"1837, November 3. Strong northwest wind with drift and cold. About one o'clock of last night the Aurora had a most unusual appearance, seemingly black in place of the white commonly observed and forming an arch from east to west, consisting of five streaks, here and there broken off."

"1827, November 5. Blacksmith making iron runners for our traineaux from old gun-barrels."

"1837, November 30. This being the anniversary of the Tutelar Saint of Scotland, we had in addition to our usual dinner a roasted swan and a moose-nose, a rice pudding, a cranberry tart, and a glass of wine."

"1837, December 1. I was obliged to give four pounds of dried meat to the dogs for there are some that are almost dead and they et all the windows of the Forge."

"1837, December 2. Three of the Fort women fell into a fit of insanity and kept all of the men at the Fort to hold them and prevent them devouring themselves."

December 25. Thermometer 35 below the cypher this morning, this being Christmas no labour done. Wind N.W."

"1838, January 1. The morning was ushered in by a salute fired by our people at the windows and doors, after which they came to wish us a Happy New Year—and in return, in conformity to the custom of the country they were treated, the men with half a glass of brandy each, and the women with a kiss, and the whole of them with as many cakes as they choose to take and some raisins. One of our gentlemen who had a bottle of shrub treated them to a glass, and after some chit-chat conversation they retired, firing a salute on going out. In the evening they played at Blind-man's-buff, concluding the fete by a supper in the Hall. I also gave each of the men a fathom of twist tobacco and a clay pipe."



CHAPTER XI

FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

"With souls grown clear In this sweet atmosphere, With influences serene, Our blood and brain washed clean, We've idled down the breast Of broadening tides."

—Chas. G.D. Roberts.

About ten o'clock on the evening of July loth, in broad daylight, we push out from Fort Simpson, with the whole population, white, red, and parti-coloured, on the banks to bid us good-bye. We have seen present-day Simpson and opened for a little way the volume of the past. We try to imagine what it is like in winter-time, and a picture pushed into our hands at parting gives us another viewpoint, showing the hamlet photographed by the light of the Aurora. As we leave Fort Simpson, the Mackenzie's channel is a mile wide and it increases in width as we proceed. For about seventy-five miles the course of the river is due northwest, running four miles an hour. The banks look low, but when the pilot takes us close in to shore, we see that it is the size of the river which has cheated our eyes, and the cliffs that seemed so low-lying will measure two hundred feet or over. At the Great Bend we impinge against two peaks, Mt. Camsell and Mt. Stand Alone, and here the Nahanni joins the Mackenzie. The great river takes a due north course for another thirty miles, and the Willow River flows in from the east.



At this point the Mackenzie enters the Rockies, this great spinal mountain-chain of North America breaking into parallel ranges to allow the mighty flood to flow between. We feel, as the boatman did on Lake Athabasca, that a day is as long as you can go without stopping. A ladder takes us to a seat by the side of Tenny Gouley in the pilot-house, who merely drops the window to give us an unobstructed view, and says nothing. Tenny Gouley is one of the rare people who understand. Talk of civilising these half-breeds of the North! They have that gift of repose which we know nothing of, which we may hope to attain after we have lived through automobiles and air-ships and when many incarnations will have allayed the fever of that unrest which we so blatantly dub "progress."

It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence we intrude. Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.

Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded, and of its treasures the world knows naught! They await man's development and acceptance—banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and unguessed. Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into its delta channels. Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the Mackenzie, practically nothing is known. There remain in these streams hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to the inconnu and the Indian.

It is one hundred and twenty years since Mackenzie descended this stream to its mouth, "discovering" a river along whose shores centuries before had smoked the watch-fires and risen the tepees of an anterior race, wanderers from Asia, who here, guiltless alike of onlooker or chronicler, lived and loved and worked out their drama of life. Age follows age, a new generation is evolved in the new habitat, and in time these once-migrants from Asia are dubbed "the red men" and "the American Indian."

We watch out the night with Tenny Gouley. In the early morning, sharply turning a corner, we flush a mixed family of water-fowl—gulls in great variety, something that looks like a brant, and a loon with its uncanny laughter. Snipe are on every batture, and sand-pipers, with kingfishers and all the lesser waders. The boreal summer is short and if broods are to be raised there is no time to waste. A riot of blossoms fringes the banks—the uplifted magenta torches of the fireweed, tufts of vivid golden-rod, the pink petals of the rose, and a clustering carpet of moss dotted with the dead white of the dwarf cornel. Now and again a splash breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.

Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly south to kinder skies, the inconnu hurry northward seeking the sea. Out of the sky comes the snow, the half-breed's "Le convert du bon Dieu," silent, soft, and all-covering. The coat of fox and rabbit and ptarmigan whitens, too. It is the coming of stern winter. Wandering Dog-Rib, Slavi, and Loucheux, lone trapper, the people of each isolated fur-post, must alike take warning. God pity man or beast who enters the six months of a Mackenzie winter unfortified by caches of food or unwitting of shelter.

According to Tenny Gouley there are but two seasons in this country: the ice season and the mosquito season. He likes winter best. As he holds the wheel in those clever hands of his, we fill and light his pipe for him, and half a dozen of his illuminating phrases give us a clear-cut etching of the winter story. From the lowest form of life to the highest it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great hunter, man.

In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. The storm spoke not to him of Divine wrath or an outraged Deity. The wind was the voice of God, but it assured the heathen Slavi of protection and power—the Gitchi Manitou coming out of the all-whiteness to talk with his children.

Spring up here is but a flutter of invisible garments; even when one is saying "Spring," full-blown summer is hot afoot. In high noon, in the open places, pools of water form in the ice. With glee is hailed the honk of the first wild goose, the coats of ptarmigan and rabbit thin and darken. There is water on the trail of the kit-fox. The subsidiary streams that feed the Mackenzie fill their banks and flush the rotting ice. With a crash, the drift-logs, with pan-ice and floating islands and all the gathered debris, roll headlong to the frozen ocean.

Do we wonder that Indians worship the great forces of Nature? Gloomy and wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent people along her banks. In this vast land men speak not of bread as the staff of life; their unvoiced prayer is, "Give us our fish in due season." From the waters of this river, since man was, have the Indians drawn and dipped and seined their sustenance—inconnu, jack-fish, grayling, white-fish, and loche. The wide bosom of the Mackenzie, in winter's ice or summer's spate, forever has been the people's highway—a trail worn smooth by sled-runner and moccasin in the ice-season, melting its breast in the spring-time to open a way to the questing bow of the birch-bark.

Along these banks, forgotten tepee-poles, deserted fish-stage, and lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph, self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, if we bring the keen eye and listening ear. Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife, Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand despoiled the cache of another. A man's word was his bond, and a promise was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter.

About noon we reach Fort Wrigley, and are boarded by priests and Indians all interested in the new steamer and impressed with its size. One asks if it is a boat or an island, and another declares it is "just like a town." Fort Wrigley is an inconspicuous post with a dreary enough record of hunger and hardship. We find it rich in flowers and will always remember it as the one place in the North in which we gathered the fringed gentian (Gentiana crinata) with its lance-shaped leaves, delicately-fringed corollas, and deep violet blue. The fringed gentian is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in a great many localities, and it gives us pleased surprise to find it far up in latitude 63 deg.. Purple asters are here, too, and the heart-shaped seed-pods of shepherd's-purse or mother's-heart. Wrigley adds to our collection the green-penciled flowers of the grass of Parnassus, with wild flax, and both pink and purple columbines already forming seed.

Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche Trempe-l'eau or "The Rock by the Riverside," an outcrop of Devonian limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above the river. We come into view of the "boucans" or beds of lignite coal which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in 1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires. At this point of his journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back, for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would come upon him before the period of his return. He would also encounter monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings. They added that there were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their eyes. These Indians told Mackenzie of "small white buffalo" which they hunted to the westward. Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the Sass-sei-yeuneh or "Foolish Bear" of the Slavis.



It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes into the Mackenzie. It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been in more comfortable places at midnight. However, after running with the current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock. This is a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.

The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole of its hundred-mile course. Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water, probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave Lake. Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and fifty miles. The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are surprised to learn that the lake remains open at the outlet until very late in the autumn and sometimes throughout the whole winter.

March sees the greatest depth of snow at Great Bear Lake, probably three feet. In mid-April the thaws begin, and by May-day arrive the earlier water-fowl. By the end of May the herbaceous plants begin to leaf, frogs are heard, and there is bright light at midnight. The end of July brings blueberries, and at this time stars are visible at midnight. September is ushered in by flurries of snow, and by the tenth of October the last of the wild-fowl depart; but it is often Christmas Day before the centre of the lake freezes over.

When we awake it is Sunday, July 12th, Orangeman's Day, with no one going round with a chip on his shoulder, and nobody to whistle "Boyne Water." The wind falling, the steamer is turned and we bear away across the river to Fort Norman, leaving the shelter of Bear Rock, the "Nest of the Wind" of the Indian. Tradition and superstition hang round this great butte, with its heart of coloured gypsum several hundred feet in thickness, and on its face we plainly see the three beaver-skins that the Great Spirit, "in the beginning," spread out there to dry. We find Fort Norman a beautiful place in the sunshine of this Sunday morning, the souls of its scanty populace well looked after by Roman and Protestant missionary. Bishop Breynat is expected on the mission boat coming up the river, and all is excitement among the sheep belonging to his particular flock. The parson of the other fold is in his library, and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas, beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by tennis and pink-teas.



Seldom have we seen a more beautiful vista than the up-climbing path leading from the shore to the Roman chapel at the head of the hill. It is bordered by flaming fireweed and lined with the eager faces of children dressed in their Sunday best, ready for morning mass and awaiting the blessing of their Bishop. Wherever the willow-herb flourishes there a Guadet is serving The Company. One was in charge at lonely Wrigley, and we find his brother here.

Leaving Norman before church-time, we travel on, the glory of the peerless day reflected in the face of every one on board. We float between two spurs of the Rockies, and about eight in the evening pass Roche Carcajou, looking in vain for the wolverine the name calls for. The Indians would seem to be strangely inconsistent in this connection. If there is one animal they fear it is the carcajou, and with him they have an old, old pact: the Indian on his side promises never to shoot a wolverine, and that cunning thief agrees to leave unmolested the cache of the Red man. While this bargain still holds, since the day when ammunition first came into the country no Indian has passed this rocky replica of the carcajou without firing a shot at the face of the cliff.

It is an hour before midnight when we reach one of the two greatest spectaculars of our whole six months' journeying,—the Ramparts. The great river which has been running at a width of several miles, here narrows to five hundred yards, and for a distance of five or six miles forces its flow between perpendicular walls of limestone three hundred feet high. Between the cliffs, scarped by Nature into turrets, towers, and castellated summits, the great Mackenzie, "turned on edge," flows, maintaining a steady rate of four or five miles an hour. The depth of the water equals the visible height of the palisaded walls. In spring, the ice jams the stupendous current. The dammed-up water once lifted a skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the cliffs above.

As we pass in silence we can but look and feel. One day a Canadian artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic. Awed and uplifted, our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of this Arctic night repays the whole summer's travel. The setting of the picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn and without twilight rises from flowing river to starless heavens, and envelopes the earth as with a garment,—the light that never was on sea or land. We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to pass the portal into the Arctic World.



A hundred yards from the entrance to the Ramparts, a group of Indians has found foothold at the base of the escarpment. They have been waiting for three days to signal our arrival, and as they catch sight of the big steamer they cry out their greeting and fire a volley from their old-fashioned rifles. The sound reverberates from rock to rock, ricochets, and is carried on to waiting Indians on the other side lower down. They repeat the salute, and others take it up. Signals are flashed from each little camp, the lights being repeated in the dancing river; and so it is by salvos of musketry and answering watch-fires that, at midnight in broad daylight, we reach Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle.

The Arctic Circle! When we used to sit on uneasy school-benches and say our "joggafy" lesson, what did that term spell for us? Icebergs, polar bears, and the snows of eternal winter. Nine-tenths of the people in America to-day share the same idea, and so far as they think of the Arctic Circle at all, think of it as a forbidding place, a frozen silence where human beings seldom penetrate. What did we find there? Approaching the shore, we stand in the bow with the pilot and his daughter, whose name suggests the Stone Age,—Mrs. Pierre la Hache. Tenny wears his "other clothes" and a resplendent l'Assumption belt, for this is his home. "It looks like a swan on the water," he says, when the first white houses come into view. "You like it, do you not?" "Like it? Good Hope is God's Country!" There is no place like home, even when it is the Arctic Circle!

The populace look down upon us from the high bank, every wiggle of the dogs' tails indicating the general impatience at the time it takes the big boat to make a landing. Down the steps comes a stately figure, Mr. C.P. Gaudet, the head and brains of Good Hope. Of the two thousand servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, this is the man who has the greatest number of years of active service to his credit. Mr. Gaudet has continuously served The Company for fifty-seven years, and his ambition is to put in three years more. The Company gives its employes a pension after thirty years' service, and this veteran of Good Hope surely deserves two pensions. The steps are almost precipitous, but the old gentleman insists upon coming down to present in person his report to his superior officer. Then the two climb up the bank together, the younger man giving a strong arm to the older. We follow, and half-way up the two figures stop, ostensibly for Mr. Gaudet to point out to Mr. Brabant the view up river. We suspect the halt is to allow the Fort Hope Factor to get breath, for the sky-line stairway is hard on asthma.

Reaching the top, we find the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses, and we can scarcely make our way through the sea of welcoming Indians. Old people grasp our hands as if we were life-time friends just back from a far journey. Young men greet us as long-lost chums, the women call to the children, and there seems to be a reception committee to rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden: it is hand-shaking gone mad. We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in all the wide world.

We meet Mrs. Gaudet, a dear old lady with a black cap, the pinkest of pink cheeks, and the kind of smile that brings a choky feeling into your throat and makes you think of your mother. She gives us home-made wine and galettes, and as we smell the mignonette flowering in the window-ledge and look around the walls of the "homey" room we wonder if this really can be the "Arctic Circle, 23-1/2 deg. from the North Pole, which marks the distance that the sun's rays," etc., etc., as the little geographies so blithely used to state. On the walls are the Sunday School tickets that the young Gaudets, now grey-haired men and women, earned by reciting the Catechism when they were little boys and girls—the same old tickets that flourish in the latitudes below. Here a pink Prodigal feeds sky-blue swine in a saffron landscape, and off there a little old lady in a basque leads a boy in gaiters and a bell-crowned hat down a shiny road. They seem to be going on a picnic, and the legend runs,—"Hagar and Ishmael her son into the desert led, with water in a bottle and a little loaf of bread."

