were stirring in the molasses
to suit our fancy. I smiled as I drank my
tea and watched Daniel bending, with grave
face, over the smouldering fire in his heap of
stones ; but I think we were all of us thankful
for the cheery presence of the man, and for
the comfort of his cookery.
Towards evening we once more entered the
ice field, and steered slowly between the heavy
pans as they edged to and fro with the gentle
swell ; and at dusk we made our anchor fast
among the stones of an islet at the foot of
Cape Kiglapeit, and with half our journey
128 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
done we sat upon the rocks around the
bubbling tea kettle and sang our evening
hymn. The men cleared a space on the floor
of the boat, and spread the sail for an awning,
and I laid me down in my sealskin sleeping-
bag and listened to the lapping of the water.
Before morning the lapping had ceased : the
water had frozen round the boat, even on a
July night. The Eskimos are a hardy folk.
I found my five boatmen sleeping on a patch
of moss among the rocks, snoring contentedly
in the cold air without so much as a blanket
among them ; and they woke in the morning
fresh and bright, and sang and laughed as
they pushed the boat among the ice. Daniel
skipped from one part of the boat to another,
always seeming to be in the very thick of the
work ; and once he seized a rope and ran over
the ice to haul us through a narrow passage,
while the others lolled and filled their pipes
again, and made remarks about Daniel being
a " Pujolik, ai " (steamer again). Daniel came
to a sudden stop, and shouted, " Jump out,
all of you," and in a moment we were on the
ice dragging the boat across, high and dry,
to plump it into the water again on the other
side of the floe. At midday we anchored
against a small iceberg, and Daniel clambered
upon it to fill his kettle at a pool that the sun
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AND KAYAK 129
was making in a hollow ; then we poled on
again while the tea was warming over the fire-
place of stones. There was a short rest for
the men during the afternoon, when the sails
were up and we beat to and fro along a sheltered
run ; but soon the captain said something that
brought forth a chorus of " Aha's," and
caused a general turning of heads. There was
a peculiar turbulence about the water in
front of us, and there was something familiar
about the hills around ; there on the right
was the beginning of the sled-pass over Kigla-
peit, and we were entering on the piece of
water that never freezes. Soon we were
tumbling and twisting among the currents of
a sort of miniature whirlpool, and the oarsmen
were straining and shouting in time while the
captain steadied the boat as well as he could
with the long sculling-oar at the stern. I had
seen the black spot of water on the white
sheet of ice only a month or two before, and
many a time as we passed the place on our
winter journeys I had wondered why Julius
led the dogs close under the rock. All the
explanation he had given me was " Sikko-
karungnaipok-tava " (never frozen) ; but now
I understood how the power of the battling
currents gives the ice no chance to set, even
in the bitter cold of January.
130 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
The men were exhausted by the time the
currents were bubbling half a mile behind us,
and nodded and grinned with appreciation
when I suggested supper. I decided on hot
meat ; but as we had only one cooking utensil
the tea and meat would have to take turns,
and Daniel chuckled as he helped me to scrape
the mutton out of the tin into his useful kettle.
We anchored at the mouth of a little brook
that was trickling through the melting snow,
and within a few minutes we were eating our
mutton out of our teacups while the kettle
sat on the fire filled with its usual cold water
and tea-leaves. We rinsed our cups at the
rivulet, and drank the hot tea thankfully ;
then I took out the Bible, and the men clustered
round me for the evening reading. I sat after-
wards gazing at the lowering sky, while the
captain spread the sail over my sleeping-place
in the stern, and the others lay on the moss and
smoked. The captain came to me. " Storm
to-morrow," he said ; " you go to sleep now ;
we row all night " ; and without another word
he called to the oarsmen and hauled the anchor
up from the water. Good-hearted fellows ;
how I admired their pluck. Rather than risk
delay they would toil all night at the oars,
because the wind was coming, and to-morrow it
might be impossible to travel among the ice-pans.
AND KAYAK 181
As I lay in the dark under the sail I could
hear the rhythmic creaking of the boards under
the feet of the captain, as he stood at my head
rolling his heavy sculling-oar, and I could hear
the steady thump of the oars against the
thole-pins, and the swish and drip of the
water ; and, lulled by the measured sounds
and rocked by the gentle roll, I fell asleep.
I woke in the dark hour before the dawning,
and heard the sound of singing ; it was Daniel's
voice, crooning a favourite hymn. Presently
the others took up the song and sang, so softly,
so as not to wake me up, but keeping time
to the plashing of their oars. Hymn after
hymn they sang to pass the night away.
Soon after sunrise we reached the open
water that narrows towards Nain, and then
up went the sail and in came the oars, and
with the water hissing past us and the ropes
groaning and the mast creaking under the
strain of the wind we raced into Nain Harbour.
The people were waiting on the jetty. They
shouldered the bags and boxes ; Daniel and
the other boatmen stowed away the sails and
oars and anchored the boat, and then went
home to sleep, smiling and good humoured to
the end.
The Eskimos are wonderful boatmen, they
seem to love the sea with all its dangers, and
132 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
yet so few of them can swim. The boys are
always in the boats in the summer-time, or
paddling among the stones ; and yet if they
fall into deep water they are lost. One day,
while they were at their play upon the jetty,
a little fellow fell into the water.
The others pluckily pulled him out, and
brought him, limp and half choked, to the
hospital. As soon as he was fit to be out of
doors again he showed his gratitude by elect-
ing himself general hospital handy-man. It
was impossible to talk to him, for he was
quite deaf, but he was always waiting about
looking for some sign that meant work to be
done. To jerk your thumbs over your shoulders
meant oars to Benjie, and away he would
scamper to the boat, grinning with delight ;
and by the time I got to the water's edge he
was in his place with the two oars in his baby
hands, ready to burst into the loudest of sobs
if I would not let him row.
CHAPTER X
A skin canoe The harpoon A seal hunt A night in a green-
house Hauling the seal net.
IF you happen to be along the village on an
autumn morning, you may see an Eskimo
come out of his hut and drag his skin
canoe from its resting-place on the roof of the
porch. He balances it upon his head or on
his shoulder, and trots away down the beach
to the sea ; then he gently lowers the canoe to
the water, steps quickly in, and paddles away.
It all looked so very easy that I thought
that I should like to try, so I asked little
Johannes to lend me his ca,noe and his paddle.
Johannes smiled. " Yes," he said, " I will bring
my canoe ; and I think that it would be
very good for you to try in the shallow pool
there, along the beach, for there you cannot
be drowned."
And so in the evening, when the tide began
to fall, and the big pool was left on the beach
in front of the houses, Johannes came sweep-
ing along with graceful strokes, and drew his
canoe up by the spot where I was standing.
" Now," he said, " you may begin " ; and I
133
134 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
began to clamber in. But oh, the treacherous,
wobblesome thing : it danced upon the water
like a cork, and careered off sideways as soon
as I set foot upon it, and rolled from side to
side as though it would upset, while I clung
to it with one hand and to Johannes with the
other, and he himself could hardly stand upon
his feet for laughing. But at last I managed
to get in : Johannes held the crazy thing
while I crawled along the deck and seated
myself in the hole in the middle with its
padded cushion of dogskin. Then things were
better ; for I found myself seated on the floor
of the canoe, well below the water line, and I
felt fairly safe. I took Johannes's paddle in
both hands, and off I went, down the long
pool in front of the houses. Then the up-
roarious glee ! Men came running from their
homes to see the fun ; they howled with
delight, and sat upon their doorsteps to laugh
the louder. " Hai," they shouted, " who are
you ? and where do you come from ? have
you paddled here from Nain, or is it Hebron
where you live ? " with fresh yells of laughter
as I dipped my paddle and the nose of the
canoe went dodging from side to side. They
knew me well enough, for had I not been
binding up their wounds and attending to
their aches and pains for many a day ; but it
tickled their fancy to see me in an Eskimo
AND KAYAK 135
canoe, and so I was an Eskimo for a time.
" Not much plenty seals out here," I shouted
back to them in the queer broken English that
they use when they talk to the men on the
fishing schooners. " I am coming home again " ;
and round I managed to turn the thing and
paddled back to Johannes, feeling every minute
more at home in the canoe, and feeling, too,
how wonderfully safe the frail-looking thing
was. That was a beginning, and I know more
about canoes since then ; but that first trial
in a skin canoe made me wonder all the more
at the skill of the men who go off to the seal
hunt, and sit for hours in rough and freezing
seas, balancing themselves with their long
paddle, and ready in an instant to fling their
great harpoon or point their gun at the head
of some seal that happens to come within reach.
The harpoon is a wonderful weapon : it
has a jointed head made of a walrus tusk,
with a barbed end that fits over it and is
held on by a line looped to a knob in the
handle. The spare length of the line lies coiled
on the top of the canoe, and its end is fastened
to a blown-up sealskin that serves as a float.
Over his harpoon the hunter spends long hours
of patient scraping and rubbing and boring
and fitting; the socketed joint is as neat and
firm as clever hands can make it; and the
result is that the Eskimo can trust his harpoon
136 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
to do what he wants of it. The hunter sits
balanced in his dancing kayak, and flings his
harpoon at the fat neck of the seal as it pops
up for a breath of air.
Down goes the seal with a rush, striving
to shake itself free from the something that
is stinging its neck. The hunter, calm and
cool, balanced in his dancing kayak, reaches
for the blown-up skin that lies behind him,
and drops it on the waves. The harpoon
bends where the head is jointed : the point
of the tusk slips away from the socket in the
barbed tip ; the line swiftly unloops itself
from the knob on the shaft ; away dives the
seal, intent on freedom, with the barb secure
in its plump flesh, while the long line drags
after and the blown-up skin bobs upon the
water as a float ; and when the hunter has
picked up the shaft of his spear he paddles
towards the float and waits for the seal to
come up again. There is no great risk of the
barb slipping why, strong fellows like Julius
and Paulus can throw the harpoon with such
terrific force that the barb sometimes goes
clean through the seal. The rest is easy ; the
seal comes to the surface, dead, maybe, or
dazed and faint, and an easy target for the
killing dart. Then the hunter's pulses throb.
" Puijesimavok " (he has caught a seal), and
he seizes it with a long hook with notches in
AND KAYAK 137
its handle, and lifts it by resting the notches
one after the other on the edge of his frail
kayak until he can slide the slippery carcase
on to the skin deck in front of him. Then he
arranges the harpoon and float in their places,
and paddles homewards.
The harpoon that big Julius gave me hangs
upon my wall, but the float is somewhere on
the broad Atlantic probably some prowling
shark has made a breakfast of it. I tried to
bring it home. First I put it under the cabin
table. " Don't risk it in the hold," said the
second mate, " the rats will have it."
Under the table it stayed for a day or two,
but it was too much for us. Every time we
sat down to meals we kicked the awful thing ;
its subtle odour flavoured our food. Somebody
would send it flying across the cabin floor,
and there it would lie until one of us tripped
over it in the dark ; it was an odoriferous
nuisance. Last of all I hung it up ; but as we
stumbled across the unsteady floor as the ship
rolled along, we used to meet that unsavoury
shape with our faces. The very look of the
bloated thing took our appetites away. The
voting was unanimous and pressing : " Over-
board with it," so I regretfully cast it to the
sharks, and watched it dance upon the waves,
as it had often danced for big Julius when he
had a seal.
138 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
But I must go back to the morning when I
first saw seal hunting : Our particular seal
hunt on that November morning was partly
an accidental one. I was sitting in the stern
of the boat, watching the rocks and the water.
It was a new thing to me, this scum of ice
that the waves were flinging up ; and the
spray from the oars was freezing as the wind
whipped it over the side of the boat.
