The Inuits stripped as usual to the skin, but the shame-faced priest felt obliged to keep on his clothes, removing his outer fur garments only. He says: "I slept feverishly in cat-naps, with constant nightmare. Tormented by my garments, perspiring terribly from the heat, crowded between my companions like a packed herring, sickened by unhealthy odors, and suffocated by unbreathable air, what fearful agony I suffered that night! [He adds:] Save their odor and their nudity, the company of the inmates was not disagreeable. Nor did the food prove less repulsive, especially the opaline, greenish-white whale blubber, which, cut into long, thin strips, forms a choice delicacy known to the Inuits as ortchok. The native with his left hand holds the dainty morsel above the greedily upturned open mouth which it at once fills. Gripping the ortchok fast with his teeth, with a knife in his right hand he cuts it off as near the lips as he can, swallowing it with a gurgle of joy."
When Petitot asked for cooked blubber his host promptly pulled out the melting piece from the smoking, dirty lamp, and was surprised that such a delicacy was refused. When later tasted the raw blubber was found to be insipid, though the fresh oil therefrom was not unlike olive oil in its flavor.
As a kind of dessert they drew on their small supply of congealed seal-oil, so rancid as to be offensive. To this food neither time nor circumstance reconciles the white man.
The meal over the natives took to the soothing evening pipe, and gradually began the talk of the day and of the morrow. Mindful of the precious store goods in his pack and of his promise to the factor, Powder Horn chanted the glory of Fort Anderson, and then sang to the young stranger Inuits the praises of the missionary, whom he proclaimed to be the Son of the Sun; despite his protestations, transforming the priest into a demi-god.
The long day's march had seen the scattering groves dwindle and fail—first the bankerian pine, followed in order by the balsam poplar and the aspen. Now as they broke their morning camp the canoe birch was a stunted, wretched shrub scarcely attaining the dignity of a tree, and even this was gone when they made their next camp near the Anderson delta, leaving here and there unsightly and rare specimens of the hardy larch and the arctic spruces.
Next day they parted company with the young natives, who carried with them the pot-stone lamp, much to the priest's annoyance, as he was nearly frozen when they entered the igloo on the river ice. Powder Horn under pressure showed his ingenuity in providing a substitute. Picking up a piece of drift-wood, he hollowed it out lamp-shaped, and covered its bottom and sides with pebbles and flat stones. As moss was lacking for the wicking, he plucked a pinch of hair from his deerskin sleeping-robe, twisted it into a mesh, and the lamp was ready. During the night a violent gale buried the igloo in a snow-drift. The river ice was under such storm-pressures and it oscillated so strongly and continuously to and fro that they all feared that the river would open and swallow them up. Throughout the whole night the roaring of the wind, the groaning of the ice, and the quivering of the igloo made sleep impossible.
As they passed the river's mouth the third day the landscape was one of frightful sterility. Snow became thin and scanty, the ice was rougher, and the bare spots of ground seemed to have no signs of vegetation, trees and shrubs failing utterly. Nature was worse than dead with its apparent desolation. Here both man and beast was doomed alike to a constant and eternal struggle for bare existence in this adverse environment.
The lack of material and the ingenuity of the Inuits in wresting a bare subsistence from this forlorn country was indicated by a most efficient fox-trap made entirely of ice.
Long after dark the wearied sledge dogs with loud howlings broke into a rapid run, and were welcomed with fierce yells from the rival teams of the Eskimo village, a dozen large snow houses on the shores of Liverpool Bay. So dim was the light and so strange the garments and the attitudes of the native women, fur-clad and crawling on all-fours from the huts, that the missionary could scarcely distinguish them from the dogs.
Introduced to the people of the village by his Inuit protector as the Son of the Sun, he was made welcome after the manner of the country. His efforts at conversions did not bear visible fruit, though the natives listened gravely to his sermons on kindness and goodness, on chastity and honesty, on wifely fidelity and motherly love.