Thirty years ago when Miss Gaudet was a little girl she got her first Scripture lesson from an R.C. Sister, the story of our old Mother in the first garden. One Sunday was review day, and this question arose: "And how did God punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience?" Quick came the girlie's reply, "They had to leave The Company's service!"

Mrs. Gaudet thinks people rush very much nowadays. "We get a mail every year without fail, and sometimes there is a second mail." This is to her the height of modernism. That second mail is an interesting one. A letter written in Montreal in winter and addressed to Fort Good Hope crosses Canada by the C.P.R. to Vancouver, by coastwise steamer it travels north and reaches the Yukon. Then some plucky constable of the Mounted Police makes a winter patrol and takes the precious mail-bags by dog-sled across an unmarked map to Fort Macpherson on Peel River. Thence the Montreal-written letter is carried by Indian runner south to Good Hope on the Arctic Circle.

We love to talk with Mrs. Gaudet, she is so dear. Mother-love and devotion to The Company,—these are the two key-notes of her character. Looking back through the years, she tells of a visit she made "outside" to Montreal when she was a young mother—it was just fifty years ago,—measles attacked her three babies and within a week they all died, "Le bon Dieu prit les tous, mes trois jolis enfants!" Some years after this at Macpherson an Eskimo woman stole another of her babies, snatching it from a swing in the fort yard, and not yielding it up until it was torn from her by force.

We wander out into the midnight daylight where with dogs and Indians the whole settlement is still a stirred-up ant-hill. Splendid vegetable gardens are in evidence here,—potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages. Should we reach the North Pole itself we would expect there a Hudson's Bay fort, its Old World courtesy and its potato-patch. As we pass the store of the "free-trader," he says, "Yes, Mrs. Gaudet is a sweet woman, kindly, and dear, but she doesn't approve of me. She makes a point of not seeing me as she passes here twice a day on her way to church."

"Why?" we ask, much surprised.

"Oh," with a laugh, "you see, I sort of trade in opposition to the H.B. Company, and a fellow who would do this comes mighty near having horns and a tail!"

We step into the "Little Church of the Open Door," and sit down and think. The quaint altar and pictures, the hand-carved chairs, and the mural decorations all point to the patient work of priests. We see across the lane the home of the R.C. clergy, looking like a transplanted Swiss chalet and carrying on each door-lintel the name of a saint,—St. Matthew, St. Bartholomew, St. John. From the shrubbery outside wafts in the sweet old-world perfume of wild-roses. Our thoughts will often drift back to this restful little sanctuary, "Our Lady of Good Hope," the mission founded here in the year 1859 by M. Henri Grollier, R.C. missionary priest of Montpelier.



CHAPTER XII

ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO

"Behold, I sing a pagan song of old, And out of my full heart, Hold forth my hands that so I would enfold The Infinite thou art. What matter all the creeds that come and go, The many gods of men? My blood outcasts them from its joyous flow."

—A Pagan Hymn.

"The Eskimo is a short, squat, dirty man who lives on blubber," said text-books we had been weaned on, and this was the man we looked for. We didn't find him.

It was at Arctic Red River, one hundred and ninety miles of river-travel since we cut the Polar Circle, that we came upon our first Eskimo, the true class-conscious Socialist of Karl Marx, the one man without a master on the American continent. A little band of Kogmollycs they were, men, women, and kiddies, who had come in to trade silver-fox skins for tobacco and tea at the Post of the Hudson's Bay Company.

On the rocks they sat, waiting for the new steamer to make her landing, and much excited were they over the iron bowels of this puffing kayak of the white men. An Eskimo generally lets you know what he thinks, and this is a basic difference between him and the Indian. An Indian is always trying to impress you with his importance; he thinks about his dignity all day and dreams of it at night. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a man who commands your respect the moment you look at him, and yet he is withal the frankest of mortals, affable, joyous, fairly effervescing with good-humour. His attitude toward the world is that of a little half-Swiss, half-Chinese baby friend of mine who, in an ecstacy of good-will when she saw her first Christmas-tree, clutched me tightly round the neck with, "Everybody are my friend."

One of the Kogmollycs, rejoicing in the name of Wilfrid Laurier, strode on deck with the swing of a cavalryman and signified his willingness to trade. Loading down my hunting-coat with pictures, pipes, tobacco, looking-glasses, needles, files, knives, I climbed over the cliffs with him to his hut. Down on the floor we sat. Wilfrid put his treasures between his knees before him, I sat opposite, and the barter began. "What for this fellow, huh?" and he held up a piece of carved ivory, a little triangular mincing-knife, a fur mat that his wife had made, or the skin of a baby-seal. The first thing he asked for was scented soap, the ring that I was wearing, and my porcupine-quill hat-band which looked good to him; every exchange was accompanied with smiles, each bargain sealed with a handshake.

Wilfrid Laurier is doing his part toward bridging the old chasm of animosity existing between the Eskimo and their next-door neighbours, the Loucheux Indians to the South. Wilfrid, in taking to himself a Loucheux woman to wife, has done what the Seventh Henry of England did when he married Elizabeth of York. Wilfrid's son and heir holds the same place in Northern history as did Henry VIII, who united in himself the claims of the rival Roses of York and Lancaster.



Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko asked us into her hut, where we reclined on fur mats while the whole family, wreathed in smiles, tumbled over themselves to do us honour. One by one they danced for us, stopping to tell their names and to ask ours. "Major Jabussy," "Missa Blown," they got the names all right but applied them promiscuously, and then went into roars of laughter at their blunder. The merriment was infectious. Let no one waste further sympathy over the poor benighted Eskimo of this Canadian North. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is, with perhaps the one exception of an Arab I fraternized with in Chicago at the World's Fair, the most splendid specimen of physical manhood I have ever seen; in physique he stood out in splendid contrast to the Europeans and Americans who were investigating him and his. Arrow-straight and six feet tall, mark him as he swings along the strand. His is the carriage and bearing of the high-bred Tartar. This man has "arrived"; he has an air of assuredness that in the drawing-rooms "Outside" you seldom see.

The Eskimo of the Arctic foreshore are of two tribes: the Kogmollycs to the east of the Mackenzie mouth, the Nunatalmutes, Dwellers in the Hills, or Deermen, originally from the interior to the West, but now for the great part making their home at Herschel Island, eighty miles from the Mackenzie delta, attracted there by the opportunity of working for the American whalers.

One of the striking figures of the North is Oo-vai-oo-ak, headman of the Kogmollycs, living in dignified happiness with his children and his two wives. This second wife was the cause of much comment among us. How did she happen? It was this way. Mr. Oo-vai-oo-ak married Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder when they were both young. Children were born to them, the big seal was plenty, succulent beluga-steaks graced the board, and the years followed one another as smoothly as glacial drift or the strip of walrus-blubber that the last baby drops down its red gullet as a plummet sinks in a well.