I could see the kayaks further out, paddling
about in an aimless sort of way ; but I was
mostly watching the line of glistening boulders
at the foot of the rocks, with the oily-looking
sea swilling over them, and the sunshine
gleaming on the crust of ice which the waves
were leaving on them. The man with the
sculling-pole, who was standing beside me in
the stern, suddenly whispered " Puije " (a
seal) and his face grew tense and eager. The
oarsmen stopped and turned to look, while
Jerry, the owner of the boat, hurriedly
crammed a cartridge into his rifle.
This was all very mysterious to me. I was
looking all round for a head above the water,
or for any bubbles or disturbance that might
mean a seal ; but everything seemed as usual ;
the dots of kayaks went paddling on, and the
sea swilled over the stones.
Jerry seemed to aim at the line of boulders
below the rocks, and my eyes followed the
AND KAYAK 139
line of his barrel ; but I saw nothing until
the bang started a splodge of red on one of
the stones. The red seemed to slide into the
water, and the boat was off with a jerk. The
oarsmen pulled with all their might ; the man
at the stern was rolling the boat from side
to side with the force of his sculling ; and
Jerry was eagerly looking out, and shouting
terse directions. There seemed to be nothing
but the red patch upon the rocks, where the
water was all stained with blood ; but as the
steersman brought the boat sweeping round
the others pulled in their oars and leaned over
the side, and in less time than it takes to tell
I was helping them to heave a big seal into
the boat. It came sliding over and flopped
down, and lay there, limp and lifeless, with
whiskers quivering and big eyes seeming to
gaze. It looked just like one of the rocks
near by ; its silvery coat, flecked with black
and shining with wet, was a perfect imitation
of the black boulders with their coating of
ice and the water swilling over them. No
wonder my eyes could not see it when the
steersman did ; but Eskimo eyes are different.
I spent that night in a greenhouse !
That is an odd thing for frozen Labrador ;
but this is the way it came about. The mis-
sionary at Okak had tried to grow early
vegetables ; but, poor man, his attempts had
140 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
failed, by reason of the awful frost. He had
even hired an old Eskimo woman to sleep in
the greenhouse on the nippiest nights, and
keep up a fire to prevent the cabbages and
lettuces from freezing ; he banked his green-
house round with a thick wall of snow ; he
had a sackcloth .cover made to put over it
like a blanket ; but in spite of the snow wall,
and in spite of the blanket, and in spite, even,
of the old woman and her fire, the greenhouse
did no good. Okak was too cold a place for
greenhouses. So the missionary sold the green-
house to one of the seal hunters for a few
dollars, and the happy hunter made a home
of it. And there I slept, on the floor, of course,
wrapped in a sealskin sleeping-bag, with the
dogs prowling about outside and snuffing at
the glass walls, and the stars twinkling through
the glass roof.
It was a cold place for a home : in the
morning the bread was frozen, and the water
in the bucket was just a solid lump of ice,
the butter was like stone, and the tinned milk
was wonderfully stiff stretching out in long
strings when we tried to help ourselves with
spoons ; but the hunter's wife was up at
dawn to light a fire, and in spite of the frost
we had a hot breakfast before we went out
of doors.
I wanted to see the hauling of the seal net ;
AND KAYAK 141
and in the keen air of that autumn morning
I felt the cold as I had never felt it before.
The winter that came afterwards was far
less biting ; for the autumn wind, blowing
over the freezing sea, nipped and chilled me
as nothing that I have ever known. It was
interesting enough to see the Eskimos trotting
down to the rocks where the shore-rope lay,
and where the float that marked the far end
of the net danced on the black water. I was
half frozen, stamping about to get warm ;
and they they cheerfully pulled the wet
ropes up, chewing at their pipes and chatting
merrily, and every now and again stopping
to wring the water out of their sodden gloves.
The cold did not seem to bite them : " Unet "
(what does it matter), they said, " it is our
life : we are made for it " ; and they pulled
their stiffening gloves on again to keep the
rope from chafing their hands. They got the
heavy seals out all stiff and dead, and piled
them in a sort of stockade to freeze, ready to
be fetched home during the winter. One was
partly eaten by sharks. " Sharks no good at
all," they said ; " eat the seals and break the
nets. Sometimes we catch him, but he is no
good except for dogs' food, and his skin makes
fine sandpaper for smoothing the sled runners."
For a fortnight the hunters were busy with
their nets and their kayaks ; and then the
142 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
sea was frozen, and the seal hunt was over
for the season. The seals were away to their
winter haunts at the edge of the ocean ice ;
winter had begun and the nets were frozen
in. It happens the same way every year : the
people want to make the most of their oppor-
tunity, and they cannot tell exactly when the
sea will freeze, so they leave the nets in the
water a day too long rather than have them
up a day too soon ; and every year they have
the awkward job of hacking them out. They
waste no time in getting their axes to work,
for every minute the ice is getting thicker.
As soon as ever they see that the ice has
covered their bay, they trot down to the beach
and begin one of the coldest pieces of work
that it is possible to imagine. They only need
to free the ropes where they dip below the
surface, for the net is at the sea bottom, and
once freed with the axes there is nothing to
do but haul. But the hauling ! In my eager-
ness I lent a hand at the rope, but my fingers
stiffened round it, and I suffered all the agony
of gripping a red-hot poker. My poor hands
ached for hours. And the Eskimos tugged at
the rope, and gathered up the meshes all
stiffening in the wind and dripping with
icicles, and piled the net on the rocks above
high-water mark, and rubbed their hands
indifferently, and ambled off to get their sleds.
143
LsKimo in his kajak
Flo<^ upon tti wafer Seal vriHibarbof Karpoon
with liaeatfachtd and lint aimchtd
AN ESKIMO HARPOON
CHAPTER XI
The edge of the ice Gustafs breakfast Rafting on ice Jakko
and Rena Catching a walrus An old custom Martin's seal.
DURING the long winter that followed
the homecoming of the families to
their wooden homes in the village
the men were seldom idle. In my visits to
the houses I always found the women in
charge, and my question " Aipait nanneka ? '
(where is your husband ?) nearly always
brought the answer " Sinamut aigivok " (he
is off to the edge of the ice again). That is
the hunting-place that the Eskimos love, the
edge of the ocean ice, where the seals sport
in the chilly water or clamber on the ice to
rest. Sometimes, when sudden sickness has
called me into the village in the small hours
of the morning, I have heard the scufflings
and yelpings of dogs, and have seen dim and
shadowy men, dressed in sealskin clothes,
trotting down the track among the hummocks
towards the sea ice, off to the " sina."
When I talked about the sina to big Gustaf
he simply said, " We go, eh ? Start at four :
' 144
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED AND KAYAK 145
I will wake you up," taking it for granted
that if I went at all I would do it in a proper
Eskimo style. As this was more or less of a
pleasure trip I made a sort of compromise
with good Gustaf's ideas on the subject, and
the clock was well on towards five before I
met him on the doorstep.
I was fortified with a good breakfast of
bacon and eggs eggs kept in waterglass since
the ship brought them last summer but
Gustaf would have none. " No," he said,
" I shall eat by and by " ; and from what I
had seen of Eskimo mealtimes I imagined him
disposing of several pounds of seal meat and
a pint or two of weak tea when the day's work
was done.
Nevertheless I saw that he was chewing,
pensively chewing with a steady champ, champ,
champ, as he disentangled the dogs from one
another.
" What are you chewing ? " said I.
" Koak " (frozen), answered Gustaf ; and
he went on to tell me that he had got a mouth-
ful of frozen raw seal meat : that was plenty,
it was the custom of the people. " Splendid,"
said Gustaf, " this makes me warm : this
gives me sinews," and he smiled as he chewed
at his leathery mouthful. I envied him his
warmth, for on those cold Labrador mornings
146 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
the effects of bacon and hot coffee are soon
gone, and I found that I must try to trot in
the darkness to keep my toes from freezing.
It was the middle of the morning before we
got among the lumps and hummocks of the
sina, and there were the sled tracks and the
footprints of other hunters who had come out
earlier than we. The ice at the sina is nearly
always rough and uneven, for the force of the
waves is always cracking the ice and raising
it up, and as fast as the waves crack the great
ice field the terrible frost welds the pieces
together again. We passed a little snow hut,
hidden in a hollow, a tiny hut that seemed too
small to hold a man.
" Johannes, maybe," said Gustaf, " he came
here yesterday, so as to be early " and there
the little man whom I knew so well from my
sled journeys had spent the night, ready to
be up before the dawn and catch the seals
before they should begin to think of danger.
Gustaf had brought his gun, and was crouch-
ing with eager face among the hummocks.
Presently I heard a bang, and Gustaf went
running towards the water, his soft little boots
pad-padding on the hard ice and his shaggy
hair waving. Soon I saw him rafting on a
floating piece of ice, paddling off to fetch his
prize ; and I shivered to think of the hundreds
AND KAYAK 147
of feet of icy water beneath him as he balanced
himself on his dangerous perch. But he got
his seal, and no doubt if you had asked him
why he had done so risky a thing he would
have stared at you with wondering eyes, and
would have said, " There was no skin canoe
for me to have, and I could not lose that seal :
it is the custom of the people to do so."
Perhaps he rather liked the spice of danger,
if he knew what danger was. But danger
there is, as we learnt not many days later,
when a sled drove in to Okak Bay with an
Eskimo boy sitting upon it. He sat strangely
still, and that was enough to make us think
that something was wrong, for an Eskimo
driver is nearly always trotting beside his
sled. The dogs turned hungrily towards their
accustomed door, but the boy took no notice
of them, but left them in their harness and
ran towards the Mission house. I watched
him pass, ashen faced, panting, stumbling ;
and a little later I heard his story. At first
incoherently, then with graphic gestures and
loud lamentations he told his tale ; and here it is.
His name was Rena, and he had started
at daybreak for the edge of the ice. His
brother, Jakko, was with him, and they were
after seals. They had a harpoon and a gun,
and they talked as they went of the splendid
148 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
hunt they would have on so fine a day.
Tautuk ! such clear, calm water and so many
seals swimming about ; it was a real day for
the sina, and before they had been there many
minutes Jakko had shot a seal. It was
wounded and floated on the water, lashing
with its flippers but too weak to dive. Oh
for a boat or a kayak ; but they had none,
and reach the seal they must. They did what
Eskimos always have done in like circum-
stances and always will do ; they clambered
on a piece of loose ice and paddled with their
hands towards the seal.
They got on fairly well until they were
twenty or thirty yards from the edge of the
ice field and the seal was near enough to be
speared. Jakko stood up and poised his
harpoon, ready to strike, while Rena paddled
gently with his hands to steady the ice-raft.
The change of position must have upset the
balance of the ice, for no sooner did Jakko
stand up than it began to heel slowly over.
For a moment they were too intent on the
seal to notice their peril, but as the movement
increased it dawned upon them that they were
turning over. And then the slow-witted Jakko
had one of those flashes of inspiration that
come to people at critical times : with a quick
cry of " Stay where you are, Rena," he jumped
AND KAYAK 149
into the water. Exactly what was in his mind
we never knew. One thing is certain he saw
the danger. If both stayed upon the ice it
would upset and both would be in the water ;
Jakko could swim a little, but Rena had never
learnt a stroke. Did Jakko think that he could
reach the safety of the big icefield by swim-
ming, or did he say in his mind, "Better one
to be drowned than both ? ' : I do not know :
all that Rena could say was that he felt the
ice-pan rolling over ; he heard the shout of
" Stay where you are," and saw his brother
leap into the waves. And that was all. The
raft of ice righted itself with a lurch that
nearly flung him off ; but he managed to keep
his hold, and paddled frantically to and fro
in a vain search for his brother. Poor Rena
paddled and paddled and paddled until his
hands were stiff and his brain reeled, but never
a sight did he see of Jakko. Jakko was gone,
sunk like a stone in the freezing water ; and
hours after the disaster Rena gave up the
search, and with his eyes blinded with tears
he scrambled from his frail island on to the
safe ice field, flung himself on the sled, and
let the dogs take him home.
