“Don’t give up yet, boy,” I encouraged. “Maybe they’ll see our fire when we start it and take us off.”
We filled our pipes and struck matches to light them. They were wax taper matches and made a good blaze. “Wonder what it’ll be like to eat civilized grub again and sleep in a bed,” said Easton meditatively, as he puffed uncomfortably at his pipe.
While he was speaking the glow of a lantern appeared from the Post house, which we could locate by its lamp-lit windows, and moved down toward the place where we had seen the boats on the mud. The sight of it made us hope that we had been noticed, and we jumped up and combined our efforts in shouting until we were hoarse. Then we ignited the pile of brush. It blazed up splendidly, shooting its flames high in the air, sending its sparks far, and lighting weirdly the strange scene. We stood before it that our forms might appear in relief against the light reflected by the rocky background, waving our arms and renewing our shouts. Once or twice I fancied I heard an answering hail from the other side, like a far-off echo; but the wind was against us and I was not sure. The lantern light was now in a boat moving out toward the main river. Even though it were coming to us this was necessary, as the tide could not be high enough yet to permit its coming directly across to where we were. We watched its course anxiously. Finally it seemed to be heading toward us, but we were not certain. Then it disappeared altogether and there was nothing but blackness and silence where it had been.
“Some one that’s been waiting for the tide to turn and he’s just going down the river, where he likely lives,” remarked Easton as we sat down again and relit our pipes. “I began to taste bread and molasses when I saw that light,” he continued, after a few minutes’ pause. “It’s just our luck. We’re in for a night of it, all right.”
We sat smoking silently, resigned to our fate, when all at once there stepped out of the surrounding darkness into the radius of light cast by our now dying fire, an old Eskimo with an unlighted lantern in his hands, and a young fellow of fifteen or sixteen years of age.
“Oksutingyae,” * said the Eskimo, and then proceeded to light his lantern, paying no further attention to us. “How do you do?” said the boy.
* [Dual form meaning “You two be strong,” used by the Eskimos as a greeting. The singular of the same is Oksunae, and the plural (more than two) Oksusi]
The Eskimo could understand no English, but the boy, a grandson of Johm Ford, the Post agent, told us that the Eskimo had seen us strike the matches to light our pipes and reported the matter at once at the house. There was not a match at the Post nor within a hundred miles of it, so far as they knew, so Mr. Ford concluded that some strangers were stranded on the hill—possibly Eskimos in distress—and he gave them a lantern and started them over in a boat to investigate. Their lantern had blown out on the way—that was when we missed the light.
With the lantern to guide us we descended the slippery rocks to their boat and in ten minutes landed on the mud flat opposite, where we were met by Ford and a group of curious Eskimos. We were immediately con-ducted to the agent’s residence, where Mrs. Ford received us in the hospitable manner of the North, and in a little while spread before us a delicious supper of fresh trout, white bread such as we had not seen since leaving Tom Blake’s, mossberry jam and tea. It was an event in our life to sit down again to a table covered with white linen and eat real bread. We ate until we were ashamed of ourselves, but not until we were satisfied (for we had emerged from the bush with unholy appetites) and barely stopped eating in time to save our reputations from utter ruin. And now our hosts told us—and it shows how really generous and open-hearted they were to say nothing about it until we were through eating—that the Pelican, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s steamer, had not arrived on her annual visit, that it was so late in the season all hope of her coming had some time since been relinquished, and the Post provisions were reduced to forty pounds of flour, a bit of sugar, a barrel or so of corn meal, some salt pork and salt beef, and small quantities of other food stuffs, and there were a great many dependents with hungry mouths to feed. Molasses, butter and other things were entirely gone. The storehouses were empty.
This condition of affairs made it incumbent upon me, I believed, in spite of a cordial invitation from Ford to stay and share with them what they had, to move on at once and endeavor to reach Fort Chimo ahead of the ice. Fort Chimo is the chief establishment of the fur trading companies on Ungava Bay, and is the farthest off and most isolated station in northern Labrador. This journey would be too hazardous to undertake in the month of October in a canoe—the rough, open sea of Ungava Bay demanded a larger craft—and although Ford told me it was foolhardy to attempt it so late in the season with any craft at all, I requested him to do his utmost the following day to engage for us Eskimos and a small boat and we would make the attempt to get there. It has been my experience that frontier traders are wont to overestimate the dangers in trips of this kind, and I was inclined to the belief that this was the case with Ford. In due time I learned my mistake.