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.