That is the true story of two Eskimo boys
that I knew, Jakko and Rena Mellik ; and
it seems to me that Jakko was a real hero,
150 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
for in the hour of danger he thought not of
himself but of his brother, and for his brother
he gave his life.
There was gloom for a few days after the
tragedy of Jakko ; but the Eskimos soon
forget ; bereavement does not wound them
very deeply ; and soon the village wore its
usual air of subdued bustle, and away at the
sina the hunters were after the seals.
But seals are not the only quarry ; by far
the best fortune that a man can have at the
sina is to catch sight of a walrus resting on
the ice. The man's idea is to rush boldly
upon the great beast and spear or shoot it
while it is too dazed to move. It has no
chance : it is unwieldy and slow, and has
hardly made up its mind which way to turn
before the hunter is upon it and its life is over.
" Yes," said Gustaf, when I asked him about
it, " Eskimo make a noise and run fast, and
Aivek (walrus) stay there all the time and get
killed plenty soon. Go quiet, creep, creep,
creep, and old Aivek smell Eskimo and crawl
off to the water. Flop, gone, no catch him
now ; plenty frightened, no good."
I knew very well while Gustaf was telling
me all this in his queer broken English, with
many wavings of his hands and the most
expressive of grins and shrugs, that he would
AND KAYAK 151
be quite ready to embark in his kayak and
hunt the walrus in its native element. A
walrus is, no doubt, a formidable beast ; its
ferocious eyes and bristling whiskers and great
gleaming tusks make a terrible picture ; and
the very weight of its tremendous rush would
be enough to frighten most folks, quite apart
from the uncanny agility the huge animal
displays. But the Eskimo in his kayak is a
match for the walrus ; he is every whit as
active, and twice as sharp-witted ; and if the
men at the sina see a walrus disporting him-
self in the water they are after him like a
shot ; and though they do not often have the
chance that my Killinek guide had, paddling
into the middle of a school of walruses and
calmly harpooning the old bull because he
had the best tusks, they seldom let the odd
ones and twos escape if they get within strik-
ing distance.
Landing a walrus is no joke. I say " land-
ing " because it is the only word to convey
the idea of hauling the great carcase out of
the water on to the ice, and the ice is every
bit as good as land to the Eskimos. What a
walrus weighs I do not know, but it stands
to reason that a creature fourteen feet long
and fourteen feet round the middle is an
enormous lump to lift.
152 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
No Eskimo would dream of trying to pack
a whole walrus on his sled ; for one thing it
would roll off at the first lurch, and, for
another thing, I hardly think that any sled
could stand the strain. Gustaf grinned and
shook his head at this idea of mine. " My
sled stand anything," he said ; " got no nails
in it, only fine seal-hide thongs ; very strong " ;
and though Gustaf may have overrated his
sled, I have seen him drive his twenty dogs
up to the Mission house with a load of drinking
water, two great puncheons of it, full half a
ton in weight, and that should be a fair test
of workmanship. But another reason for
cutting up a walrus at the sina is that an old
Eskimo custom says it must be so.
And the custom is that every one who sees
the capture of a walrus must have a share.
The lucky hunter skins his huge catch, and
chops it into lumps and hands the pieces
round. If you were there yourself upon a
pleasure trip you would get a great piece of
the red raw meat thrust upon you ! You might
like to eat it ; certainly the Eskimos smack
their lips over it and say " piovok " good ;
and the tenderer parts of the flesh are quite
palatable when your table lacks fresh meat ;
but really to enjoy Eskimo food you must
have good Eskimo teeth, made for chewing
AND KAYAK 153
tough things. I found that the people were
very fond of boiled walrus skin ; but it needs
a great deal of boiling before English teeth
will meet in it, and those parts of the skin
that the people do not want to boil and eat
can be made into great hard dog whips, and
strong and heavy drags for the sleds.
One day during the winter, when the hunters
were busily going to and fro, hunting seals
at the sina, I saw a boy walking along the
village path, carrying what looked to me like
a very large and slimy slug. Whatever horrible
thing had the lad got ? He carried it by the
middle, and it dangled quivering on each side
of his hand. He had an air of importance
with him, and everyone he met stopped to
have a word with him, and to take a look at
his loathsome handful.
What was it ?
Behind him marched his father and mother,
both looking very proud. " Hai, Martin," I
shouted, " what have you got ? "
" Kissek " (sealskin), he said ; and came
trotting along to unroll his package on the
snow, and display a fresh sealskin well scraped
and washed and sodden with brine, which is
never a pleasant object. " My first seal," he
said, grinning shyly. " I caught it yesterday."
He seemed in a hurry to be off, so I let
154 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
him go without further question, and watched
the little procession make its way to the
Mission house. During the evening I saw his
father again, and broached the subject of
Martin's sealskin.
Lukas's eyes brightened. " Ilia, ilia," he
said, " Martin angusimavok " (Martin has
quite caught a seal) as much as to say,
" My son is a grown-up hunter now : he is
a man."
" And what was he doing with the seal-
skin ? " said I.
" Issumaminik " (his own idea), answered
Lukas ; and he wandered off into a long story
of the catching of the seal. " I took him to
the sina yesterday, to look after my dogs ;
but there came a seal very close, and I lent
Martin my gun, and he shot it.
" Kuvianarmek (what rejoicing there was)
there were many people there, and Martin
cried, ' Anguvara, anguvara,' and they all
came running to see. He knows how to skin
a seal and cut it up, because he has often seen
his mother do it. Ilia, he is a man now,
ernera-una (that son of mine)."
"He caught the seal himself, with his own
hand. Nakomek (how thankful). And he cut
the seal in pieces, and gave everybody a piece,
for that is a custom of the people when a boy
AND KAYAK 155
kills his first seal. He saved the liver for his
father and mother, as is right to do ; and he
put a big special lump of the best meat on
the sled because his mother told him to do so,
and we brought it home.
" What shall we do with it ? Ilia "with
a twinkle " that is for old Henrietta. She
was his nurse when he was a baby : she it
was who cared for him when he was a little
child. Surely she shall have a share of Martin's
first seal and, besides, it is a custom of the
people. The blubber he will sell at the store
to-morrow, and that will be the first money
he has earned at the seal hunt : Ilia, he is
very proud and thankful. Now he shall go
with me to the sina every day, except when
he must stay at home and chop firewood for
his mother, for he is a good boy, ernera-una ;
and he will catch seals often, and learn to be
as fine a hunter as his father better, perhaps,
for my eyes are not as good as they were.
And soon, when I am an it ok (old man) and
his mother is a ningiok (old woman) he will
go alone to the hunt and bring seals every
day, and I shall stop at home and chop the
firewood ; and he will have a wife to help
the ningiok scrape the skins, and the kittorn-
gakulluit (little children) will play about the
fioor. But I still have nukke (sinews) : I will
156 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
go to the sina to-morrow, and he will chop
wood. And the skin ? The skin of Martin's
first seal ? Ilia, issumaminik, it was quite his
own idea. We had been reading how the
people of Israel used to give the first-fruits to
God, and Martin thought he would like to do
that with the first seal he had ever caught ;
so he took the skin to the missionary, and that
is how you saw him yesterday."
CHAPTER XII
Trapping fur The dog that limped A wolverine Jerry and the
footprints The deer scouts The hunt Johannes again.
THERE are no idle days in an Eskimo
winter.
Even when the weather is too stormy
for a man to venture out of doors, he can
mend his harpoon and his dogs' harness, he
can polish up his gun, or he can sit carving
pieces of walrus tusk into little birds and seals
and sleds, while his wife cleans and combs the
latest catch of fur. It may be a marten or a
fox over which she is bending, sometimes even
a black fox that will sell for hundreds of
dollars ; and the woman's eyes gleam as she
thinks of all the money that the fur will bring,
and of all the things that the money will buy.
And on days when the weather is fine the
men will tramp away to their fox traps,
plodding over the deep soft snow on great
broad snow shoes, carrying pieces of rotten
meat for bait, and hoping to catch a fine
black fox.
Alas for the thieving dogs ! A man may
157
158 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
go miles and miles from the village to set his
traps, but sometimes the dogs will follow or
find their way by the scent or the footprints,
and then instead of a beautiful furry fox there
is a lean and angry dog in the trap ! I was
out on a sled one day with an Eskimo, when
I saw that one of his dogs was limping.
It ran as fast as the others, and seemed to
do its share of the pulling, but still there was
the limp. " Is your big yellow dog lame," I
asked. The man smiled. " Bad old rascal,"
said he, " that old dog got his foot fast in a
fox trap last winter, and so he lost some
toes " ; and as he spoke he caught the dog's
trace and hauled him back to the sled, and
took him on his knees and held him fast for
me to see ; and sure enough, there was a scar
across the old dog's foot, where the trap had
nipped the toes. The poor dog was frightened
while his driver held him ; he thought that
he was going to be whipped ; he struggled
and whined, and as soon as the driver let him
go he raced away with his tail between his
legs and his head down, and pulled at his
trace and whined and whimpered. Dogs
always think that they are in disgrace if they
are pulled back to the sled, for that is the
way an Eskimo makes sure of giving the
needed thrashing to the right dog no dodging
AND KAYAK 159
among the others, in the hope that some other
back will get a share of the beating : but
perhaps he whimpered partly because there
was some memory in his doggy mind of that
day last winter when he went a-wandering in
the woods and smelt a beautiful smell of
rotten meat. Perhaps in his mind he was
licking his lips over the memory of that
lovely smell : it was just the thing that an
Eskimo dog would enjoy a piece of seal
flipper, horrible and nasty ; it was buried in
the snow by the stump of a tree, but the big
dog nosed it out and pawed the snow away.
Then there was a horrid snap, and a great
steel trap had him fast by the foot. He
howled and struggled, but it was a long time
before he got free and limped home again.
His master looked at him when he came out
with the tub of dogs' food that evening.
44 Ha," he said, 44 1 see where you have been,
you greedy rascal. Why can you not leave
the traps for the foxes, and be content with
your own food at home, you bad old thing ? "
And then he found a piece of sealskin, and
tied the poor foot up to save it from the frost-
bite, and so the toes got well again. But the
fox trap by the tree stump up in the woods
is the reason why that big yellow dog limps
when he runs with the rest of the team.
160 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
It sometimes happens that the Eskimo
catches a Tartar in his fox trap, if the smell
of the putrid bait of rank and rotten seal meat
chances to attract a wandering wolverine.
The powerful brute, finding itself fast, marches
off with the trap, . snarling and grumbling at
the pain ; and before the hunter can add it
to his bag he has a weary trail through the
woods, up and down, to and fro, following
the blood-stained line of the trailing trap, and
at the end of it all he has to face a sharp
encounter with one of the most dangerous
things a man can meet, a mad and furious
wolverine. He is probably thankful to shoot
the beast before it does him an injury if he
has a gun with him.
As a matter of fact, the men seldom go to
their traps without their guns. It is not that
they have danger or big game in their minds,
but because there is always a chance of
meeting a partridge (rock ptarmigan) on
the road, and a partridge, eaten raw and
warm, is a real delicacy to Eskimo ways of
thinking.
There is bigger game for those who seek it ;
I have heard the scufflings of a wolf among the
dogs when we camped in a snow hut on the
mountain pass, and I have known the drivers
stop the sled among the stunted trees on some
HOME FROM THE HUNT
The sledge has just arrived from the sealing place with a fair-sized seal upon it, and the people
are collecting, as they always do, to inspect and to pass remarks. The man on the left is just home
from his traps with a marten ; he also will come in for a share of good-natured attention.
WINTER FISHING
fhoto lent by Mo
During March, when seals are rather scarce and the reindeer hunt has not begun, the
Eskimos depend a good deal on the fish they catch under the ice. They have a marvellous
AND KAYAK 161
desolate neck of land between the fiords, and
have watched them peering at the spoor of
a bear in the snow. " Tumingit " (his foot-
prints), they say. " Old, no good."
