The following morning it was snowing and drifting, and as the day grew the storm increased. An hour’s traveling carried us to the Koroksoak River—­River of the Great Gulch—­which flows from the northeast, following the lower Torngaek mountains and emptying into Ungava Bay near the mouth of the George. The Koroksoak is apparently a shallow stream, with a width of from fifty to two hundred yards. Its bed forms the chief part of the komatik route to Nachvak, and therefore our route. For several miles the banks are low and sandy, but farther up the sand disappears and the hills crowd close upon the river. The gales that sweep down the valley with every storm had blown away the snow and drifted the bank sand in a layer over the river ice. This made the going exceedingly hard and ground the mud from the komatik runners.

The snowstorm, directly in our teeth, increased in force with every mile we traveled, and with the continued cramps and pains in my legs it seemed to me that the misery of it all was about as refined and complete as it could be. It may be imagined, therefore, the relief I felt when at noon Will and Peter stopped the komatik with the announcement that we must camp, as further progress could not be made against the blinding snow and head wind.

Advantage was taken of the daylight hours to mend the komatik mud. This was done by mixing caribou moss with water, applying the mixture to the mud where most needed, and permitting it to freeze, which it did instantly. Then the surface was planed smooth with a little jack plane carried for the purpose.

That night the storm blew itself out, and before daylight, after a breakfast of coffee and hard-tack, we were off. The half day’s rest had done wonders for me, and the pains in my legs were not nearly so severe as on the previous day.

January and February see the lowest temperatures of the Labrador winter. Now the cold was bitter, rasping—­so intensely cold was the atmosphere that it was almost stifling as it entered the lungs. The vapor from our nostrils froze in masses of ice upon our beards. The dogs, straining in the harness, were white with hoar frost, and our deerskin clothing was also thickly coated with it. For long weeks these were to be the prevailing conditions in our homeward march.

Dark and ominous were the spruce-lined river banks on either side that morning as we toiled onward, and grim and repellent indeed were the rocky hills outlined against the sky beyond. Everything seemed frozen stiff and dead except ourselves. No sound broke the absolute silence save the crunch, crunch, crunch of our feet, the squeak of the komatik runners complaining as they slid reluctantly over the snow, and the “oo-isht-oo-isht, oksuit, oksuit” of the drivers, constantly urging the dogs to greater effort. Shimmering frost flakes, suspended in the air like a veil of thinnest gauze, half hid the sun when very timidly he raised his head above the southeastern horizon, as though afraid to venture into the domain of the indomitable ice king who had wrested the world from his last summer’s power and ruled it now so absolutely.

With every mile the spruce on the river banks became thinner and thinner, and the hills grew higher and higher, until finally there was scarcely a stick to be seen and the lower eminences had given way to lofty mountains which raised their jagged, irregular peaks from two to four thousand feet in solemn and majestic grandeur above our heads. The gray basaltic rocks at their base shut in the tortuous river bed, and we knew now why the Koroksoak was called the “River of the Great Gulch.” These were the mighty Torngaeks, which farther north attain an altitude above the sea of full seven thousand feet. We passed the place where Torngak dwells in his mountain cavern and sends forth his decrees to the spirits of Storm and Starvation and Death to do destruction, or restrains them, at his will.

In the forenoon of the third day after leaving George River we stopped to lash a few sticks on top of our komatik load. “No more wood,” said Will. “This’ll have to see us through to Nachvak.” That afternoon we turned out of the Koroksoak River into a pass leading to the northward, and that night’s igloo was at the headwaters of a stream that they said ran into Nachvak Bay.