One day after a big hunt, as Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak placed before her lord the matutinal mess of whale-skin boiled to that particular rubber-boot consistency which was his taste, she said, "I'm not as young as I was, you entertain much, the household cares are heavy, I'd like you to get another wife to help me with the work." Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak chewed upon the whale-skin and the suggestion of his spouse. Out in his kayak, dodging the icebergs, he turned it over in his mind for half a day; and as the outcome of his cogitations Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger, a rollicking and comely maiden, joined the family circle.

How does it work out? For ten days I sat round their hospitable fire trying hard for the viewpoint of each member of this Farthest North family of fellow-Canadians. I have lived under many roof-trees, but never have I seen a more harmonious family, nor a menage of nicer adjustment. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder, full of the mellow juice of life, waggish and keen, "quick at the uptak'," as the Scotch say, presides over her household with dignity, never for a moment relaxing her hold on the situation. Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak wisely leaves the interior economy of the household in the hands of the women. He is the quiet, dignified gentleman with an easy manner that courtiers and plenipotentiaries extraordinary might envy. His six feet two inches of height, magnificent physique and superb carriage would mark him out as a man of distinction at any race-course, polo-meet, or political reception where men of the world forgather.

Observing the small, strong, exquisitely-formed hands and feet of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, the almost-white complexions dashed with ruddy scarlet, the easy grace that even the children have, and, above all, the simple dignity which compels respect, one recognizes here an ancestry harking back to Old World culture and distinction.



How does the young wife fit in? No suffragette need break a lance for her, demanding a ballot, dower-rights, and the rest of it. She is happy and busy. All day long she sings and laughs as she prepares the family fish and feast of fat things, she pays deference to her co-wife, romps with the children, and expands like an anemone under the ardent smile of her lord. When the grave question was under discussion regarding the exchange of her pendant bead-and-shell ear-rings for a pair we had brought from the shops of the white men, the two spouses discussed the matter in all its phases earnestly together, as chummy as two school-girls.

The Oo-vai-oo-ak family was a puzzle to the on-lookers, who sought in vain for some one of the three contracting parties to pity. They were all so abundantly happy, each in his or her own way, that Walking Delegate could find no crack here for the opening wedge of discord. If no one is to be pitied, then surely for this new departure in matrimony there must be some one for the virtuous to blame. But why?

Kipling declares, "There's never a law of God or man runs north of fifty-three." The Eskimo has worked out his life-problem independent quite from the so-called civilisations evolved to the south of him. He is his own man.

In the rest of America and in Europe we have formulated a rule of "One man, One wife," allowing an elasticity of the rule in Chicago and elsewhere, so that it may read, "One man, one wife at a time." Are we so sure of results that we are in a position to force our rule upon the Eskimo?

Following the animals that God has ordained shall be their daily bread, in little communal bands they thread the silent places of the North. On the Arctic foreshore we have a people different to all other peoples; here is no inherited wealth, no accumulation of property. A man's skill as a hunter determines his ability to support others, the pursuit of seal is the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now, the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and provide for one wife and three children, leaving on the community a floating sisterhood of unattached females, or is it more sane and generous for the Northland Nimrod to marry as many wives as he can comfortably support, and raise up olive-branches to save from extermination the men of the Kogmollycs, the honourable people of the Nunatalmutes?

The fact that the women prefer a vulgar-fraction of a man, an Eskimo equity in connubial bliss, to spearing walrus on their own account is a significant factor in the problem. And before we piously condemn either the lord or the lady in the case, it is well that we adjust our judgment to the latitude of 68 deg. North and take cognizance of the fact that no seductive "Want Columns" in the daily press here offer a niche whereby unappropriated spinsters may become self-supporting wage-earners as chaste typewriters, school-teachers, Marcel-wavers, or manicurists. To keep the vital spark aglow you must kill walrus and seal in your own proper person or by proxy, for no other talent of body or grace of mind is convertible into that sustaining meat and heating blubber which all must have in order to live.

Economically, then, a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a man to hunt for her. Ethically, it works out beautifully, for each partner to the hymeneal bargain is fat and full of content, happiness fairly oozing out of every oily pore. And is not happiness the goal of human endeavour, whether a man seeks it amid the electric lights, subtle perfumes, and dreamy waltz-music of a New York ballroom, or finds it seated with his community wives on a hummock of ice under the Aurora?

I wouldn't like to picture our cousin the Eskimo woman as being always content with a circulating decimal of a husband instead of a whole unit, nor would such presentment be just. The shield, like most shields, has a reverse. Last winter, at the Mackenzie Delta, one Eskimo bride of seventeen took her fourth consecutive husband. She is dark but comely, but truth will not carry the analogy further. I have yet to see the Eskimo who is like a bunch of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Three winters ago, at Baillie Island, the three-times-widowed one had both her feet amputated as the result of exposure to cold.

In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes. The wedding breakfast consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat). The ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do's bungalow is ten by twelve, one needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as "odours of Edom and offerings Divine."

The festivities began to warm up about midnight. An old chap, with a retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance. His wife, a gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the air being confined to three notes. After each line came the chorus twice repeated,

"Ai, yea, yae! Yae, yae, ya—yae!"

Dancing was kept up to an early hour. Overcome by the air, respiratory and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride, pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.

By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America. The Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known but little of other bands than his own. Yet sometimes they met. There is an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty miles west of Herschel. For years this was a trading rendezvous for four peoples: the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo, and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of Barter Island. To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days brought their most precious medium of exchange,—a peculiar blue jade, one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins. And thereby hangs a tale. Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi's ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.

This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and merriment. In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and courtesies with their half-known kin. The barter consummated, these Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of delight. No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no red-hots nor "fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled and f-five a bag!", but the Arctic concomitants of these,—boiled beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that smells to high heaven. Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island. It is only the counters that are different.

Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the world forgot. The white men who reached the Eskimo land from the south were discoverers following to the sea the three great rivers that disembogue into the Polar Sea: the Mackenzie, Coppermine, Back or Great Fish. The first of these explorers was Samuel Hearne who, in 1771, followed the Coppermine to the Frozen Ocean. For the northern natives their first contact with white explorers was a disastrous one, for at Bloody Falls on the Coppermine Hearne's Indians set upon the only band of Eskimo they saw and almost exterminated them. Sir John Franklin in 1820 was more happy. He says, "The Eskimo danced and tossed their hands in the air to signify their desire for peace; they exhibited no hostile intention; our men saluted them by taking off their hats and making bows." Back, who explored the Back or Great Fish River in 1834, has this tribute of respect and appreciation. He says, "I called out 'Tima' (Peace), and putting their hands on their breasts they also called out 'Tima.' I adopted the John Bull fashion of shaking them each heartily by the hand; patting their breasts, I conveyed to them that the white man and the Eskimo were very good friends. They were good natured, and they understood the rights of property, for one of them having picked up a small piece of pemmican repeatedly asked my permission before he would eat it."

Through all these years, if we except the noble devotion of the Moravian missionaries on the northeast of Canada and the splendid Christianity of such men as Bishop Bompas who sought them from the south, no one visited the Eskimo from the outside with the purpose of doing him good, but rather with the idea of exploiting him. Yet, from the days of Sir John Franklin and Sir Alexander Mackenzie to the recent voyage of Amundsen, the spontaneous tribute of every man who has met them, talked with them, and received their hospitality is the same. The Eskimo is generous, and his word is worth its full face value. What we have done for the Eskimo is a minus quantity; what he has done for us is to point a splendid moral of integrity, manliness, and intrepid courage.