It is remarkable how long one may live in
Labrador without seeing any of these fur
animals in the wild state ; as for myself, the
nearest I ever got to a bear was when Paulus
came to me and said, " Me kill a bear you
want some, eh ? " and so for next day's
dinner we had a roast haunch of black bear
on the table, and found it excellent.
It is wonderful to see how keen the Eskimos
are to notice footprints. Hares and weasels
and lemmings and martens, and all the other
animals that may have crossed your path as
you travel on your dog sled, all leave tracks
that the Eskimos can tell. Your driver will
tell you how long it is since the animal passed ;
whether it was running or walking ; how big
it was ; and you soon learn to know some-
thing of these tracks for yourself, and stop
to peer and study whenever you come upon
some footprints that seem strange.
I stopped my sled one day by the side of a
great bank of snow. A queer little track ran
down the bank and across our path, as though
some tiny animal had hopped that way. It
was not a bird, for there were no marks of
162 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
outspread claws : it was a one-legged sort of
a track, and it puzzled me.
I called Jerry, our great seal hunter, who
was driving my sled, and asked him about
this curious line of footprints. Jerry looked
at the tracks, and he looked at the snow
bank ; and then he looked at me. " Those
footprints," he said, and his face was ever so
grave, " those footprints are the footprints of
a little piece of snow rolling down the snow
bank." Then we drove on.
The Eskimos themselves are always on the
tracks of one sort of animal or another ;
hunting is their very life, and as the days of
winter went by, and the excitement of sealing
at the sina and trapping in the woods began
to wane, I was not surprised that there was
something else to occupy their thoughts.
" Tuktu " began to be the burden of their
talk from morning till night.
The men stood chattering in groups ; the
women indoors were sewing and mending
from dawn to sunset and sometimes far into
the night ; " Tuktu, tuktu, tuktu," was in
everybody's mouth the reindeer hunt was
coming. Presently the word went round that
the scouts were out, and everybody lived in
a fever of excitement. This was early in
March ; and all day long the people were
AND KAYAK 163
going in twos and threes to the top of the
nearest hill, to watch the sled track for the
homecoming of the scouts. The real hunting
does not begin till Easter Tuesday, for such
is the custom that the people have made for
themselves, and no man would dream of
stopping away from the special meetings in
the church during Easter week for the sake
of hunting deer ; but so eager are the men to
have everything ready, and so full are they
all of the talk of the coming of the deer, that
before Easter several of the hunters will
certainly go out as scouts to spy out the land,
and to bring back reports of the likelihood
of a good hunt.
The later Easter comes, the more likely
are the scouts to go ; and when I missed this
or the other familiar face among the men, and
asked, " Where is So-and-so ? " I was certain
of the answer, " He has gone a-scouting."
These scouts do not often bring home any
meat : they have done their part if they
bring home some sort of a report, whether
it be " I saw no deer yet," or " I have seen
tracks : they seem to be near," or, best of
all, " I saw three deer in the distance : I
think those are the leaders of the herd." At
the report of deer tracks the excitement bubbles
over into energy. Men stand grouped round
164 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
sleds in the snow, planning and smoothing and
polishing the runners, binding up slack joints
and patching weak places with plates of iron ;
harpoons are pushed among the rafters of the
roof, and kayaks are hoisted on poles, out of
reach of the prowling dogs ; women are
stitching as if for dear life, getting ready for
the great occasion, all eager to send their
men out with the best boots and clothing
possible ; there is stir and bustle everywhere,
and work and chatter go on in every hut
from morning to night.
All this is a prelude to the great deer hunt ;
and at last the day comes, and with shoutings
and crackings of whips the sleds are away in
the dark of the morning, and the hunters
have started. I have watched them off in the
gathering light, stern-faced and eager, each man
to his own sled, and mostly alone. A boy of
thirteen is handy with a gun, and useful to
take care of the dogs ; but smaller folk must
stay at home, beseech they never so prettily.
The deer hunt is no time for useless weight
upon the sled : I knew a man who took his
wife with him, but the lady had to walk the
seventy or eighty miles home, trailing
laboriously beside the sled, because there was
such a glorious load of meat and skins that
the dogs could haul no more ; and up the
AND KAYAK 165
hills she tasted some of the hardships of the
third-class travellers in the old English coach-
ing days she had to push.
On Easter Tuesday morning the sleds make
their start, and track westward up the frozen
rivers and through the winding valleys to the
moss-covered wilderness where the reindeer
find their food. The hunters have no luggage
on their sleds : no tent, no sleeping gear, only
a scrap of dried seal meat or fish for themselves
and the dogs, and a gun, an axe, a knife, a
packet of sticking plaster for the inevitable
cuts, and a tin of grease for their sunburnt
lips and cheeks that is their whole equip-
ment, with the occasional addition of a kettle
for the making of a cup of Eskimo tea, weak
as water, and flavoured with a mouthful of
molasses out of a bottle.
They start together, but after a while they
get separated, and travel in ones and twos,
or alone. This man's dogs are slow, and lag
behind ; the other man wants to try such and
such a valley instead of the beaten trail ; and
so they separate.
When night comes they build snow huts for
shelter, and sleep on a bed of dogs' harness
spread on the hard snow floor not for any
great comfort there is in it, but because if
they left it outside the dogs would devour it
166 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
in the night. In the morning each man boils
his own tea and munches his own solitary feed
of dried meat or ship's biscuit, harnesses his
team, and drives on alone. Alone he travels
where his fancy leads him : he will find the
deer. Solitude has no terrors for the Eskimo ;
it wakens his best instincts ; it matters not
that he meets nobody, sees nobody ; alone
he finds his way to the hunt and back again,
trusting to his marvellous memory for land-
marks, and guided by the stars and the sun-
rise.
It was a bleak, raw morning when I first
saw the reindeer hunters start : they had their
skin clothes tied round with scarves to keep
the wind out, and they had their heads down
as they faced the bleak gusts. Before ten
o'clock a hurricane was raging, and I feared
for the safety of the men. But they came
back, with the storm roaring behind them ;
first Jerry, then Abia, then others in twos
and threes, all with the same tale " Ajornar-
pok (it is impossible), we must start to-
morrow." " Are you all safe ? " I asked them ;
and Jerry counted them over on his fingers.
" Yes," he said, " we are all here : all except
Johannes." " And Johannes, where is he ? "
" Atsuk " the laconic answer, so characteristic
of the Eskimo" I don't know." But I was
AND KAYAK 167
anxious. " Unet," they said as if to say,
" Just don't you bother your head about
Johannes ; you can't lose him, we all know
that. He's safe enough."
Next day was stormy again, and there was
no Johannes. I thought of search parties, but
the people only smiled ; and, when the weather
cleared, off they went again with their dogs
and their sleds, with never a word about the
missing man. For ten days nothing happened ;
then the women waiting on the hill yelled
" Kemmutsit, kemmutsit " (a sled, a sled), and
I climbed the hill and saw a dot of a sled and
a tiny blur of dogs with an active little ant
of a driver slipping slowly down from the
woods at the mouth of the big river to the
wood-cutter's track over the ice.
" Johannes, immakka," they said, and
strolled down the hill to meet him. And
Johannes it was, smiling and happy, and
brown and well ; proudly shoving at a sled
piled high with meat and skins, and shouting
and cooing and chuckling to the toiling dogs.
Willing women tore the pile to pieces, and
carried it into the hut ; an army of small
boys fought for the privilege of unharnessing
the dogs no doubt to the huge disgust of the
poor dogs, which had to wait with what
patience they could muster until the scuffling
168 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
was finished, thankful at last to slink out of
the way of the tumbling mob ; and Johannes
himself seized a great pair of antlers that had
topped the load, and brought them over as a
present for myself. I looked at the happy
little man ; and as I looked there was a picture
in my mind of a solitary little fur-clad Eskimo
driving a team of ten wolfish and hungry dogs
into the very teeth of an Arctic storm. " Why
did you not turn back with the others ? " I
asked him. Johannes's eyes twinkled.
" It is quite a long time since I slept in a
snow house," he said, " so I built a snow house
instead of turning back, and I sat inside and
listened to the storm. It was splendid. And
now I am the first home with meat. I will
go and fetch you a leg."
CHAPTER XIII
The Eskimo baby Abralia in bed Eskimo names Choosing sur-
names Girls and their dolls Boys at play Learning to be
men Punting on the ice In school.
WHO would not be an Eskimo baby ?
The very first nest it goes into is
a charming bag of baby-reindeer
skin, with the fur inside, soft and warm ; and
there the baby sleeps, safe from all draughts
and chills and cold toes. Hung on the wall,
or propped against the end of the bed, the
bag looks like a giant watch-pocket ; indeed,
one good Eskimo housewife must have been
struck by the likeness herself, for she brought
me a miniature one when I left Labrador,
and told me that it would do to keep my
watch from getting sick with the frost.
The baby spends most of its early days
asleep in its bag, stuffed feet downwards into
the hood of its mother's sealskin or blanket
dicky, but as time passes and it begins to feel
the desire to kick, it discards the pocket and
nestles in the depths of the hood, and you
may see its beady and wide-awake eyes
169
170 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
peering over its mother's shoulder as she walks
along. Sometimes the mother tires of the
weight, and, for the sake of a rest, dumps the
baby on a snowdrift to play. " Poor little
mite ! " I fancy I hear somebody saying, " will
it not catch cold ? ' : But there the fat little
object sits, chuckling and goo-ing and grabbing
handfuls of snow.
I have often seen small girls playing nurse-
maid, strutting along with the big hood hang-
ing lumpily over their backs, and the long tail
trailing on the snow. They have no big hood
of their own ; a girl is not allowed to have
one until she is old enough to get married ;
so the little girl who sets out to act as nurse-
maid borrows her mother's. She would be
helpless without a hood ; no Eskimo baby
would be satisfied with any other sort of
perambulator ; there is a queer swaying of
the shoulders as the girl walks along that
gently swings the baby from side to side, and
rocks it to sleep in a way that no amount of
pushing about on wheels or sled runners would
ever do.
While their sisters are making themselves
useful by minding the baby, the boys spend
all their time playing in the snow or on the
water. Boys are always out of doors : no
weather seems too cold for them, no snow too
AND KAYAK 171
deep or soft or wet for their games. You
may imagine how surprised I was when I went
into an Eskimo house one bright spring day,
and found a healthy-looking little boy in bed.
This was a strange sight ; it was surely
not a case of illness, for there was no mistak-
ing the mischief that twinkled in those bright
little eyes that followed all my movements ;
but here was Abraha in bed in broad daylight,
while all the other boys and babies too, for
that matter were shouting and playing out
of doors. I cast about for a cause of the
phenomenon. " Ah," I thought, " Abraha's
mother has an eye to her boy's welfare after
all : it is not all callousness ; she has the
mother's instinct to care for her children."
Above the stove there stretched a string,
and on the string there hung a row of little
boots and trousers and shirt and dicky,
sopping with moisture and steaming in the
warmth. So there was a limit to the lengths
to which the child might go unchecked.
" Yes," she said, " he has tumbled through
the ice and got wet through, and he must
stay in bed till his clothes are dry : I cannot
let him have his Sunday clothes, for he would
spoil them uivetokulluk " (the little rascal)
this last with a smile of real motherly pride
at the restless little fellow in the bed.
172 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
" Aksunai, Abraha," I said ; and Abraha
turned his face away with a sheepish air, and
buried himself in the bedclothes.
In heathen times the Eskimos had heathen
names, and rare mouthfuls of the language
some of the names were, great unwieldy strings
of letters, sometimes with a meaning, appro-
priate or otherwise, and sometimes without.
Among the heathen people who have lately
settled at Killinek, I found a boy and a girl
both called Nippisa, and I came across a little
girl whose parents knew her by the burden-
some title of Atataksoak (grandfather) !
