CHAPTER XVII
TO WHALE RIVER AND FORT CHIMO
The feeling of relief that came to me when I heard the shout and saw the men and dogs coming can be appreciated, and something of the satisfaction I felt when I grasped the hands of the two Eskimos that strode up on snowshoes can be understood.
The older of the two was an active little fellow who looked much like a Japanese. He introduced himself as Emuk (Water). His companion, who, we learned later, rejoiced in the name Amnatuhinuk (Only a Woman), was quite a young fellow, big, fat and goodnatured.
Without any preliminaries Emuk pushed right into the shack and, from a bag that he carried, produced some tough dough cakes which he gave us to eat, and each a plug of tobacco to smoke. He was all activity and command, working quickly himself and directing Amnatuhinuk. A candle from his bag was lighted. Amnatuhinuk was sent for a kettle of water; wood was piled into the stove, and the kettle put over to boil. The stove proved too slow for Emuk and he built a fire outside where tea could be made more quickly, and when it was ready he insisted upon our drinking several cups of it to stimulate us. Then he brought forth a pail containing strong-smelling beans cooked in rancid seal oil, which he heated. This concoction he thought was good strong food and just the thing for half-starved men, and he set it before us with the air of one who has done something especially nice. We ate some of it but were as temperate as Emuk with his urgings would permit us to be, for I knew the penalty that food exacts after a long fast.
A comfortable bed of boughs and blankets was spread for us, and we were made to lie down. Emuk, on more than one occasion, bad been in a similar position to ours and others had come to his aid, and he wanted to pay the debt he felt he owed to humanity.
He told us that Potokomik and the others, after suffering great hardships, had reached his tupek near the Mukalik the day before, but I could not understand his language well enough to draw from him any of the details of their trip out.
At midnight Emuk made tea again and roused us up to partake of it and eat more dough cakes and beans with seal oil. I feared the consequences, but I could not refuse him, for he did not understand why we should not want to eat a great deal. The result was that with happiness and stomach ache I could not sleep, and before morning was going out to vomit. Even at the danger of seeming not to appreciate Emuk’s hospitality, I was constrained to decline to eat any breakfast.
Emuk noticed a hole in the bottom of one of my seal-skin boots. He promptly pulled off his own and made me put them on. He had another though poorer pair for himself.
It was a delight to be moving again. We were on the trail before dawn, Emuk with his snowshoes tramping the road ahead of the dogs and Amnatuhinuk driving the team. The temperature must have been at least ten degrees below zero. The weather was bitterly cold for men so thinly clad as Easton and I were, and the snow was so deep that we could not exercise by running, for we had no snowshoes, and while we wallowed through the deep snow the dogs would have left us behind, so we could do nothing but sit on the komatik (sledge) and shiver.
At noon we stopped at the foot of a hill before ascending it, and the men threw up a wind-break of snow blocks, back of which they built a fire and put over the teakettle. Easton and I had just squatted close to the fire to warm our benumbed hands when the husky dogs put their noses in the air and gave out the long weird howl of welcome or defiance that announces the approach of other dogs, and almost immediately a loaded team with two men came over the hill and down the slope at a gallop toward us. It proved to be Job Edmunds, the half-breed Hudson’s Bay Company officer from Whale River, and his Eskimo servant, coming to our aid.
Edmunds was greatly relieved to find us safe. He knew exactly what to do. From his komatik box he produced a bottle of port wine and made us each take a small dose of it which he poured into a tin cup. He put a big, warm reindeer-skin koolutuk [the outer garment of deerskin worn by the Eskimos] on each of us and pulled the hoods over our heads. He had warm footwear—in fact, everything that was necessary for our comfort. Then he cut two ample slices of wheat bread from a big loaf, and toasted and buttered them for us. He was very kind and considerate. Edmunds has saved many lives in his day. Every winter he is called upon to go to the rescue of Eskimos who have been caught in the barrens without food, as we were. He had saved Emuk from starvation on one or two occasions.
After a half-hour’s delay we were off again, I on the komatik with Edmunds, and Easton with Emuk. We passed the snow house where Edmunds and his man had spent the previous night. They would have come on in the dark, but they knew Emuk was ahead and would reach us anyway.
Edmunds had a splendid team of dogs, wonderfully trained. The big, wolfish creatures loved him and they feared him. He almost never had to use the long walrus-hide whip. They obeyed him on the instant without hesitation—“Ooisht,” and they pulled in the harness as one; “Aw,” and they stopped. There was a power in his voice that governed them like magic. The wind had packed the snow hard enough on the barrens beyond the Tuktotuk—and the country there was all barren—to bear up the komatik; the dogs were in prime condition and traveled at a fast trot or a gallop, and we made good time. Once Emuk stopped to take a white fox out of a trap. He killed it by pressing his knee on its breast and stifling its heart beats.