Indians beg and boast, the Eskimo does neither. With no formulated religion or set creed, he has a code of ethics which forbids him to turn the necessity of another to his own advantage. Amundsen's farewell to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, "Goodbye, my dear, dear friends. My best wish for you is that civilisation may never reach you."

The trite saying is that the Loucheux Indians forced the Eskimo north, "keeping them with patient faces turned toward the Pole." But the Eskimo has a better country than the Loucheux has, for it is less rigorous and it produces more food stuffs. The Loucheux at Fort Macpherson knows what it is to experience a temperature of 60 below Fahr., while at the coast it doesn't drop below 55.

The Eskimo has two fields in which to hunt food,—the land and the sea, with fish the great staple; and both fresh and salt-water fish are his, that in the mouths of the great rivers being better than what the Loucheux gets higher up. If the Eskimo wrote copy-book lines, the most insistent one would be, "Lose your matches, throw away your guns, but hang on to your fish-net."

Through the years there was bad blood and mutual distrust between Eskimo and Loucheux. The last pitched battle occurred in the 60's, when of the contestants only two Loucheux escaped and not one Eskimo was killed. The Hudson's Bay Company officer at the close of the fight called together the relatives of the slain Loucheux, upon whom rested the duty of revenge, and out of The Company's stores paid in trade-goods the blood-price of the slain. Since then both peoples have traded at Forts Macpherson and Arctic Red River, maintaining a sort of armed peace, but with no deeds of violence. The Loucheux Indian, his wives, his babies, and his slab-sided dogs suffer from starvation almost every winter. In the whole history of the Eskimo there is not an authenticated story of one of this people having starved to death. Once more we protest against misapplied sympathy. However it may have been in the past, the Eskimo stays on the coast to-day because it is to him "God's country" and not because any hostile Loucheux sends him there.

For the past twenty years the men on the American ships have employed the Eskimo to aid them in the whaling industry, picking up different bands all the way from Bering Sea eastward as they sail in from the Pacific, and depositing each group at their individual beaches as the ships take out their rich spoils of baleen and oil at the close of the season. The Eskimo has proven a valued aid to this industry; how has the intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the Eskimo?

Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of that number. The causes? White men's diseases: scarlet fever, consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling decrease. Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian, measles perhaps more than all. Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.

What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic, so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches. To the credit side of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.

The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the whaling-ships. Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its changed culture characteristics. But as a more far-reaching result of the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo mothers, and, for "floating fathers," marking their escutcheon with every nationality under the sun,—American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Portuguese, Lascar. This state of things startles one, as all miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is different from all others. In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one. There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo "wives" outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this. One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken "outside" by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior waterways south to some mission-school, Anglican or Roman. As a rule, the marriage-contract is "good for this season only," and the wife and children bid their quondam husband and father farewell, smiling at him with neither animosity nor reproach as the boats go out.

What is then the ice-widow's condition? Is she an outcast among her people? No, you must remember that neither the matrimonial standard of Pall-Mall nor Washington, D.C, obtains here. The trade-ticker of the erstwhile wife of the whaler ticks skyward in the hymeneal Lloyd's; she is much sought of her own people. Has she not gained in both kudos and capital? The knowledge which she must have acquired from the white man of whalers' ways of trading is supposed to be of monetary use to her second lord. Moreover, the tent, utensils, and cooking-kit which she shared with her spouse from the ships makes a substantial dower when she again essays Hymen's lottery.

Eskimo women are neither petulant nor morose. With the men they share that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a child which makes such a rare and winning mixture. In moving among the half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall below the standard of the thorough-bred natives. About the morals, the ethical, or mental standards, we venture no comparison, for heredity plays such strange tricks. The whole condition is formative, for the blending of races has been going on scarcely long enough for one to see and tabulate results. The influence of the mother will be longer applied and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in this is their hope. For years we have been repeating the trite, "The sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation;" it remained for Charles Dickens to ask, in his own inimitable way, if the virtues of the mothers do not occasionally descend in direct line.

We respect the Eskimo for many things: for his physical courage as he approaches the bear in single combat, for his uncomplaining endurance of hardships, for his unceasing industry, the cleverness of his handicraft, his unsullied integrity, sunny good-humour, and simple dignity. But, most of all, he claims my respect for the way he brings up his children. "A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure," is a pretty theory, but Charles Lamb reminds us that each child must stand on his own footing as an individual, and be liked or disliked accordingly. In the igloo and the tupik the child has his own accorded place and moves in and out of the home and about his occupations with that hard-to-describe air of assuredness that so distinguishes his father and mother.

The Eskimo child accepts himself as the equal of any created thing, but there is nothing blatant about him, nor is his independence obtrusive. He is born hardy, and lives hardy, trudging along on the march in his place beside the grown-ups. Each Eskimo man and woman is an independent entity, free to go where he pleases. There is no law, no tribunal, no power to limit or command him, but instinctively he observes the rule of doing as he would be done by, and he teaches his child the same Golden Rule. A boy or girl is never considered an encumbrance and is readily even eagerly adopted if his own parents die. The Eskimo child is ushered into the earthly arena with no flourish of trumpets, for his coming is but an incident of the journey if Fate has decreed that he should be born when the family is on the march. The hour's stop for the mid-day meal often sees a new little valiant soldier added to the ranks of the clan and starting his traverse of Arctic trails. If the baby is born while the family is in camp, mother and babe separate themselves from the rest of the family for a month, no one being allowed to look at, much less fuss over, the little stranger.

Naming an Eskimo baby is fraught with significance. If the last grown man who died in the band was one revered, one whose footsteps are worthy to be followed, the name of the departed clansman is given to the newborn child. The belief is that the spirit of the dead man hovers around the community and immediately upon the birth of the child takes possession, a re-incarnation in the baby-body. Withdrawing itself in twelve months' time, the spirit of the ghostly god-father lingers by to influence the character and destiny of the growing child.

We trace a well-known nursery rhyme to the igloo of the Eskimo. The summer-born baby dispenses with clothing for the first six months of its earthly pilgrimage, cuddling its little bare body close to its mother's back under her artikki, or upper garment, which has been made voluminous to accommodate him. But the husky babe who comes when King Wenceslaus looks out on the Feast of Stephen has his limbs popped into a bag of feathers before his mother takes him pick-a-back, or else he is wrapped in a robe of rabbit-skin. So we see that it was an Eskimo mother who first crooned in love and literalness,

"By-o, Baby Bunting, Daddy's gone a-hunting, To get a little rabbit-skin, To wrap his Baby Bunting in."

Mother-love is a platform upon which even ancestral enemies can meet. While I sat cross-legged (and, like cotton, absorbent) last summer enjoying the hospitality of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, to us entered a beautiful-faced Loucheux Indian mother with a pair of twins pendant,—rollicking chaps. The younger Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak dropped on the floor her lord's boot which she had been dutifully biting into shape and jumped up to greet her visitor. There was no mistaking that smile of hospitality. Snatching from the visitor one of her baby boys, the young hostess kissed and cried out to it with an abandon of maternal joy, the culminating point of which was feeding it from her own breast. Thus, in one instance at least, has the ancient feud of Loucheux and Eskimo died.

