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 MISSION ARrS EXPERIENCES & ADVENTURES IN LABRADOR BY S. K. HUTTON, M.B., CH.B.VICT. FELLOW OF THE UOYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY With Thirteen Illustrations and a Map LONDON SEELEY, SERVICE & CO. LIMITED 38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET MISSIONARY LIBRARY FOR BOYS SP GIRLS WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS <•<•«. " An admirable picture of a great career."— Sfea,. " The astonishing adventures of Bishop Bompas amongst Red Indi&ns and Eskimos. "— The Cha. . MISSIONARY CRUSADERS. Stories of the Daunt less Courage and RemarVable Adventures which Missionaries have had in many parts of the World whilst carrying out their duties. By CLAUD FIELD, M. A. (Cantab.). MISSIONARY KNIGHTS OF THE CROSS. Stories of the Indomitable Courage &> Stirring Adventures of Missionaries with Ui»o:.vi!i*ed Mn.n, Wild Blasts, 6- the Forces of Nature in many of the Witflct '(By:J.:C. LAMBERT, M.A., D.D. MISSIOXARY-lliIROINES. OF. THE CROSS. True Stories ,(?f: flit /^plf-dd id ,C°tii"^Ae ^ Patient Endurance of Lady Missionaries. By Canon DAWSON. LIYlNr.STONE, THE HERO OF AFRICA. By R. B. IM\\S.;.\, M.A.(Oxon.). With many Illustrations. BY ESKIMO DOGSLED & KAYAK. The Adventures 6 Experiences of a Missionary in Labrador. By DrS. K. HUTTON. SEELEY, SERVICE ^ CO. LIMITED CONTENTS 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 CONTENTS PACK CHAPTER XI .14 CHAPTER XII .. . .157 CHAPTER XIII . . 1(>9 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 FISHING JULIUS AND A SNOW HOUSE SPRING FLITTING . SEAL FISHING ESKIMO HARPOON 13 Facing page 32 32 . 56 . 56 . 64 88 . 128 . 136 142 xi xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fating jug* HOME FROM THE HUNT . 160 WINTER FISHING . . . . . . . . 160 ESKIMO BOY . . . .176 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 IS 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 see 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. " 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 shorewards. 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 in tents— Tents and dogs— Bob's tent— The tent-stones— A tent 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 BY ESKIMO DOG-SLED 29 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 font 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 erawl ovit 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 tent ing-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 t> >> (4 V S-1 si It: I §*«§ QJ O a i§| 0) • 11 3 .£ .,>•-' 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 corners 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." " 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 their 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 Lahrador 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. " Whatever do you want ? " I asked them. They all grinned sheepishly and said " 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 " 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 tha,t 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 stove and save the potatoes. And ours was a warm house, built of boards and felt in alternate layers. Early in December the Okak brook wras 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 Aii 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 wrould 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 tall 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." 66 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. It 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 what they are to do, and so a driver's work is a const ant repetition of such orders as " Ouk- ouk-ouk " (go to llir 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 ? v 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 v 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 63 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- 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 4 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 at 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 60 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 r 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 AND KAYAK 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. " 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 5: 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 ! 5: 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 with 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 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 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 v/ork. 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 cried out upon the rocky crags as we passed them 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. " 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