Tale XLVI: An Eskimo Guide in the Barren Lands
Many years ago, on one of my first trips to the North, I once asked a white man what impression the Barren Lands had made upon him the first time he saw them in the winter. The man was one of the toughest specimens of a trapper one could ever hope to meet anywhere. He had roamed north of the trees for twenty years. He was illiterate, coarse and hardened to an unbelievable extent by the life he had led, but he had a kind of passionate love for the desolate country he knew so well.
He looked at me in a startled way, scratched his head and pondered.
“That’s a pretty hard thing to say,” he answered, “for I have no education. I guess a city guy could, if ever he was able to get there. When I reached the Barrens for the first time, I gave them one good look from the top of a hill. The only thing I remember thinking to myself was—Hell! What’s the use of swearing now?”
Several years later I was travelling in the same country in the heart of winter, and I thought of what my friend the trapper had told me. No other words could have described better what I felt at that moment. The cold was intense. The wind blew in savage gusts, lashing the snow in a stinging, powdery smother. Nothing in sight but rolling hills of glaring ice, with a few bare boulders showing their dark heads above the white desert. Nothing to break the awful monotony of that God forsaken country. Not a tree. Not even a shrub. Not a sign of animal life. Not a track.
In winter everything goes south—the birds, the wolves, the foxes, even the caribou. White men alone in their restlessness venture northward.
“The more fools are they,” I reflected bitterly as I plodded behind my sleigh in the teeth of the gale.
Since dawn we had fought our way, mile by mile, across those everlasting hills. I say “we”, for I had a companion and a guide, an Eskimo who drove his own team of dogs while I looked after my own. Unable to understand one another, except by signs, we made a strange pair struggling through the wilderness.
After the noon meal, the native iced the runners of my sleigh then motioned to me to go on, pointing the direction towards a high hill which one could dimly see on the horizon. Meanwhile, he proceeded to ice his own runners in the usual leisurely manner of all Eskimos to whom time, weather and hardship mean nothing.