A baby Eskimo is nursed until it is two years old or older, and learns to smoke and to walk about the same time. The family pipe is laid upon the couch, and papa, mamma, and the children take a solacing whiff as the spirit moves them. These pipes are identical with those used by the Chinese, and hold but half a thimbleful of tobacco, the smoke being inhaled and swallowed with dreamy joy.

The hardihood of Eskimo children is scarcely believable. It is not unusual for children of six years to trudge uncomplainingly for twenty-five miles by the side of their elders; and we came to know a little seven-year old chap who was quite a duck-hunter, and who went out every day alone and seldom came back without at least two brace. At eleven years, with his watertight boots, spear in hand, and coil of line on his back, he takes up the Innuit man's burden, and does it with an air both determined and debonair. If you ask a mother if she does not think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam, and says, "The First Innuits [Eskimo] did so."

These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North, as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was neither Rugby nor "Soccer," but there seemed to be a good deal of tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball, down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft parts of his anatomy. "You're angry, now," said a Major of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. "No, sir," said the under dog, with difficulty protruding his head, "I never get mad when I play."

The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders. It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy. All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a row of "heathen" Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind, for the blows are no child's play. Think of what this self-inflicted discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball diamonds, and "sport" carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and out among the camps of the Eskimo,—"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control."



What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude imitations of their elders. And they play "house," and "ladies," and "visiting," just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas; but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up in her mother's long dresses.



When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in spring after the long six months' night, it is the pleased prerogative of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat's-cradle are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the anxiously-waiting Eskimo. The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game, help, too, to hasten its return. When the sun forgets you for six months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever. The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are finished and the new hunts not yet begun. "I'll eat my hat" is an empty threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.

At the Mackenzie delta last year, Roxi the Eskimo came in and told me this sad story. Six weeks before, a party of Eskimo had left Baillie Island with dogs for Kopuk. On their way they found a dead whale and cooked and ate of it; the next day they found another and again indulged. After travelling twenty-five miles, the whole party was taken violently ill, and six adults and two children died, leaving only one little girl alive. There for three days and four nights she remained, alone in the camp of the dead, until by the merest chance a young Eskimo, attending his line of traps from Toker Point, stumbled into the silent camp.

One can faintly glimpse at, but must utterly fail to grasp, what that little girlie suffered mentally. We picture her sleeping, sobbing, waiting in that snow-hut in the silences, surrounded by the still bodies of every one she loved on earth. The sequel of the story is as sad as its first chapter. The band of Eskimo to which the rescuer belonged went in their turn and ate of this stranded whale, with the result that A-von-tul and Ita-chi-uk, two youths of twenty or twenty-one, died, too, and with them a little four-year-old girl. The drift whale must have been poisoned either by ptomaine or by the remnants of the highly compressed tonite, the explosive used by the whale-hunters.



As we visit in friendly wise the Eskimo and their children, a feeling of loving admiration and appreciation tightens round our hearts. We had never heard a harsh word bestowed upon a child, no impatient or angry admonition. If a boy gives way to bursts of temper, and this is rare, he is gently taken to task, reproved, and reasoned with after the fit of passion is over. Certainly, without churches or teachers or schools, with no educational journals, and no Conventions of Teachers, with their wise papers on the training of "the child," the Eskimo children we saw were better behaved, more independent, gentler, and in the literal sense of the word, more truly "educated" than many of our children are. Instinctively you feel that here are boys and girls being trained admirably for the duties of life, a life that must be lived out in stern conditions.

Perchance, floating down on the Aurora, has come to the Eskimo a glint of the truth that has passed us by, the truth that God's own plan is the family plan, that there are life lessons to learn which, by the very nature of things, the parents alone can impart. Teaching children in the mass has its advantages, but it is the family after all and not the fifty children in a school grade which forms the unit of national greatness.



CHAPTER XIII

FORT MACPHERSON FOLK

"I have drunk the Sea's good wine, Was ever step so light as mine, Was ever heart so gay? O, thanks to thee, great Mother, thanks to thee, For this old joy renewed, For tightened sinew and clear blood imbued With sunlight and with sea."

—A Pagan Hymn.

On July 14th, shortly after we leave Arctic Red River, an open scow passes us, floating northward with the stream. It comes in close to the steamer, and we look down and see that every one of its seven occupants is sound asleep. In traversing the Mackenzie, there is no danger of running into ferry-boats or river-locks, if you strike the soft alluvial banks here the current will soon free you and on you go. The voyagers in the scow may sleep in peace.

At Point Separation, 67 deg. 37' N., the Mackenzie delta begins. Where the east and west branches diverge, the width of the river is fifty miles, the channel becoming one maze of islands, battures, and half-hidden sand-bars. The archipelago at the Arctic edge extends a full hundred miles east and west.

The two lob-sticks at Point Separation are full of historic interest. It was here, on the evening of July 3rd, 1826, that Sir John Franklin and Dr. Richardson parted, Franklin to trend west and Richardson east, in their mission of Arctic coastal exploration. Twenty-two years later, Richardson, this time concerned with the Plover Relief Expedition of the lost Franklin, again visited Point Separation. He records,

"July 30th, 1848, Point Separation. In compliance with my instructions, a case of pemmican was buried at this place. We dug a pit at a distance of ten feet from the best grown tree on the Point, and placed in it, along with the pemmican, a bottle containing a memorandum of the Expedition, and such information respecting the Company's post as I judged would be useful to the boat party of the Plover should they reach this river. The lower branches of the tree were lopped off, a part of its trunk denuded of bark, and a broad arrow painted thereon with red paint. In performing these duties at this place, I could not but recall to mind the evening of July 3rd, 1826, passed on the very same spot with Sir John Franklin. We were then full of joyous anticipation."

As we look at these enduring lobsticks, we recollect that Commander Pullen, with two boats from the Plover in 1849, visited the depot and found the precious pemmican. We leave the Mackenzie proper for the present and enter the easternmost channel of its farthest north tributary, the Peel, and follow this considerable stream thirty-three miles to Fort Macpherson, the most northerly post of the Hudson's Bay Company.

Fort Macpherson has a striking site. To the east, spreads a rolling wooded plain of alluvial origin, containing thousands of lakes. The west aspect gives us an uninterrupted view of the wooded valley of the Peel, backed by a heathery slope with the northern Rockies on the far horizon. Due north, upstarts a peak of the Rockies known locally as Black Mountain—a dark barren spur two thousand feet in height. A winter trail from Macpherson to Arctic Red River cuts no fewer than thirty-three small lakes.



On the beach to meet us are Mounted Police and Eskimo from Herschel Island, Church of England missionaries, traders of the H.B. Co., and Loucheux Indians. But here, as at Arctic Red River, it is that Polar gentleman the Eskimo who claims our attention. Let Sergeant Fitzgerald, R.N.W.M.P., stationed at Herschel Island, speak for the Kogmollye and Nunatalmute Eskimo. In his departmental report this officer states, "I have found these natives honest all the time I have been at Herschel Island. I never heard of a case of stealing among them." He has been there five years. Up here on the Arctic the bare word of an Eskimo is accepted of all men. If he states to an H.B. Co. factor that he has an order from a whaling captain to get certain goods for himself, that unwritten order is honoured though it may date back two or even three years, whereas an order presented by a white man must be in writing and certified.

