And so it turned out: the lad had a club foot. He was fond of telling his mother that he had a right foot and a wrong one. “The wrong one, mama,” said he, “is no good.” He was to be a cripple for life—utterly incapacitated: the fishing does not admit of club feet. But the doctor made arrangements for the child’s transportation to the St. Anthony hospital, where he could, without doubt be cured; and then hurried on.
The way now led through a district desperately impoverished—as much by ignorance and indolence as by anything else. At one settlement of tilts there were forty souls, “without a scrap of food or money,” who depended upon their neighbours—and the opening of navigation was still three months distant! In one tilt there lay what seemed to be a bundle of rags.
“And who is this?” the doctor asked.
It was a child. “The fair hair of a blue-eyed boy of about ten years disclosed itself,” says the doctor. “Stooping over him I attempted to turn his face towards me. It was drawn, with pain, and a moan escaped the poor little fellow’s lips. He had disease of the spine, with open sores in three places. He was stark naked, and he was starved to a skeleton. He gave me a bright smile before I left, but I confess to a shudder of horror at the thought that his lot might have been mine. Of course the ‘fear of pauperizing’ had to disappear before the claims of humanity. Yet, there, in the depth of winter,” the doctor asks, with infinite compassion, “would not a lethal draught be the kindest friend of that little one of Him that loved the children?”
For five days the doctor laboured in Conch, healing many of the folk, helping more; and at the end of that period the man who has suffered the hemorrhage was so far restored that with new dogs the doctor set out for Canada Bay, still travelling southward. There, as he says, “we had many interesting cases.” One of these involved an operation: that of “opening a knee-joint and removing a loose body,” with the result that a fisherman who had long been crippled was made quite well again. Then there came a second call from Conch. Seventeen men had come for the physician, willing to haul the komatik themselves, if no dogs were to be had. To this call the doctor immediately responded; and having treated patients at Conch and by the way, he set out upon the return journey to St. Anthony, fearing that his absence had already been unduly prolonged. And he had not gone far on the way before he fell in with another komatik, provided with a box, in which lay an old woman bound to St. Anthony hospital, in the care of her sons, to have her foot amputated.
Crossing Hare Bay, the doctor had a slight mishap—rather amusing, too, he thinks.
“One of my dogs fell through the ice,” says he. “There was a biting nor’west wind blowing, and the temperature was ten degrees below zero. When we were one mile from the land, I got off to run and try the ice. It suddenly gave way, and in I fell. It did not take me long to get out, for I have had some little experience, and the best advice sounds odd: it is ‘keep cool.’ But the nearest house being at least ten miles, it meant, then, almost one’s life to have no dry clothing. Fortunately, I had. The driver at once galloped the dogs back to the woods we had left, and I had as hard a mile’s running as ever I had; for my clothing was growing to resemble the armour of an ancient knight more and more, every yard, and though in my youth I was accustomed to break the ice to bathe if necessary, I never tried running a race in a coat of mail. By the time I arrived at the trees and got out of the wind, my driver had a rubber poncho spread on the snow under a snug spruce thicket; and I was soon as dry and a great deal warmer than before.”
At St. Anthony, the woman’s foot was amputated; and in two days the patient was talking of “getting up.” Meantime, a komatik had arrived in haste from a point on the northwest coast—a settlement one hundred and twenty miles distant. The doctor was needed there—and the doctor went!