Big cakes of ice were piled in high barricades along the rivers where we crossed them, and at these places we had to let the komatik down with care on one side and help the dogs haul it up with much labor on the other; and on the level, through the rough ice hummocks or amongst the rocks, the drivers were kept busy steering to prevent collisions with the obstructions, while the dogs rushed madly ahead, and we, on the komatik, clung on for dear life and watched our legs that they might not get crushed. Once or twice we turned over, but the drivers never lost their hold of the komatik or control of the dogs.
It was dark when we reached Emuk’s skin tupek and were welcomed by a group of Eskimos, men, women and children. Iksialook was of the number, and he was so worn and haggard that I scarcely recognized him. He had seen hardship since our parting. The people were very dirty and very hospitable. They took us into the tupek at once, which was extremely filthy and made insufferably hot by a sheet-iron tent stove. The women wore sealskin trousers and in the long hoods of their adikeys, or upper garments, carried babies whose bright little dusky-hued faces peeped timidly out at us over the mothers’ shoulders. A ptarmigan was boiled and divided between Easton and me, and with that and bread and butter from Edmunds’s box and hot tea we made a splendid supper. After a smoke all around, for the women smoke as well as the men, polar bear and reindeer skins were spread upon spruce boughs, blankets were given us for covering, and we lay down. Eleven of us crowded into the tupek and slept there that night. How all the Eskimos found room I do not know. I was crowded so tightly between one of the fat women on one side and Easton on the other that I could not turn over; but I slept as I had seldom ever slept before.
The next forenoon we crossed the Mukalik River and soon after reached Whale River, big and broad, with blocks of ice surging up and down upon the bosom of the restless tide. The Post is about ten miles from its mouth. We turned northward along its east bank and, in a little while, came to some scattered spruce woods, which Edmunds told me were just below his home. Then at a creek, above which stood the miniature log cabin and small log storehouse comprising the Post buildings, I got off and climbed up through rough ice barricades.
Never in my life have I had such a welcome as I received here. Mrs. Edmunds came out to meet me. She told me that they had been watching for us at the Post all the morning and how glad they were that we were safe, and that we had come to see them, and that we must stay a good long time and rest. For two-score years they had lived in that desolate place and never before had a traveler come to visit them. In all that time the only white people they had ever met were the three or four connected with the Post at Fort Chimo, for the ship never calls at Whale River on her rounds. Edmunds brings the provisions over from Fort Chimo in a little schooner. There are five in the family—Edmunds and his wife, their daughter (a young woman of twenty) and her husband, Sam Ford (a son of John Ford at George River), and Mary’s baby.
A good wash and clean clothing followed by a sumptuous dinner of venison put us on our feet again. I suffered little as a result of the fasting period, but Easton had three or four days of pretty severe colic. This is the usual result of feast after famine, and was to be expected.
And now I learned the details of Potokomik’s journey out. When the three Eskimos left us in the shack they started at once in search of Emuk’s tupek. The storm that raged for two days swept pitilessly across their path, but they never halted, pushing through the deep-ening snow in single file, taking turns at going ahead and breaking the way, until night, and then they stopped. They had no ax and could have no fire, so they built themselves a snow igloo as best they could without the proper implements and it protected them against the drifting snow and piercing wind while they slept. On the second day they shot, with their rifles, seven ptarmigans. These they plucked and ate raw. They saw no more game, and finally became so weak and exhausted they could carry their rifles no farther and left them on the trail. Each night they built a snow house. With increasing weakness their progress was very slow; still they kept going, staggering on and on through the snow. It was only their lifelong habit of facing great odds and enduring great hardships that kept them up. Men less inured to cold and privation would surely have succumbed. They were making their final fight when at last they stumbled into Emuk’s tupek. Kumuk sat down and cried like a child. It was two weeks before any of them was able to do any physical work. They looked like shadows of their former selves when I saw them at Whale River.
It was after dark Sunday night when my letter to Edmunds reached the Post. Earlier in the evening Edmunds and his man had crossed the river, which is here over half a mile in width, and pitched their camp on the opposite shore, preparatory to starting up the river the next morning on a deer hunt, herds having been reported to the northward by Eskimos. Mrs. Edmunds read the letter, and she and Mary were at once all excitement. They lighted a lantern and signaled to the camp on the other side and fired guns until they had a reply. Then, for fear that Edmunds might not understand the urgency of his immediate returns they kept firing at intervals all night, stopping only to pack the komatik box with the clothing and food that Edmunds was to bring to us. Neither of the women slept. With the thought of men starving out in the snow they could not rest. The floating ice in the river and the swift tide made it impossible for a boat to cross in the darkness, but with daylight Edmunds returned, harnessed his dogs, and was off to meet us as has been described.
