"There are wide chinks in the rocky roof of every properly made Eskimo grave. This is not so that prowling sailor-men may reach in: it is so the spirits will have no trouble going in and out.
"You may still find lying in a grave a modern high-powered rifle ready for business, and good steel knives ready to carve those cooked seals down there in Heaven. I've even found pipes all ready filled with tobacco, to save the spirits the trouble of using their fingers to cram the bowl.
"Nowadays sealskins are exchanged for European goods, especially guns, and the Labrador Eskimo have lost much of the art of using their kayaks, the canoes into which they used to bind themselves securely, so that when they turned over in the water it did no harm. They would 'bob up serenely' and go right on, and in contests one man would pass his boat right over that of a rival without risk of accident.
"The Eskimo and the Indians were bitter enemies. The story of the last fight is, that the Eskimo had their fishing-huts on an island off the mouth of a river.
"Down-stream by night crept the Indians in their war-canoes. These they dragged ashore and hid in the rocks. Next morning the Eskimo came upon their enemies and at once attacked them.
"The Eskimo are little people as compared with the Indians. The Indians, their squaws fighting like bears beside them, drove the Eskimo back and back toward the sea.
"Stubbornly the 'huskies' contested every inch of the ground. Now and again they would crawl into holes among the rocks—but the Indians would find them there and cut them down without mercy, like animals trapped in their burrows.
"The Eskimo had their choice between the Indians and the sea. They would carry their children and even their wives down to the boats on their backs, and sometimes the frail skin-boats would turn over, and all the people in them would be drowned. If they succeeded in putting out to sea, they had no place to go: the Indians waiting ashore would get them whenever and wherever they landed.
"At last—there were only the Indians in their war-paint, dancing and howling on the beach—not an Eskimo was left to tell the tale."
A few days later, Dr. Grenfell came to Hopedale.