The Christian Eskimos who people the
Labrador coast to-day have proper baptismal
names, mostly biblical, such as Moses, Laban,
Thomas, Miriam, Sarah, and so on. This
habit of choosing Bible names seems a very
fitting one among a people reclaimed from
heathenism ; it is a constant witness and
reminder of the change they profess and of
the God they serve. And I like those old
Bible names that I met among the Eskimos,
for the people steer clear of the long and
difficult names, and choose those that are
simple and dignified and easy to pronounce.
I can well imagine that the large assort-
ment of Samuels and Labans and Michaels
and Jonathans to be found along the coast
AND KAYAK 178
used to lead to some confusion, and that is
the reason why the Mission ordained some
years ago that the heads of the various
families should choose surnames. Then there
was some scratching of heads and racking of
brains to choose a name that all the families
could like ; and many, I expect, were the
arguments and the palavers before the choice
was made.
Some men found a way out of the difficulty
by simply doubling the name they already
had, like Laban Laban or Josef Josef; some
chose Eskimo words, like our organist at
Okak, who called himself Sillit (Grindstone),
or my big sled driver, who was Kakkarsuk
(Little Mountain) ; some followed the old
plan of calling themselves after their occupa-
tion, like the teacher in the Eskimo day school,
who became Illiniartitsijok (Schoolmaster), or
the village coffin maker, who called himself
Igloliorte (The Builder of Houses !).
Others went a little deeper in their search
for names. One little man, who surely had
some poetry in his soul, called himself Atser-
ta-tak, " because," he said, " that sounds to
me like the noise that the little birds make,
and we are as happy as a family of little birds."
And some there were who took the ordinary
English names that they heard among the
174 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
fisher-folk, and spelt them in extraordinary
Eskimo ways, like Braun and Grin ! So the
Eskimos got their surnames.
As I sit, pen in hand, looking back over
those fascinating years in Okak, there come
to my mind pictures upon pictures of the
Eskimo children at their play ; and I think
again, how true it is that the playtime years
of childhood are a preparation for the active
work of grownup life. " The child is father
to the man " is a saying that holds true of the
Eskimos even more than of most peoples.
The Eskimo baby is born to live an Eskimo
life ; the boy will grow up to be a hunter
like his father ; the girl will be a mother
some day, busy over the clothing and the
sealskins and the bootmaking ; and the in-
herited aptitude for the ordinary work of an
Eskimo life shows itself and shapes itself in
the children's games. I have seen the girls
playing at " shop," and the boys playing at
" rounders '" with a rag ball, but these are
games that they have learnt from the mis-
sionaries' children, mere interludes in their
ordinary play.
An Eskimo girl plays at being mother, just
as girls do all the world over, and there is
generally a baby brother or sister to lend
reality to the play. The real mother does
AND KAYAK 175
not bother much about the baby if there are
big sisters to look after it.
If there is no baby to be nursed, the girls
play with dolls. I suppose there have been
dolls among the Eskimos from time immemorial
dolls of stone or bone, scraped and scrubbed
into shape with hard flint stones ; dolls of
wood, with wide-eyed, staring faces, carved
after the Eskimo cast with high cheekbones
and broad, flat noses ; and dolls nondescript,
mere bundles of rags, or rather of sealskin
scraps, tied with thongs at the waist and neck,
and with features only visible to the fond
little make-believe mother.
Some of the little girls are the proud owners
of flaxen-haired dollies from the English shops,
but most of them have to be content with the
native article, whittled from a stick of fire-
wood by a fond father ; but whatever sort
of a dolly it be, the little mother dresses it in
Eskimo clothes.
I have seen the children sitting on the floor,
planning and chattering, cutting out clothes
for their dolls after the unchanging Eskimo
pattern, making dickys and trousers with a
due eye to the economy of cloth, and learning,
all unconsciously, to cut and make the real
clothes. By daytime the doll is an Eskimo
baby, poked feet first into its little mother's
176 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
hood, and marched from side to side of the
hut or among the houses of the village ; and,
if she does not know that she is watched, the
little girl will put on all the serious air of
motherhood, and sway her body to and fro,
hushing and humming to get her fractious
dolly to sleep. At night the child undresses
her doll, and lays it to rest on a scrap of deer-
skin spread on a toy bedstead of boards, and
covers it with a gay quilt, and leaves it to
sleep while she clambers into her own wooden
bed and pulls her own deerskin or patchwork
counterpane over her. It is the little girls'
chief game, this serious game of learning to
be grown up.
The boys are playing the same game in
their own way, but it always seemed to me
that there is vastly more fun and frolic in a
boy's life. One of the most fascinating relaxa-
tions of our long winter was to watch the boys
at play.
Every day we could hear their shouts as
they romped and tumbled in the snow. They
rolled huge snowballs, and hollowed them out
and hid in them ; they built proper little bee-
hive snow huts, and joined them by tunnels
under the snow ; and, more than anything
else, they sledded and slid down the hills.
There was a steep slope beside my window,
THE ESKIMO BDY
A favourite boys' game punting on the broken ice in the spring-lime and all the more
dangerous because none of them can swim.
AND KAYAK 177
where the drifting snow had filled the bed of
the stream, and this was the great sledding-
place. I watched them with a good deal of
trepidation as they careered down on little
wooden runners strapped to their feet-
miniature ski, whittled from a stick of the
family firewood but I never heard of an
accident. However fast they were going they
seemed able to dodge the lumps in the path,
and avoided collisions by twisting round in
a sharp curve. If they fell at all, they always
seemed to tumble into a snowdrift, and picked
themselves up and shook their shaggy heads,
and tramped up the hill again shouting with
laughter. Sometimes they tried the less excit-
ing forms of tobogganing, dragging out little
sleds made for one, and built after the Eskimo
pattern with the cross-pieces bound with
thongs to the runners, and bumped madly
down the hill ; or a party of boys and girls
joined at one of the big travelling sleds,
yelling and laughing, and shoving one another
off into the snow ; but the boys preferred
their sliding shoes.
Sometimes a man's first present to his little
son is a toy whip, with a lash five or six feet
long ; and children hardly out of their baby-
hood crawl about the floor shouting at imaginary
dogs and dealing vicious smacks at them.
178 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
Out of doors the boys play with full -si zed
whips, and it is wonderful to see the way in
which they manage the thirty feet of lash.
They set an empty tin upon a hummock, and
flick it off time after time at the full length
of the whip ; or two of them wage a hot
battle, each trying to entangle the other's
lash. Whips and sleds are the Eskimo boy's
chief playthings, usually combined with the
useful but very unwilling dog. The boys
train the puppies, and teach them how to do
dogs' work ; and the training is a training
for the boys as well, for they copy all the
tricks and mannerisms of the grown-up drivers,
and take their toy sleds over cracks and
hummocks and smooth sea ice just as they
see their fathers do in the real work of the
daily life.
Sometimes a boy can find a puppy, but no
sled : then he fastens the pup to a block of
ice, and makes him haul that, and if the
going is good enough he seats himself upon
the block both to give the puppy some weight
to pull and to enjoy the ride for himself.
One puppy at a time is enough for the ordinary
boy ; but I have seen a great lad trying to
drive a team of three. You may imagine the
tangle they made of it : the three of them
were hardly ever all on their legs at the same
AND KAYAK 179
time, and when they were, they were wander-
ing in different directions. First one would
amble to the end of its trace, and stand
tugging until it realised that it was fast ;
then it would lie down to whine and make
queer whistling noises while the others made
their move. For the most of the time the
three puppies were lying down with their
legs in the air, while the angry boy tugged
and shouted at them.
Full grown dogs are easier to drive, for they
have learnt their lesson ; but when a boy is
old enough to drive big dogs his playtime is
over, for he must turn to the task of fetching
seals and firewood. Sometimes for the sake of
sheer merriment six or seven of the boys will
slip the harness on their own shoulders and
race away with a big sled, wheeling this way
and that at the command of their driver.
They enter most heartily into the fun,
crossing from one place to another in the team,
just as dogs do, snapping and yelping and
whining and tugging to be on the move every
time the driver calls a halt.
Whatever game it be, you may be sure that
they are playing it thoroughly, even though
it be only the mischievous game of walking
in the water and getting their boots wet.
Mothers and fathers only wink at these water-
180 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
pranks ; the boys are growing strong and
hardy, and that is a great thing for a hunter ;
and, after all, their mischief is never malicious.
Springtime provides the most exciting game
of the whole year, when the ice breaks, and
the tides that come oozing up the beach bring
great pans and little flat pieces floating shore-
wards.
A floating piece of ice makes a splendid raft,
to Eskimo ways of thinking, and I have seen
crowds of our Okak boys standing in ones and
twos on these very unstable punts, and moving
along by paddling with their hands in the
water or prodding at the bottom with poles.
The favourite idea is to put a boy on a big
ice-pan and shove him away into deep water,
and then, after leaving him helpless for a suit-
able time, to scramble and pole along to rescue
him. Sometimes a dog is pressed into service
to play this Robinson Crusoe sort of role ; but
the dog generally considers itself in real danger,
and does not wait for a formal rescue ; on the
contrary, it takes matters into its own hands
(or paws), and after a time of terrified whining
slips miserably into the water and swims
ashore.
I watched one bold spirit among the boys
who had found a long and narrow piece of
ice that struck him as a suitable kayak. He
AND KAYAK 181
tried hard to stand on it, but it was too
wobbly, and time after time he only just
escaped a ducking by great agility ; at last
he squatted on it tailorwise, balancing him-
self with his long two-handed " pautik "
(paddle), and steered to and fro among the
floating ice with all the skill and grace of the
practised kayak man.
A boy came to our door one day, and asked
for an empty meat tin. A few minutes later
I saw a lot of them with harpoons, enjoying
an imaginary seal hunt with the meat tin for
quarry. They had flung it into a big pool
left by the tide, and were taking turns at
spearing it. They flung their heavy harpoons,
and splashed through the water to fetch them,
amid a chorus of triumph or derision accord-
ing to their skill. Some of them were able
to " kill " the tin every time, but the smaller
ones found the harpoon too heavy ; the inborn
skill was there, for one little fellow had a toy
spear of his own, and was flinging it like a
thorough artist.
So these little hunters learn to be men.
But life is not all play, though it be playing
at work. During the months of winter, when
the people are grouped at the Mission stations,
there are regular school hours for the children.
Benjamin, our Okak schoolmaster, is a wise
182 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
man with a stern face and a kindly twinkle
in his eyes.
I walked in one day when he was keeping
school.
" What is four times four ? " said Benjamin.
The little eyes stared, and the little mouths
opened, and the little fingers began to count
under the shadow of the desk. Benjamin
made it easier. " I saw four sleds," he said.
There was a general heave of interest :
Benjamin was going to tell them a story.
They shuffled their feet and elbows, and
settled down to listen. " I saw four sleds :
they were coming round the bend from the
sealing-place. Each sled had four dogs to
pull it. How many dogs were there, gathered
all together ? "
That made thinking easy ; the little brains
had got something familiar to work upon ;
there was a picture of sleds in their minds,
and like a flash came the answer, " Sixteen
dogs they are sixteen." " Yes," said
Benjamin, " four times four makes sixteen ;
don't forget." The little faces were serious
again : it was not much of a story, after all ;
but they had learnt something without expect-
ing it. Wise man, Benjamin ; he was an
Eskimo child himself once, and has had a
careful training from the missionaries ; he
AND KAYAK 183
has learnt to present things in a way that the
Eskimo mind can grasp. After a few more
exercises with the table-book I saw the little
eyes becoming restless ; thoughts were be-
ginning to wander ; and Benjamin called for
a change. Shock-headed little Moses fetched
the books out of the cupboard, and handed
them round, and the chubby faces brightened
again.