We had left George River on October twenty-second, and it was the eighth of November when we reached Whale River, and in this interval the caribou herds that the Indians had reported west of the Koksoak had passed to the east of Whale River and turned to the northward. Fifty miles inland the Indian and Eskimo hunters had met them. The killing was over and they told us hundreds of the animals lay dead in the snow above. So many had been butchered that all the dogs and men in Ungava would be well supplied with meat during the winter, and numbers of the carcasses would feed the packs of timber wolves that infested the country or rot in the next summer’s sun. Sam Ford had gone inland but was too late for the big hunt and only killed four or five deer. The wolves were so thick, he told us, that he could not sleep at night in his camp with the noise of their howling. One Eskimo brought in two wolf skins that were so large when they were stretched a man could almost have crawled into either of them. I saw wolf tracks myself within a quarter mile of the Post, for the animals were so bold they ventured almost to the door.
Edmunds is a famous hunter. During the previous winter, besides attending to his post duties, he killed nearly half a hundred caribou to supply his Post and Fort Chimo with man and dog food, and in the same season his traps yielded him two hundred fox pelts—mostly white ones—his personal catch. This was not an unusual year’s work for him. Mary inherits her father’s hunting instincts. In the morning she would put her baby in the hood of her adikey, shoulder her gun, don her snowshoes, and go to “tend” her traps. One day she did not take her gun, and when she had made her rounds of the traps and started homeward discovered that she was being followed by a big gray timber wolf. When she stopped, the wolf stopped; when she went on, it followed, stealing gradually closer and closer to her, almost imperceptibly, but still gaining upon her. She wanted to run, but she realized that if she did the wolf would know at once that she was afraid and would attack and kill her and her baby; so without hastening her pace, and only looking back now and again to note the wolf’s gain, she reached the door of the house and entered with the animal not ten paces away. Now she always carries a gun and feels no fear, for she can shoot.
I took advantage of the delay at Whale River to partially outfit for the winter. Edmunds and his family rendered us valuable assistance and advice, securing for us, from the Eskimos, sealskin boots, and from the Indians who came to the Post while we were there, deer skins for trousers, koolutuks and sleeping bags, Mrs. Edmunds and Mary themselves making our moccasins, mittens and duffel socks.
The Eskimos were all away at their hunting grounds and it was not possible to secure a dog team to carry us on to Fort Chimo. Therefore, when Edmunds announced one day that he must send Sam Ford and the Eskimo servant over with the Post team for a load of provisions, I availed myself of the opportunity to accompany them, and on the twenty-eighth of November we said good-by to the friends who had been so kind to us and again faced toward the westward.
The morning was clear, crisp and bracing; the temperature was twenty degrees below zero. We ascended the river some seven or eight miles before we found a safe crossing, as the tide had kept the ice broken in the center of the channel below, and piled it like hills along the banks.
I noted that the Whale River valley was much better wooded than any country we had seen for a long time—since we had left the head waters of the George River, in fact—and the Indians say it is so to its source. The trees are small black spruce and larch, but a fairly thick growth. This “bush,” however, is evidently quite restricted in width, for after crossing the river we were almost immediately out of it, and the same interminable, barren, rocky, treeless country that we had seen to the eastward extended westward to the Koksoak.
That night was spent in a snow igloo. The next day we crossed the False River, a wide stream at its mouth, but a little way up not over two hundred yards wide. At twelve o’clock a halt was made at an Eskimo tupek for dinner.
The people were, as these northern people always are, most hospitable, giving us the best they had—fresh venison and tea. After but an hour’s delay we were away again, and at three o’clock, with the dogs on a gallop, rounded the hill above Fort Chimo and pulled into the Post, the farthest limit of white man’s habitation in all Labrador.
We were welcomed by Mr. Duncan Mathewson, the Chief Trader, who has charge of the Ungava District for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Dr. Alexander Milne, Assistant Commissioner of the Company, from Winnipeg, who had arrived on the Pelican and was on a tour of inspection of the Labrador Coast Posts.
The Chief Trader’s residence is a small building, and Mr. Mathewson was unable to entertain us in the house, but he gave orders at once to have a commodious room in one of the dozen or so other buildings of the Post fitted up for us with beds, stove and such simple furnishings as were necessary to establish us in housekeeping and make us comfortable during our stay with him. Here we were to remain until the Indian and Eskimo hunters came for their Christmas and New Year’s trading, at which time, I was advised, I should probably be able to engage Eskimo drivers and dogs to carry us eastward to the Atlantic coast.