The Colonel or the Boy cooked the eternal beans, bacon and mush dinner, after whatever desultory work was done; as a matter of fact, there was extraordinarily little to occupy five able-bodied men. The fun of snow-shoeing, mitigated by frostbite, quickly degenerated from a sport into a mere means of locomotion. One or two of the party went hunting, now and then, for the scarce squirrel and the shy ptarmigan. They tried, with signal lack of success, to catch fish, Indian fashion, through a hole in the ice.
But, for the most part, as winter darkened round them, they lounged from morning till night about the big fireplace, and smoked, and growled, and played cards, and lived as men do, finding out a deal about each other's characters, something about each other's opinions, and little or nothing about each other's history.
In the appalling stillness of the long Arctic night, any passer-by was hailed with enthusiasm, and although the food-supply in the Big Cabin was plainly going to run short before spring, no traveller—white, Indian, or Esquimaux—was allowed to go by without being warmed and fed, and made to tell where he came from and whither he was bound—questions to tax the sage. Their unfailing hospitality was not in the least unexpected or unusual, being a virtue practised even by scoundrels in the great North-west; but it strained the resources of the little camp, a fourth of whose outfit lay under the Yukon ice.
In the state of lowered vitality to which the poor, ill-cooked food, the cold and lack of exercise, was slowly reducing them, they talked to one another less and less as time went on, and more and more—silently and each against his will—grew hyper-sensitive to the shortcomings and even to the innocent "ways" of the other fellow.
Not Mac's inertia alone, but his trick of sticking out his jaw became an offence, his rasping voice a torture. The Boy's occasional ebullition of spirits was an outrage, the Colonel's mere size intolerable. O'Flynn's brogue, which had amused them, grew to be just part of the hardship and barbarism that had overtaken them like an evil dream, coercing, subduing all the forces of life. Only Kaviak seemed likely to come unscathed through the ordeal of the winter's captivity; only he could take the best place at the fire, the best morsel at dinner, and not stir angry passions; only he dared rouse Mac when the Nova Scotian fell into one of his bear-with-a-sore-head moods. Kaviak put a stop to his staring angrily by the hour into the fire, and set him to whittling out boats and a top, thereby providing occupation for the morrow, since it was one man's work to break Kaviak of spinning the one on the table during mealtime, and sailing the other in the drinking-water bucket at all times when older eyes weren't watching. The Colonel wrote up his journal, and read the midsummer magazines and Byron, in the face of Mac's "I do not like Byron's thought; I do not consider him healthy or instructive." In one of his more energetic moods the Colonel made a four-footed cricket for Kaviak, who preferred it to the high stool, and always sat on it except at meals.
Once in a while, when for hours no word had been spoken except some broken reference to a royal flush or a jack-pot, or O'Flynn had said, "Bedad! I'll go it alone," or Potts had inquired anxiously, "Got the joker? Guess I'm euchred, then," the Boy in desperation would catch up Kaviak, balance the child on his head, or execute some other gymnastic, soothing the solemn little heathen's ruffled feelings, afterwards, by crooning out a monotonous plantation song. It was that kind of addition to the general gloom that, at first, would fire O'Flynn to raise his own spirits, at least, by roaring out an Irish ditty. But this was seldomer as time went on. Even Jimmie's brogue suffered, and grew less robust.
In a depressed sort of way Mac was openly teaching Kaviak his letters, and surreptitiously, down in the Little Cabin, his prayers. He was very angry when Potts and O'Flynn eavesdropped and roared at Kaviak's struggles with "Ow Farva." In fact, Kaviak did not shine as a student of civilisation, though that told less against him with O'Flynn, than the fact that he wasn't "jolly and jump about, like white children." Moreover, Jimmie, swore there was something "bogey" about the boy's intermittent knowledge of English. Often for days he would utter nothing but "Farva" or "Maw" when he wanted his plate replenished, then suddenly he would say something that nobody could remember having taught him or even said in his presence.
It was not to be denied that Kaviak loved sugar mightily, and stole it when he could. Mac lectured him and slapped his minute yellow hands, and Kaviak stole it all the same. When he was bad—that is, when he had eaten his daily fill of the camp's scanty store (in such a little place it was not easy to hide from such a hunter as Kaviak)—he was taken down to the Little Cabin, smacked, and made to say "Ow Farva." Nobody could discover that he minded much, though he learnt to try to shorten the ceremony by saying "I solly" all the way to the cabin.
As a rule he was strangely undemonstrative; but in his own grave little fashion he conducted life with no small intelligence, and learned, with an almost uncanny quickness, each man's uses from the Kaviak point of view. The only person he wasn't sworn friends with was the handy-man, and there came to be a legend current in the camp, that Kaviak's first attempt at spontaneously stringing a sentence under that roof was, "Me got no use for Potts."
The best thing about Kaviak was that his was no craven soul. He was obliged to steal the sugar because he lived with white people who were bigger than he, and who always took it away when they caught him. But once the sugar was safe under his shirt, he owned up without the smallest hesitation, and took his smacking like a man. For the rest, he flourished, filled out, and got as fat as a seal, but never a whit less solemn.