Benjamin announced a psalm, and the little
fingers grew busy as they turned the pages ;
and then I saw first one boy and then another
stand up to spell through a verse. It was
really wonderful to watch the eager way in
which they pursued the alarming strings of
letters that stretched from margin to margin,
and gathered them into syllables under
Benjamin's guidance, and made out the proper
meaning. When the psalm was finished Moses
collected the books ; then the children sang
a hymn and ran out to romp in the snow.
CHAPTER XIV
Winter weather Klara and the clothes Summertime The boys
in the sea Mosquitoes A Polar bear Cod fishing Building
houses The boys at play again.
THE cold winter weather of Labrador
has no terrors for the Eskimos. As I
walked along the village path, facing
a wind that made my cheeks tingle, I often
saw them standing bare-headed outside their
doors, exchanging the gossip of the day, or
working with bare hands when I was thank-
ful for the warmth of my sealskin mitts.
Klara, the rosy-faced girl who did our wash-
ing, used to go straight from the wash-tub
into the open air on the bitterest winter
mornings to hang out the clothes ; and those
were the mornings when we were muffled with
blanket coats and sealskin smocks, and when
we wore gloves lest our hands should freeze,
and dared not touch the door knob with our
bare fingers for fear of getting blistered by
the touch of the icy metal.
If I happened to meet Klara in the passage
with her basket of clothes I would say, " Klara,
184
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED 185
it is very, very cold : you will get frost-bitten " ;
and Klara would burst into a loud laugh and
mutter, " Eh, these English people," and then
stand on the steps with the basket clasped in
her bare arms, looking around at the weather
and the scenery before going down the steps
to shake the freezing clothes in the wind and
hang them on the line. Sometimes in the
middle of her hanging-out Klara would pause
to stand laughing at her handiwork, and would
call to the passers-by to look at the clothes
and enjoy the joke ; for as she shook the
garments out and the wind caught them they
froze stiff in an instant, and then they would
hang and dangle and even stand upon the
snow in queer human shapes shirts with
their arms straight out, and stockings like
long stiff legs and pillow cases blown out tight
like drums. All this was a great delight to the
boys and girls of the village ; but I could
never understand how the drying went on
when all the moisture was frozen in the clothes
and they were pegged upon the line. I put
a nice new clothes line for Klara in the kitchen ;
but unless a blizzard was raging she would
have none of it. " No," she said, " I will
hang the clothes out of doors : the frost will
make them white."
It seemed strange to me that a land that
186 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
could be so cold as Labrador could be so
comfortably warm as it sometimes was on
days in the summer-time. Warm days did
not come very often, and however much we
English folk may have liked them, they were
very unwelcome to the Eskimos. They would
rather have the cold, any day. Poor things,
they were prostrate with the heat, panting for
air, while we were just enjoying the warmth
of the sunshine. On warm days like that the
boys spent their time in the sea.
They had a queer way of bathing : they
just walked into the water, boots and clothes
and all, and tumbled about.
They could not swim, but they were cool,
and that was the main thing to their minds.
" What a dreadful place England must be,"
they said, when I told them that our summer
was ever so much warmer than theirs. " How
marvellous to be hotter than this ! Dread-
ful ! " And so they spent their warm days,
perched upon a stone in their wet clothes, or
wallowing in the shallow sea, as long as the
sun was high ; and when the cool of the even-
ing came they ran about the beach in their
wet clothes until they were dry.
Summer does not last long in Labrador :
at the best it is no more than eight weeks
of days that are pleasantly warm, and the
AND KAYAK 187
evenings are always cool and chilly, and most
of the nights are frosty. It seems a pity that
the short summer should be spoiled by the
gnats, but so it is.
Just when you are thankful that the winter's
cold is over, and just when you begin to find
the days warm enough to be enjoyable, the
time of the gnats begins. From the begin-
ning of July to the end of August, and even
later, the summer air of Labrador swarms
with countless hosts of the blood-thirsty
creatures.
Mosquitoes, we call them ; and rightly, I
suppose, for their scientific name is Culex ;
and they live fully up to the evil repute that
their family has for biting and stinging and
buzzing and swarming around. How, thought
I, can one be expected to enjoy this lovely
scenery, these otherwise delightful walks among
the hills, if one is compelled to be encased in
a gauze veil and a pair of thick gloves ? The
buzzing creatures perch on the meshes of your
veil, and you can see them striving to get
through ; if you have not adopted Eskimo
boots, which reach up to your knees, they
climb about your knitted socks, and sit there,
biting your ankles between the strands of wool,
and you can almost imagine them kicking their
heels with delight at the convenience of having
188 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
something to stand on while they ply their
nefarious trade.
There is a hideous fascination about watch-
ing the mosquitoes : you may slap and dance,
but however many you may kill there are
always plenty waiting their turn, and the only
satisfaction you get is in the knowledge that
new-comers receive an extra share of their
attentions, and that some day you will be
hardened. The first bites may produce really
alarming results. I am sure that I took all
due precautions the first night that I slept
on shore in Labrador, but a mosquito must
have crawled under my door in the darkness,
for in the morning I could only open one eye,
and the question that greeted me at the break-
fast table was, " Have you bumped yourself ? "
Summer in Labrador may seem a quiet time
from the hunter's point of view ; there are no
foxes or wolves to trap ; and though there
may be black bears away up the river-banks
of the mainland not many folks have the time
to go after them, for the summer fur is not
of much value and the bear is only useful for
his meat. Polar bears sometimes come our
way in the summer-time, and then there is a
furious hunt, followed by a great deal of chatter-
ing over the pipes in the evening ; but the
most of the white bears have retreated to the
AND KAYAK 189
Button Islands and to other desolate places
where there is no smell of man to disturb them.
A beady-eyed little Eskimo came into my
room one evening, hugging a bulky package
which he dumped upon the floor. " Nennok
(polar bear)," he explained, " half of him :
you buy him, eh ? ' : He unrolled his package
and named his price, and I found myself
looking at the hinder half of a huge bearskin.
" Where is the rest of him ? " I asked : and
then I got the story.
It seems that this man and another were
out in a little boat, fishing for cod, when they
saw a white bear swimming in the sea. Like
true Eskimos they fell to their oars, and got
the boat between the bear and the shore so
as to head him off. They had no gun and no
harpoon, but this did not matter to them :
their great idea was that they were within
hunting distance of a nennok, and hunt him
they would. They chased him to and fro
until he began to tire, and then they assailed
him with their oars, hammering prodigiously
at his head. The bear tried to get into the
boat, and at that they hammered the more
until they had him stunned and helpless.
Then they towed his carcase ashore and set
about sharing him. It did hot happen to
strike them that they might sell the skin and
190 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
share the money, and so reap a reasonable
reward for their adventure : no, they cut the
bear in two, and each appropriated an end.
They were digusted to find that they had
entirely spoiled the market value of the skin
by cutting it : no trader wanted half a bear !
But I have that piece of bearskin to-day to
remind me of the pluck of those two men,
who captured a polar bear with no better
weapon than their oars.
But a bear hunt is quite an unusual thing :
it is the cod fishing that makes the months of
August and September the busiest in the whole
year.
Day in and day out the boats are on the
water, with men and boys sitting in them
fishing from morning till night aye, and all
night long if fish are plentiful. It is a big
test of Eskimo patience, to jerk the bright
leaden lure, with its two barbed hooks, up
and down within a few feet of the bottom of
the sea ; jerk, jerk, jerk, hour after hour, when
fish are rather scarce and only the plodder
can hope to succeed ; but there come times
when the fish are so plentiful that they are
on the hook before it is well sunk, and there
is a spice of excitement in hauling up as fast
as your hands can pull, and dropping the hook
again for more and more and more. But in
AND KAYAK
spite of the excitement, " jigging," as it is
called among the fishermen, is horribly cold
work on dull, bleak days, and I was not
surprised to find the Eskimos wearing gloves
of seal leather on their plump hands to prevent
the line from chafing them. In ordinary times
the men and boys do the fishing, and leave
the women and girls to attend to the splitting
and salting, but when they light upon one of
the vast shoals of fish that seem to swarm
from place to place, the whole family goes out
in the boat, and the baby in the mother's
hood is the only one that seems too small to
ply the jigger, and tiny children somehow
manage, with much struggle and determina-
tion, to land fish almost as big as themselves.
After the end of the summer comes the time
for building houses. The fish is all dried and
bundled for market ; the seal hunt has not
yet begun, and the men have time to mend
their homes or to build themselves new ones.
Timber for houses can be had for the fetching,
though the woods may be twenty miles away,
and though the men of the northernmost
villages have no woods at all, but need to rely
on those living nearer the trees to cut planks
for them.
And this is the way that the Eskimo sets
about his work, when once he has made up
192 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
his mind that he will build himself a nice new
wooden home.
Some fine spring morning he calls his dogs
together, and hies him to the woods. He
builds a tiny snow hut for shelter, and lives
on tough dried meat. He is after timber for
a house, and from dawn to dusk he searches
for the best of the poor stunted trees and chops
them down. Then he builds a sort of scaffold,
and gets his wife to help him saw the planks.
Many a time have I seen them at work with
their big pit -saws : the man is top sawyer on
the scaffold, while the woman stands below
and does her share, and so they get planks for
their home. Building begins later on, for the
seal hunting and the cod fishing are too
important to be missed ; but, sooner or later,
before the next winter is due the Eskimo gets
busy. He lays a foundation of stones from
the beach or the hillside, and builds his beams
and joists upon it ; he works long hours,
intent and serious, until he can proudly fling
his tools down and say, " My house is built."
So your Eskimo gets his house : now to
teach him to keep it nice ! That is the dif-
ficulty. I wanted the men to make windows
that could be opened quite a new thing for
them, for the old Eskimo huts had hardly any
window at all, and never a whiff of fresh air
AND KAYAK 193
excepting when somebody coming in hastily
opened the door and hastily banged it shut
again. So I did a great amount of thinking
about those windows, and this is the way the
solution came.
Tomas was building a new house, and he
came to me with a very simple request. " I
want to build a good house," he said, " because
I catch many seals. I want glass windows,
not windows of seals' bowels : I want to be
able to see out of my windows when the days
are fine. Can you find me a piece of proper
wood for a window frame among the wood
that you have ? " " By all means," I told
him ; " here is a piece of soft pine : and you
shall have it without payment if you will make
a window like this of mine that opens on
hinges." Tomas studied my window, and
opened it and shut it, and grinned, and looked
at me and coveted that piece of pine. " Yes,"
he said, " it shall be " ; and off he trotted with
his prize surely the first Eskimo house -
improvements prize ! I walked along several
times to see how he was getting along with
his new house and his new window ; and I
found that^another man, quite a poorjjfellow,
who was building himself a tiny hut near by,
was also making a window to open. He had
seen Tomas at work, and, of course, was
N
194 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
inquisitive. " Hello, Tomas, what sort of a
window are you making ? " " Ah," says
Tomas, " new sort, very fine ; see, it opens on
hinges." " Piovok (that looks good) : teach
me how to do it ; I must have a window like
that."
Yes, the Eskimos would imitate ; that was
the secret. And they imitate so thoroughly,
too : you may see it even in the children's
games. One day there had been a funeral,
and after it was all over I heard the sound of
singing. It was the funeral hymn over again !
I looked out, and saw a group of boys, all
standing round a long hole in the snow, and
singing lustily. When their singing was
finished they heaped snow into the hole, and
built it into a mound, and very deliberately
patted it smooth and then walked off two by
two towards the village. I could not help
laughing at the young rascals, for I suppose
all children play at funerals. But these little
Eskimos were doing things properly, for after
the mock-mourners had all gone the mound
gave a great heave, and a small boy poked
his head up and crawled out, shaking the snow
out of his shaggy hair as he ran to join his
mates.
