HEARTY AT EIGHTY.
AN ESKIMO GRANDMOTHER.
The Eskimo as hunter is the angle from which hunters, trappers, and fur merchants, view these children of the Northland. The missionary sees in them children to be taught; the ordinary voyager merely a new and interesting facet of life—men and women, masters of the secret of living under conditions under which the probabilities are the voyager himself would come a cropper. They fire the imagination for the same reasons as do the children of the Desert—an interesting peculiar people wholly masters of interesting peculiar circumstances.
Some of the features of Eskimo coastal life are portrayed in the pelts brought in to swell the large collections at the several Hudson’s Bay Company’s posts, and in the evidences of “native art” as shown in ivory and wood carvings brought down to sell to the ship.
These latter articles are of interest from two points of view. They were taken from life and so, have pictorial and story value—little ivory komatiks or sledges drawn by dogs in harness and little wooden dolls with typical Eskimo features of old man or woman dressed in sealskin, cut in the same model always in vogue with these people; the men with trousers and short middy, the women in trousers and middy, short in front but often with a sort of longer rounded effect at the back. These vendors to the ship display in addition seal-skin port-monies for women and tobacco-pouches for men, but these are less interesting because the idea is imitative, caught from things of similar intent in the hand of voyagers from the south and civilization.
Eskimo dogs are not seen to advantage in summer. Only a few appear at each outport, more at some than at others. But under the boardwalk, climbing to the post office, a half dozen roly-poly puppies will snarl and snap under your feet like little wolves. And these “miniatures” of the pack—away at this season on some island out of harm’s way and busy foraging for a scant support to life among fishheads cast up by the incoming fishboat—are merely little point-fingers of the road of the great untamed that stretches from here to Hudson’s Bay.
Except in the neighbourhood of the Hudson’s Bay Posts and the Moravian Missionary settlements, evidences of the native are comparatively few. The many outports of this rugged coast are posts held firmly in the strong capable hand of Newfoundland. It is said that thirty thousand Newfoundlanders yearly fish “The Labrador”. And romance lies in the wake of this yearly pilgrimage to the Northern Shrine of Cod.
As the landing mailboat rounds the barren headlands, vistas of schooners and fishboats stretch before, lying at anchor in the harbour or “tickle”. And if it be Sunday, as it is sure to be if the schooners are in port, a group of men and women are at the water’s edge to pick up news that the boat brings, or eagerly await at the Post Office the letter from home.