The natives will not dress any deer skins until the snow comes, "so that game will be plenty" this winter. I am at work upon a small vocabulary of the Eskimo language, and already have two hundred words. The language has many guttural sounds, and is hard to express with letters, but I am learning it rapidly, and getting the words written as accurately as possible under difficulties.
One of the Indian boys, Lyabukh, is very bright, and understands what I want. He is learning English very fast.
Come to Church.
Our preacher holds services regularly every Sunday, and we go out to gather in all the Indians of the village and the white men in the vicinity. Four parties of three white men each, have put up winter quarters within a mile of us, so we have quite a community. Besides these, there are some twenty prospectors six miles below us and five above us. All have built snug winter cabins. About a mile above us, back in the woods, twenty Eskimos have established their village for the winter, and built their dug-outs, or igloos. There is seldom an hour in the day when two or more natives are not in our cabin, and, with a little encouragement, such as C. C, with his missionary instincts, gives them, they have become very persistent visitors.
Last Sunday services were largely attended, there being fifteen natives, and ten of our white neighbors. It was proposed, and unanimously carried, that a church be constructed by this community. So Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday over a dozen men were at work on the new chapel, which is located back in a sheltered place in the woods. It is now finished except the fireplace, and will serve as a church, school-room, and lecture-room or town hall.
Several of us are going to start a school for the Eskimo children in the neighborhood. We have seven months before us to occupy in some manner, and why not this? It would be monotonous to be continuously biting off northern zephyrs, and pulling the threads out of a tangled beard, and rubbing one's ears, and eating baking-powder biscuit; biscuit that are none of your light, fluffy things that have no backbone to them, but something that will stay with you on a hunt or a tramp with the temperature below the counting mark. Then there are the nice fat sides of bacon carefully preserved—"the white man's buffalo meat," as the Sioux Indians used to call it. We have ordinary fried bacon, and hashed bacon, and pork chops. When it is dreadfully cold and it doesn't slice readily, we chop it up with the axe—and then it is we have pork chops!
For variety's sake, if for nothing else, we would all vote the "school." Our life on the Kowak will not be a sealed book never to be read again when once the springtime lays it away on the shelf. We shall take it down and peruse it and possibly make marginal entries in it when we are too old to do anything else. Sitting in the chimney corner toothless, and feeble of gait, it will give us pleasure to remember the "school" in the woods, on the banks of the mighty Kowak.
CHAPTER VII.
O