Yes, the Eskimos would imitate. If Moses
had dug up the sodden mud floor of his hut,
AND KAYAK 195
and replaced it with a neat layer of boards,
sure enough somebody else would want to do
the same, and there would be a great time of
digging and boarding. Some of the men went
off to the wood for planks ; others, who had
not dogs enough, or who were too poor to
spare the time, came to beg or buy our old
packing-cases. Some of them seemed to think
the marks on the cases a grand ornamentation
of the floor, for they turned the boards the
proper way up, so that the floors told tales
of " Cube Sugar " and "Prime Lard " and
" per Harmony to Okak." But the boards
were there, and the trampled slush that I have
had to splash through on my visits, and that
reeked of what Shakespeare might have had
in mind when he wrote " a very ancient and
fish-like smell," was abolished.
CHAPTER XV
Some stories of a Mission Hospital.
SO far I have made this little book to tell
something of the Eskimos as they are
in their daily life, and something of the
land and the homes in which they dwell ; and
now, before bringing my story to a close, I
am going to say something of the life that we
live as missionary workers among the people.
" Some Stories of a Mission Hospital " is the
title that I have chosen for this chapter, and
that is a title that explains itself. If you were
to visit the village of Okak to-day, you would
see the neatly painted hospital standing by
the side of the brook, with the church spire
towering near at hand ; you would go in and
see the rooms where the sick folks are ; you
would see the piled-up benches in the waiting-
room downstairs ; you would see the wood
shed and the storeroom and the attic where
the hard dry fish is hung a sort of larder of
odd-looking Eskimo dainties ; you might meet
a brown-faced little woman on the stairs, a
woman with black hair plastered tightly on
AND KAYAK 197
her head, and her little beady brown eyes all
aglow with the excitement of seeing a visitor,
and from her neat white apron and the
business-like way in which she trots about
in her soft sealskin boots you would judge,
and rightly, too, that she is the Eskimo
nurse.
In the summer the windows are wide open,
with wire gauze to keep the gnats away ; and
through those open windows you can hear the
sounds of the village, and the rustle of the
tides upon the pebbly beach, and the babbling
of 'the brook that runs close by. The brook
looks harmless enough ; too small to harbour
even the smallest of fishes, and so quiet and
sedate in its course that the Eskimo women
come and do their family washing in the pools.
They have a queer way of doing it : they soap
the clothes well, then drop them in the water
and trample on them ; and if you looked out
of the window you might see two or three of
them standing in the pool where the brook
widens just outside the hospital railings, stand-
ing with their soft sealskin boots upon their
feet, and tramp, tramp, tramping on the week's
washing as though they were doing a slow sort
of Eskimo jig. And as they tramp they chatter
and laugh. This is the quiet little Okak brook
in the summer-time, tumbling and trickling
198 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
down the slope of the hillside from the spring
in the swamps, an innocent, harmless little
brook. But when the winter snow is melting
in the month of June, then the little brook
becomes a roaring torrent ; and once I have
seen it burst its banks, and come thundering
down against the back wall of the hospital,
threatening to wash the building off its founda-
tion, and battering against the kitchen wall
until a gang of willing little Eskimos, armed
with hatchets and shovels and picks, managed
to dig a channel for it through the snowdrift
in another direction.
So much for the brook.
The other end of the hospital looks over
the village, and the sick folk love to lie there
gazing through the windows, watching the
sleds going to and fro, and the hunters
dragging seals up the hill, and the children
tumbling and romping in the snowdrifts.
They get better the quicker, as you may well
imagine, for the happiness of seeing all that
goes on.
Downstairs is the big waiting-room where
the people have their morning prayers. Soon
after the building of the hospital I told the
people that I thought that it would be a good
idea to start each day's work with morning
prayers. The word I happened to use the
AND KAYAK 199
morning singing caught their fancy at once,
for singing always appeals to them. A grim-
faced deputation called upon me to know if
it was true that there was going to be singing
at nine o'clock. " Yes," said I. " Then the
people want to know if they may come, even
when they are not sick, just for the singing,
and then go home again." " By all means,
let them come and help with the singing."
And the deputation retired, smiling and
nakomek-ing.
" Now," thought I, "we are likely to have
a crowd : what are we to do for benches ? ):
I set a small boy to scour the village for the
two worthies who shared the honourable and
responsible position of public carpenter ; and
when, after a due interval, they arrived,
having been discovered, without doubt, sharing
a solid meal of fresh seal meat in some hunter's
house, I took them into my plans. Peter and
David, the worthy carpenters in question,
nodded sagely and said " Taimak " (so be it) ;
and we made our way to the attic. There
we attacked the disused packing-cases, and
knocked them to pieces and pulled the nails
out, and planed the boards to a reasonable
smoothness, and by dint of much measuring
and sawing and hammering evolved a dozen
very decent little benches out of the pile.
200 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
No Mission hospital ever had cheaper furniture
than our amateur benches ; but they served
their purpose, and, for all that I know to the
contrary, they are doing duty at Okak
Hospital to this day. On the advice of Peter
and David we made them nice and low, to
suit the short Eskimo legs ; and though we
did not paint them they always looked spruce,
for Sarah and Valeria, the two charwomen,
took great pride in scrubbing them. I was
well satisfied with the benches, because the
Eskimos liked them.
As I had expected, the room was packed
to the utmost on the first day of the singing.
There were seats for about fifty, and as " first
come, first served " was to be the rule, the
people began to come early. By a quarter
to nine there was a crowd on the doorsteps,
a jolly tempered mob, clinging to the railings
and jostling to get nearer to the door, and
constantly reinforced by new arrivals from all
parts of the village.
An avalanche of boisterous humanity surged
in and nearly overwhelmed me when I opened
the door upon the stroke of nine, and the
benches were full long before the stream of
people had ceased ; but the folk were deter-
mined to get in. Those who could not find
room on the benches squatted on the floor,
AND KAYAK 201
and those who were unable even to nudge
their way into places on the floor stayed in
the passage or sat on the stairs, and we left
the door open so that they might join in the
singing.
Among the people on the floor between the
benches I saw big Josef, the mightiest hunter
(and therefore the richest man) in Okak ; in
heathen times he would have been a sort of
king among the people because he was so tall
and because he was the best hunter, but he
seemed quite happy on the floor.
We sang a well-known hymn, and the place
shook with the delightful noise. I like to look
back upon that morning ; I seem to see again
the crowd of faces, all wrinkling with pleasure
and perspiring with the warmth, and I seem
to hear again the tremendous harmony that
filled the room.
That was the first of many happy morn-
ings ; and though the novelty of the thing
was a great attraction in the beginning, the
people still came when the novelty had long
worn off, and morning by morning, when nine
o'clock struck, our benches were packed with
an eager crowd.
There was a catastrophe at one of our nine
o'clock meetings, in which one of our little
benches played the leading part. When four
202 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
good solid Eskimos were seated on each of
them, the benches were well laden, and I used
to feel some apprehension as I watched the
people edging closer and closer together to
make room for " just one more." I felt sure
that the last straw would be reached some
day, but the people always said, " Nama-
tuinarput " (they are quite all right) when I
expressed my fears. But the last straw came
and a very substantial last straw it was
in the person of big Tabea. She came in
rather late one morning and stood looking
round for a place with all the dignity and
consequence of the prosperous middle-aged
Eskimo matron. There were no empty seats,
but a comfortable-looking party of village
worthies made room or an apology for room
for her in the middle of their well-filled
bench. Tabea sat down ponderously and with
deliberation ; there was an ominous creaking
and the bench collapsed with a clatter, heaping
its occupants into a wild scrimmage on the
floor. I could hardly keep my face straight
when I saw them shove the broken bench aside
and compose themselves upon the floor as
gravely as you please.
If all this had happened out of doors they
would have laughed, I have no doubt ; but
this was meeting-time, when folks do not
AND KAYAK 203
laugh ; and it speaks well for the gravity of
the Eskimo character that the ludicrous
spectacle of the collapsing bench and the
struggling dignitaries on the floor did not even
cause a titter.
Morning prayers, or the " Morning Singing "
as the Eskimos called it, was the beginning
of the day's work ; and I might fill many
pages with tales of the odd happenings that
sometimes made up the daily round of our
hospital.
There were always some who stayed behind
after the singing to talk about some ailment
that was troubling them.
Their usual way of describing pain was to say
that they were " broken." When a man said,
" My leg is broken : my arm is broken," he
only meant that he had a pain in his leg or
his arm ; but you may imagine how alarming
and terrible it all seemed until we learnt to
understand this queer way of saying things.
" Little Gustaf has fallen and broken his back,"
cried an excited little mother, as she came
running up the hospital steps but little
Gustaf, after all, had only fallen and bruised
himself, and was playing about almost as
lively as ever by the time his mother reached
home again. And when a man came with a
bad cold, and told of aches and pains in his
204 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
head and his legs and his back and his arms
" all broken " he would look at his bottle
of medicine and shake his puzzled head, and
wonder how the different things in the bottle
would know to find their way to all the different
places where he had his aches.
And the language ! What troubles there
were with those long words ! How we used
to chase those strings of letters through the
pages of the grammar book, trying to make
them mean just what we wanted to say !
Sarah, our little charwoman, who swept the
floors and scrubbed the benches and did the
washing and made herself as useful as she
could in all the ways that she could find, went
into fits of laughing one day because the nurse
told her that the doctor was up in Heaven
when the doctor was only up in the attic
where the dried fish was stored : he was " up
high," and the nurse just turned the word a
little bit wrong. Sarah used to chuckle about
that joke for a long time afterwards, and tell
it to the people who came to the door, so
that they might laugh too ! If I had to give
a man two pills to take at different times, I
had to tell him how to swallow one little pill,
and then at the proper time to swallow the
little pill's wife ! It all sounds so funny to
us, but it is just the Eskimo way of saying
AND KAYAK 205
things, and sounds quite ordinary to Eskimo
ears.
There is plenty of incident in a doctor's
daily round in Labrador, though it be only
in the mild form of peeps at typical Eskimo
life, or small adventures such as falls down
great snow pits or even a plunge through the
roof of a buried hut or a sudden and painful
descent into a sort of cave full of vicious sled
dogs which was the householder's buried snow
porch.
Another very interesting thing was the
feeding of the sick. They were Eskimos, and
must have Eskimo foods ; so in order to let
them have the foods they liked, we allowed
their friends to bring things for them.
I might make a long list of the foods the
people brought seal meat raw, dried, boiled,
fried, and even made into a stew with flour
and giving forth a most appetising smell ; the
flesh of reindeer, foxes, bears, hares, sea birds
of all sorts ; eggs of gulls, sea pigeons and
ptarmigan, the gulls' eggs especially being
sometimes in a half-hatched state, with great,
awful-looking eyes inside them ; trout and
cod and salmon ; the boiled skin of the white
whale and the walrus ; raw reindeer lips and
ears these are only some of the peculiarly
Eskimo dishes that passed before our eyes ;
206 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
to say nothing of attempts at European
cookery, such as home-baked bread, some-
times grey and sodden, sometimes light and
wholesome, so that we wondered how Eskimo
hands and Eskimo stoves could bake so well ;
roasted dough, as hard as bricks, a concoction
of flour and water baked on the top of a tiny
iron stove ; and even, on festal occasions,
dough with currants.
There are memories, too, of the people who
passed through the hospital wards : there is
the man who was brought ninety miles over
the mountain pass from Nain, with the two
noble fellows who had offered to bring him
pushing on and on through a blizzard, for-
getting themselves and their weariness because
they knew he must be brought quickly : there
is young Jerry, who came sixty miles with a
broken leg, tied fast upon a dog sled : there
is little Kettura. Kettura is a brisk little
housewife who came as a passenger upon
her husband's sled to have treatment for her
eyes.
For a week she had to be blindfolded ; and
there she sat on her bed in the ward, with
both eyes bandaged over, singing in her clear
sweet voice, and improvising an accompani-
ment on an old guitar. As we went about our
work we could hear the twankle-twankle of
AND KAYAK 207
the strings and the quaint sound of her
singing, hour after hour, tune after tune, as
the happy little woman made her fellow
patients bright in spite of her own darkness.