Why should I enter the lists and take up icy spear for my Eskimo fellow British subject? Because he is so very worth while. Because through the years the world has conspired to libel him. Because within a decade or two he will have passed utterly off the map. And because it is so very much pleasanter to write appreciations than epitaphs. This man wins you at once by his frank directness; his bearing is that of a fearless child. The Indian, like Ossian's hero, scorns to tell his name, and on occasion will dodge the camera, but the Eskimo likes to be photographed. Young and old, they press to our side like friendly boys and girls round a "chummy" teacher, volunteering information of age, sex, and previous condition, with all sorts of covetable bits of intimate family history. You love the Eskimo because he is kind to his dogs and gentle to little children. His entire willingness to take you on credit is contagious, trust begets trust even in walrus latitudes.



The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a clever chap. With no school-teacher, no school, no modern appliances, he does many things and does each admirably. He is a hunter by land and sea, a fearless traveller, a furrier, a fisherman, a carver, a metal-smith, and he takes in every task the pride of a master mechanic,—"the gods see everywhere." The duties of the man and the woman are well-defined. The head of the Kogmollyc household is the blood-and-flesh-winner, the navigator of the kayak, the driver of dogs. It is he who builds the houses on the march, and when occasion requires he does not consider it infra dig. to get the breakfast or mind the baby. The wife dresses the skins, prepares the food, makes all the clothing, and the lord of the igloo demands from her the same perfect work that he turns out himself.



When an Eskimo wife has finished making her spouse a pair of waterproof boots, she hands them to him, and he blows them up. If there is one little pin-hole and the air oozes out, he throws the boots back to her, and she may take up the pedal gauntlet in one of two ways. Either she must meekly start to make a new pair of boots without murmuring a word, or leave it open to him to take to his bosom another conjugal bootmaker. We noticed with interest in watching this little tableau that there was no recrimination. No word was spoken on either side, the exacting husband contenting himself with blowing up the boots and not the wife.

With uncanny fascination we watched one old woman curry a sealskin. Her tongue was kept busy cleaning the scraper, while her mouth was a repository for the scrapings, which went first there, then to a wooden dish, then to the waiting circle of pop-eyed dogs. The whole performance was executed with a precision of movement that held us fascinated.

If a white woman were to be shipwrecked and thrown upon an Eskimo foreshore and presenting herself at a Husky employment bureau, many surprises would await her. Instead of asking for references from her last employer, the genial proprietor would first ask to inspect her teeth. In prosecuting female Eskimo handicraft your teeth are as important a factor as your hands. The reporter for the funeral column of an Eskimo daily, writing the obituary of a good wife, instead of speaking of the tired hands seamed by labor for her husband and little ones, would call pathetic attention to, "the tired and patient teeth worn to their sockets by the yearly chewing for the household." A young wife's cobbling duty does not end with making for her mate boots that shall be utterly waterproof, but each morning she must arise before the seagull and chew these into shape. You see, after the boots are wet each day they get as stiff as boards, then they must be lubricated with oil and chewed into shape. We watched Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger at this wifely duty. Taking the big boot up in her well-shaped hands, incisively, quarter-inch by quarter-inch, the white teeth made their way round the borderland between upper and sole, the indentations looking like the crisped edges on the rims of the pies your mother used to make. Solomon's eulogy of Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak corrected to the latitude of 70 deg. North would read, "She seeketh fish and the liver of seals and worketh willingly with her hands; she riseth also while it is yet night and cheweth the boots of her household."

Every bit of Eskimo skin-clothing is as soft and pliable as a kid glove. The effect is not produced without patient labor, and again the teeth of the woman are brought into requisition. The raw sealskins or hides of the reindeer and bear are staked out in the sun with the skin-side up and dried thoroughly. Before this stiff material can be worked up into garments it must be made pliable, and this is done by systematically chewing the fibres, a slow and painstaking task. Creasing the hide along its whole length, the women take it in their hands and chew their way along the bend from one end of the skin to the other, working their way back along the next half-inch line. Watching them, one is reminded of the ploughman driving his team afield up one furrow and down the other.

It falls to the lot of the woman, too, to do her share of boat-making. The men deftly fashion the frames of kayak and oomiak, using in their construction not a single nail or piece of iron, but fastening the wood together by pegs and thongs of skin. Then the women come on the scene, measure the frame, and sew green hides of the proper shape to fit, making wonderful overlapping seams that are absolutely watertight. As it is necessary to put the skin covering on while the hides are raw, the whole job has to be completed at one sitting. So a bee is held of the women of the communal camp.



Where did the Eskimo get his versatile ability? Only the walrus knows. The whalers have inducted the Eskimo into the art of making cribbage-boards. They use for each board a complete tusk of walrus-ivory, covering the whole with a wealth of descriptive carvings illustrative of all that comes into the yearly round of an Eskimo's life,—ice-fishing, bear-hunting, walrus-sticking. So far as we could find out, the Husky's connection with cribbage ceased with his making these edition de luxe boards. He seemed himself to have gathered no inkling of the fine points of that game which one instinctively associates with Dick Swiveller as tutor and as pupil the little Marchioness, "that very extraordinary person, surrounded by mysteries, ignorant of the taste of beer, and taking a limited view of society through the key-holes of doors." In the world outside, far from igloos and ice-floes, where people gather round cheery Christmas fires with "one for his nob," "two for his heels," and "a double run of three," these ivory crib-boards are sold for from seventy-five to one hundred dollars each. We have two among our most treasured trophies, and with them an ivory ring beautifully formed which we saw made. Set in the ring is a blue stone of irregular shape which was fitted into its ivory niche with a nicety of workmanship that few jewellers could attain. I had fashioned for me also a gavel in the shape of a sleeping seal, made of fossil ivory from the Little Diomedes. The contrast of the weathered brown of the outside of the ivory with the pure white of the inner layers, when worked up into a carved design, gives the effect of cameo and intaglio combined.

We tasted many new Eskimo dishes. When, on our return, we confessed that the brain of the seal served here is a delicious dish, we ran against the sensibilities of refined natures. But why is it cruder to enjoy seal's brains a la vinaigrette, than to tickle our taste with brains of the frolicking calf? The seal furnished a more equivocal dinner than this, nothing less than entrails au naturel, which our hostess draws through her fingers yard by yard in pure anticipative delight, each guest being presented with two or three feet of the ribbon-like piece de resistance. The scene that jumps to our memory as we watch this feast of fat things is connected with food-manipulations in Chicago. It was down at Armour's in the stockyards that we had seen Polacks and Scandinavian girls preparing in the succulent sausage a comestible that bore strange family semblance to that which our friends are now eating before us, this linked sweetness long drawn out.

[Illustration: Useful Articles Made by the Eskimo

A—Eskimo soapstone lamp which burns seal-oil. The wick is of reindeer moss.

B—Eskimo knife of Stone Age.

C—Its modern successor, fashioned from part of a steel saw, with handle of ivory. This is the knife used by the women; note how the old shape is retained.

D—Eskimo Tam O'Shanter. The band is of loonskins, the cap proper being carefully constructed from swans' feet. This admirably shows the cleverness of the Eskimo in adapting natural forms to economic use, each foot of the swan being a true sector of a circle.

