We found the travelling excellent along the tundra. The trail was plainly marked, for the wind had swept the land nearly bare of snow, and the tracks of the sledge that had passed that way before were defined enough to be easily followed. After our days of stumbling over the rough ice and crossing open leads it seemed as simple as walking along a country road. Our dogs were in bad shape and only one of the four was of any real use.
About two o’clock in the afternoon we could make out black objects some distance ahead of us; as we drew nearer we could see that they were moving. Kataktovick had been ahead, while I drove the dogs; now he stopped, came back and said, “Eskimo igloo.”
“Ardegar,” I replied, and told him to go on.
He set his face eastward again and I urged the dogs harder than ever. Ordinarily he was a good walker but now he seemed to be lagging a little and dropping back, nearer and nearer the dogs. I asked him what the matter was.
“Eskimo see me, they kill me,” he said. “My father my mother told me long time ago Eskimo from Point Barrow go to Siberia, never come back, Siberian Eskimo kill him.”
I told him that he was mistaken and repeated what I had said the day before about the hospitality of the Siberian Eskimo. Our troubles were at an end, I said; we should now have a place to dry our clothes and get them mended, or perhaps get new ones. “Maybe,” I added, “we get tobacco.”
Kataktovick was still reluctant, even though I told him that perhaps we could get some dogs, or even persuade some of the Eskimo to travel along with us.
We could now make out that the objects ahead of us were human beings and that they were running about, apparently very much excited by our approach. Kataktovick hung back near the dogs. At length I said, “You drive the dogs now and I will go ahead.” He did so with evident relief and so we went on until I was within ten yards of the Eskimo. Then I put out my hand and walked towards them, saying in English, “How do you do?” They immediately rushed towards us and grasped us each warmly by the hand, jabbering away in great excitement. I could understand nothing of what they were saying, nor could Kataktovick. I tried to make them understand who we were and where we had come from but they were as ignorant of my language as I was of theirs.
There could be no doubt, however, that they were glad to see us and eager to show their hospitality, for the first thing we knew they had unharnessed our dogs and were feeding them, had taken our sledge into the outer part of their house and put it, with everything still on it, up on a kind of scaffold where it would be away from the dogs and sheltered from the weather. Then an old woman caught me by the arm and pushed me into the inner inclosure and on to a platform where three native lamps were going, one at each end and the other in the middle. The roof was so low that my head touched it, so I sat down. The woman brushed the snow off my clothes with a snow-beater shaped like a sickle and thinner than ours, placed a deerskin on the platform for me to sit on, pulled off my boots and stockings and hung them up to dry. Then she gave me a pair of deerskin stockings, not so long as ours, because, as I could see, the trousers that these Siberians wore were longer than ours. After that she took off my parka or fur jacket and hung it up to dry, while I pulled off my undershirt. Others were waiting upon Kataktovick in the same way and here we were, when we had hardly had time to say, “Thank you,” clad only in our bearskin trousers and seated comfortably about a large wooden dish, filled with frozen reindeer meat, eating sociably with twelve or fourteen perfect strangers to whom, it might be said, we had not been formally introduced. Never have I been entertained in a finer spirit of true hospitality and never have I been more thankful for the cordiality of my welcome. It was, as I was afterwards to learn, merely typical of the true humanity of these simple, kindly people.
When I had time to look about me, I found that I was seated in a large, square room, shaped somewhat like a large snow igloo, though the Siberian Eskimo or Chukches, as these natives are called, know nothing of snow igloos or how to build them. Their house, as I was presently to learn, is called an aranga. There is a framework of heavy drift-wood, with a dome-shaped roof made of young saplings. Over all are stretched walrus skins, secured by ropes that pass over the roof and are fastened to heavy stones along the ground on opposite sides. The inner inclosure, which is the living apartment, is about ten feet by seven; it is separated by a curtain from the outer inclosure where sledges and equipment are kept. In the living apartment the Chukches eat and sleep on a raised platform of turf and hay, covered with tanned walrus skin. They light and heat their houses and do their cooking with a lamp which consists of a dish of walrus or seal oil, with a wick of moss in it. This is superior to wood for such a dwelling-place, for it makes no smoke; the lamp is lighted by a regulation safety match, though to be sure it is seldom allowed to go out. The three lamps in this aranga made the room pretty hot; the temperature, I should guess, was about a hundred.