CHAPTER XVI
The life of a missionary.
CNG years ago, when the missionaries
first came to Labrador, their life was as
lonely as life can well be.
The ship brought them in the summer-time,
and then sailed away and left them to their
long, cold winter.
When the winter ice had broken, and the
great sea was once more open for the ship
to return, they began to look forward to the
greatest day of all their year, the Coming of
the Ship. And so, once a year, the ship came,
bringing news from home, and stores of meat
and flour so that there should be no want
through the next winter. Lonely it must have
seemed, to live shut off from the world by
the ice and the storms and the dreadful cold of
the Labrador winter, locked in because the sea is
frozen all along the coast, and no ship can venture.
But in spite of all, those old-time mis-
sionaries were happy. Lonely they must have
felt, far from their friends and their home,
hearing no voices but the strange rough sounds
BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED 209
of the language of the Eskimos around them ;
but they were happy. They were telling the
good news of the Gospel of Christ to one of
the strangest and loneliest of peoples, in a land
where you would hardly have thought that
any man but an Eskimo could live ; and the
joy of their work was their reward.
Perhaps Labrador is not quite so lonely
nowadays : fishing vessels come along the
coast in the summer ; a mail steamer sent
by Government bustles to and fro ; but still
the great sea freezes as before ; for eight
months of the year the lonely coast of Labrador
is closed by the ice. And so it is that to-day,
just as in the days gone by, the missionary
lives his lonely life during all that long winter,
happy in his work, teaching the little children,
holding service in the church, translating
hymns and stories for the Eskimos to sing and
read, and visiting the people in their huts and
at their lonely hunting places. And just as
in the old days, the Coming of the Ship is the
great day of the year.
In the month of July, when the ice had
floated away, and the tides came rustling up
the beach once more, we began to take our
walks upon the hillsides, and to look out over
the wide sea, watching and waiting for the ship.
We wrote our letters ; we made room in the
210 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
storeroom for the new supplies of food ; we
talked and talked about the ship we could
talk of nothing else. And then, in spite of
all our waiting, we were taken by surprise.
Suddenly, suddenly, there came a shout.
" Pujoliarluit " (the big steamer), it roared
and shrilled from all parts of the village. Guns
banged ; people came running, shouting as
they ran, racing for the jetty ; and out on
the bay a man was paddling home as if for
dear life. As soon as he was near enough to
be heard he yelled, "A fire on Parka vik."
That was enough ; a fire on the beach might
be cookery, but a fire on the hill was the signal ;
and he in his kayak had seen the smoke and
had fired the two bangs with his gun that the
people understood. Boats came bustling across
the bay, with sails spread and oars all busy :
and in half an hour the quiet village was
populous again. Every house seemed to have
a flag, from the big red ensign on the Mission
flagstaff to the bandanna handkerchief that
was fluttering on an oar out of somebody's
window. Even the old widow in the hut
behind the hospital was entering into the
spirit of the day ; she had no flag, but she
had sacrificed her red petticoat, and was
scrambling up her roof to pin it to a tent pole
propped against the eaves.
AND KAYAK 211
It was an hour or more before the ship came
into sight, and then, when the tall masts came
peeping over the rocks of the point and the
little black hull slipped silently into the mouth
of the bay, the shouting and banging began
afresh. The men were wild with glee : I saw
one brawny fellow with a Winchester repeater
letting off round after round in his delight,
until he had shot away enough cartridges to
account for dozens of prospective seals ; he
was as delighted as we, and that was his way
of showing it.
The ship came on and on, looking strangely
near in the clear air ; we could see the fur-
clad captain on the bridge, and the first mate
standing on the bow, just over the painted
angel that spreads her wings beneath the bow-
sprit.
The mate's hand rose : there was a sharp
clatter, and the anchor plunged into the water.
At the same moment Jerry the organist raised
his voice, and the people joined in their hymn
of thanks : " Now let us praise the Lord."
" Gud nakorilavut
Omamut illunanut."
There was just one hint of sadness about
the coming of the ship. One evening in the
winter the missionary might say to his wife,
212 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
" Our little Harry is getting a big boy now :
he is seven years old : we must send him
home to school " and the mother would nod
her head and smile bravely, and begin to knit
stockings and make new flannel shirts for her
boy. Perhaps she cried at times over her
sewing ; but Harry himself was all excite-
ment. He ran across to tell his friends. " When
the ship comes I am to go home to England :
I am to go to school, and I shall see London :
I shall spend my holidays with my grandfather.
Oh, how fine it will be."
The ship comes, and the little boy's box is
carried on board : the child himself is shown
the tiny cabin where he is to sleep on the
journey, and the captain takes him by the
hand and shows him all the wonders of
the ship. They all have tea together in
the captain's cabin on that last evening ;
and the mother kisses her boy and tries not
to let him see that she is crying, and the
father tells him, " Be a good boy, my son, and
remember to send us a letter as often as you
can."
Then the parents go ashore to their lonely
home ; and in the morning the ship is gone,
and maybe Harry will be a big boy before he
sees his mother and father again.
If he is a wise boy he will remember what
AND KAYAK 213
was said to him about letters, for even in
Labrador we have a postman.
True, he does not come very often : the
mail steamer bustles along in the summer, and
during the winter we always had a little
Labrador post of our own.
On the 20th of January big Josef started
south with his sled and dogs, to meet the
messenger from the southern stations at Nain.
After a stay of two or three days to give the
Nain missionaries time to read and answer
their letters days which Josef spent in going
the round of the village and delivering the
laborious salutations of which the Eskimos are
so fond he travelled back again. We used
to meet him as he drove up to the Mission
house, and shake his great hand, and smile,
and tell him we were glad to see him and so
we were.
Sometimes there were a few belated
European letters in the bag, a welcome spice
in the pile of coast news ; aye, we knew what
it was to feel thankful for the postman, in
Labrador.
Next day Jerry would take the mail sled
northward, while Josef rested on his laurels
and told tales of his trip, and delivered him-
self of his burden of salutations. He went
about it with great solemnity. He had all
214 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
the greetings written down, and usually called
a mass meeting in one of the huts to get rid
of the most of them. Sometimes he had a
general message to deliver, and in such a case
he would beg leave to announce it after one
of the meetings in church. The congregation
sat quietly in their places, while big Josef rose
and stalked solemnly to the missionary's
table. " Jonas and his wife, Nainemiut (Nain
people), send greetings to all the people of
Okak," he would say in his quiet voice, and
then make his dignified way to his seat by
the door, while the people shuffled and began
to pick up their hymn books ready for home.
Jerry, our northern postman, was a great
man for adventures ; he generally had some-
thing out of the common to relate.
Once he broke through thin ice on a river,
and had to run all day long to keep his clothes
from setting stiff and jointless he must have
known what the old knights felt like in their
armour : another time he was caught in a
storm, and had to spend a couple of awful
nights among the rocks and the snow. When
he wanted a drink of warm tea, he cut chips
off his sled and made a fire. So much for our
great luxury, the postman.
It may seem strange to talk of gardening
in so bleak a place as Labrador, but, strange
AND KAYAK 215
as it may seem, when the July sun had melted
the snow and thawed the ground, we used to
grow flowers and vegetables. All the little
shoots must first be carefully grown in boxes
in our living rooms, or under a cover of glass ;
and you can imagine how anxiously we
watched for the tiny green leaves to peep
above the soil, and how proudly we saw them
grow large enough and strong enough to be
put in the open ground. I suppose that the
missionaries of long ago had toilsomely made
the gardens, wheeling barrow-loads of earth
from here and there ; why, even at that
bleak and rocky spot called Killinek, where a
Mission station was opened a few years ago,
away at the northernmost tip of Labrador,
there is the beginning of a garden, and the
missionary talked to me of borrowing a couple
of barrels of earth from our garden at Okak !
The gardens need a great deal of care and
nursing, for we had always three enemies to
fight against the dogs, and the mice, and the
frosts.
The dogs were delighted to have a patch of
freshly dug soil for their romps and their
scrambles, but we managed to keep them out
by the help of wooden palings. Sometimes
they climbed over, or burrowed underneath,
and then it was good-bye to our garden stuff ;
216 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
but mostly we made things secure enough to
baffle them. The mice were a more serious
nuisance : they were wide-awake and very
hungry, and found our nice young shoots of
lettuce and cabbage very tempting, far better
than buried twigs and frozen roots. It was
rather a laborious thing to have to do, but in
years when mice were plentiful we went round
every evening and covered each shoot with an
empty meat tin, and made a second pilgrimage
in the morning to uncover them all again.
The frost we fought by covering each row with
a wooden framework ; and the old widows
who worked in the blubber yard made it their
annual care to go round at night and spread
sacks over the frame, and to take the sacks
off and put them away every morning. For
this they got a present of a couple of dollars
and an armful of green vegetables at the end
of the season, and shrill were their cries of
" Nakomek," and broad were their grins of
happiness, when the time came for them to
get their perquisite.
There are many pleasant things to remember
in a missionary's life in Labrador. We forget
the cold and the hardships when we think of
the smiling, friendly faces of the Eskimos ;
we forget the loneliness of the long, long
winter when we think of the many little things
AND KAYAK 217
that come, even in Labrador, to mak? life
bright. How charming it is to hear the sound
of music on a dark Christmas morning, when
you waken with the frost of your breath upon
the pillow and the windows caked with thick
soft snow. On the snowdrift outside stands
Jerry with his troop of bandsmen : there a^e
small boys holding lanterns to show the players
their notes. The cold air nips their fingers,
the snow powders down upon their heads ;
but they puff lustily at their trumpets so that
you may wake to the sound of a Christmas
hymn. And so they move from house to
house, delighting the village with their in-
spiring noise.
Jerry likes best to encircle himself with the
bombardon, to lend a solid foundation to the
harmony ; but if one of the men is away he
is quite able to take the cornet or horn or
whatever it may be, and leave the bottom
notes for Benjamin's trombone. It is hard
work, but the bandsmen are happy ; the
morning frost may settle on their heads, the
moisture may freeze inside their trumpets in
spite of shawls and stockings wrapped round
them, the mouthpieces may stick to their lips
with the cold ; but they are Eskimos ; winter
weather does not easily daunt them or numb
their fingers ; and, besides, to play a trumpet
21* BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED
in the band is one of the greatest honours
that an Eskimo knows.
And what more delightful thing can there
be than to watch the Eskimos trooping to
church on a winter's day ! In a long stream
they come pouring from the houses, a winding
line of trim little figures, clad in silvery furs
or red-tipped blanket, or in newly-washed
calico overalls, some with their heads bare to
the wind and the snow, and their shaggy
black hair hanging over their ears, some with
the peaked hood that we know so well from
the pictures. They trudge along the narrow
path in single file, and the little children
stretch their baby legs to tramp in the foot-
prints of the older people funny little souls,
those children, they find it easier, no doubt,
to plant their feet in the deep footprints of
their elders than to make new holes in the
snow for themselves ; and, besides, it pleases
them to plod with long strides like the grown-
ups. And so you see the people marching on,
grave and sedate, while the church bell clangs
from the tower.
They march into the porch, and you hear
them stamping their feet to beat off the snow
that clings to them ; the bell ceases its clang-
ing ; an old man, bell-ringer and keeper of
the door, puts out his head and peers around
AND KAYAK 219
for stragglers or late-comers, then shuts the
door and goes in after the others. And inside
the church the people are singing, singing a
hymn, maybe, that you know quite well,
while Jerry at the old pipe organ leads them
on in stately time. Then the missionary prays
and reads and tells the people once again of
Christ the Saviour ; and as he looks around
on the sea of faces, eager and intent, he thanks
God for the truth that from every nation and
tribe and people there shall be gathered those
who love the name of Christ.
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