"Sure we're gettin' handy t' th' coast!" he exclaimed.
They would soon find white men, he was sure. The track led them on for a mile or so, and then they heard a dog's howl and a moment later came out upon two snow igloos. Eskimo men, women, and children emerged on their hands and knees from the low, snow-tunnel entrance of the igloos at their approach, but when they saw that the travellers were a party of Indians, gave no invitation to them to enter, and said nothing until Bob called "Oksunie" to them—a word of greeting that he had learned from the Bay folk. Then they called to him "Oksunie, oksunie," and began to talk amongst themselves.
"They're rare wild lookin' huskies," thought Bob.
As much as Bob would have liked to stop, he did not do so, for the Indians stalked past at a rapid pace, never by word or look showing that they had seen the igloos or the Eskimos.
These new people, particularly the women, who wore trousers and carried babies in large hoods hanging on their backs, did not dress like any Eskimos that Bob had ever seen before. Nor had he ever before seen the snow houses, though he had heard of them and knew what they were. The dogs, too, were large, and more like wolves in appearance than those the Bay folk used, and the komatik was narrower but much longer and heavier than those he was accustomed to. He was surely in a new and strange land.
More igloos were seen during the afternoon, but they were passed as the first had been, and at night the party bivouacked in the open as they had done the night before.
On the morning of the third day they passed into a stretch of barren, treeless, rolling country, and before midday turned upon a well-beaten komatik trail, which they followed for a couple of miles, when it swung sharply to the left towards the river, and as they turned around a ledge of rocks at the top of a low ridge a view met Bob that made him shout with joy, and hasten his pace.
At his feet, in the field of snow, lay a post of the Hudson's Bay Company.