E—Old-time stone hatchet.

F and G—Knives filed from saw-blades, with bone handles.

H—Mortar for pulverising tobacco into snuff.

I—Needle set in a wood handle, and by rapid rotary motion used to pierce ivory.]

Mr. John Firth, of the Hudson's Bay Company here, gives us much information regarding these people who for thirty-seven consecutive years have traded with him. The Kogmollycs have been here "from the beginning," the Nunatalmutes moving into this region in 1889, driven out of their hunting grounds inland from Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, by a scarcity of game. The two tribes live in peace and intermarry. The aged among them are respected. Criminals and lunatics are quietly removed from the drama. Supposed incurables commit suicide and in that act reach immediately a hot underground heaven.

Nature to these Eskimo is especially benign. The junction of the Mackenzie and the Peel is covered with a forest of spruce, and even to the ocean-lip we trace foot-prints of moose and black bear. In the delta are cross, red, and silver foxes, mink and marten, with lynx and rabbits according to the fortunes of war. The Eskimo declare that, east of Cape Parry, bears are so numerous that from ten to twenty are seen at one time from a high hilltop.

The Chauncey Depew of the Kogmollycs, the man with the best stories and the most inimitable way of telling them, is Roxi. It was Roxi who gave us the love story of his cousin the Nuntalmute Lochinvar. This young man wooed a maid. The girl's father had no very good opinion of the lad's hunting ability and was obdurate. The lover determined to take destiny into his own hands. A ravine of ice stretched between his igloo and that of the family to whom he would fain be son, and over the chasm a drift-log formed a temporary bridge. Lothario, one night, crossed the icy gully, entered the igloo of his elect, seized her in her shin-ig-bee or sleeping-bag and lifted the dear burden over his back. In spite of struggles and muffled cries from within, he strode off with her to his side of the stream. The gulch safely crossed, he gaily kicked the log bridge into the gulf and bore his squirming treasure to his own igloo floor. He had left his seal-oil lamp burning and now it was with an anticipative chuckle of joy that he untied the drawstring. We end the story where Roxi did, by telling that the figure which rolled out sputtering from the shin-ig-bee was the would-not-be father-in-law instead of the would-be bride!



CHAPTER XIV

MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN

"Into this Universe, and Why not knowing Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing, And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing."

—The Rubaiyat.

The Midnight Sun! The sun does not sink to the horizon, but pauses for a moment and rises again. Dawn and eventide are one. The manifestations of light ever since we left Athabasca Landing have been wonderful, uplifting. The supreme marvel of the Midnight Sun is not what we see but what we feel. Standing at this outpost of Britain's Empire, we give our imagination rein and see waking worlds and cities of sleep. As this red sun rises from its horizon-dip, it is the first of the unnumbered sunrises which, as hour follows hour, will come to the continents. Longfellow says:

"Think, every morning where the sun peeps through The dim, leaf-latticed windows of the grove, How jubilant the happy birds renew Their old, melodious madrigals of love! And when you think of this, remember too 'Tis always morning somewhere, and above The awakening continents, from shore to shore, Somewhere the birds are singing evermore."



How do the people of Macpherson divide into day and night their largesse of light? By common consent four o'clock in the morning seems to be bedtime, and by four in the afternoon people are busying themselves with breakfast. In Polar Circles, do as the Polars do, is good advice, and we follow suit. Individuality is strongly marked at this metropolis on the Peel. Every one you meet is a mine of interest, and sharp contrasts present themselves. Mrs. Macdonald discusses fur and deer-meat with Jack Johnson. He is a trapper who plays the game alone and who last year was reduced to killing his favourite dog for food. Current report credits him with having "killed his man in the Yukon." Mrs. Macdonald is a Loucheux woman who, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, married Archdeacon Macdonald of the English Church and for eight long years afterwards assisted him in his life work of translating the Gospels into the Loucheux language. She has come all the way from Winnipeg to the Arctic Circle to spend the summer visiting her people. We lose our hearts to her two sons, splendid fellows both.

It is the Eskimo who brings both missionary and trader to Fort McPherson. Are these Eskimo, Christians? Are they civilised? These are the questions that confront us when we speak of these Farthest North Canadians. It is an age of classification. You cannot find a flower nowadays that some one has not tacked a Latin name to, and it goes by inverse ratio—the smaller the flower the longer the name. Every bird you hear sing, even though it stop but an hour to rest its tired pinion on its northern migration, has an invisible label pinned under its coat. How can a man, a tribe, a people, hope to escape? In the northeast of Canada the Eskimo is a disciple of the Moravian missionary. In Alaska, on the extreme northwest of the continent, the Greek Church takes him to its bosom. In between these two come the people we are studying. The Episcopalians through the years have made some sporadic attempt to influence these people, but so far as I know these Eskimo are not Episcopalians. What then must we call these splendid fellows so full of integrity and honour, whose every impulse is a generous one? Heathens? The question sets us thinking.

The Century Dictionary defines a heathen as "Any irreligious, rude, barbarous or unthinking class or person." This Eskimo is not "irreligious," for he has a well-formed conception of a Great Spirit and an Evil One, he looks to a place of reward or punishment after death, and he accedes to Kipling's line without ever having heard it,—"They that are good shall be happy." He is not "rude," but exceedingly courteous, with a delicacy of feeling that is rare in any latitude. "Unthinking" he certainly is not. Six months' darkness within the igloo gives him the same enviable opportunity of thinking that the shoemaker has in his stall, and the whole world knows that the sequestrated cobbler is your true philosopher.

There remains but the one ear-mark, "barbarous." The dictionary declares that barbarous means, "not classical or pure," "showing ignorance of arts and civilisation." On the first of these indictments our poor Kogmollyc must fall down, for he is not classical. And what man dare pronounce on the purity of another? Then we come to "arts" and "civilisation." In arts, this Eskimo can give cards and spades to every European who has visited him. The stumbling-block in this honest search for a tag to put on my people is the term "civilisation." One is reminded of the utterance of the Member of the British House of Commons: "Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is the other man's doxy." Was it not Lowell who at a Harvard anniversary said, "I am conscious that life has been trying to civilise me for now seventy years with what seems to me very inadequate results"?

If "Christianity" with the Eskimo means taking him into the white man's church, and "civilising" means bringing him into close contact with white men's lives, then he has not yet attained the first, and has but little to thank the second for. Two years ago eighty of these people in one tribe died of measles, a white man's disease. A stray chaplain wandered into an encampment of Eskimo, finding his way from a whaling ship. He told the people of Heaven, its golden streets, pearly gates, and harp-songs, and it meant nothing to these children of frost. They were not interested. Then he changed his theme, and spoke of Hell with its everlasting fires that needed no replenishing. "Where is it? Tell us, that we may go!" and little and big they clambered over him, eager for details.

Prayer as presented by the white man is recognised as an incantation which should bring immediate and literal results. An enquiring scientist was seated one day with Oo-vai-oo-ak, the two fishing through adjacent air-holes in the ice. Calling across to the white man, Oo-vai-oo-ak said, "How is it, brother, have you any fish?"

"No," replied the man of letters, "I have taken nothing."

"Have you spoken to God this morning?" asked the Eskimo in a business-like tone.

"No," said the wilted Walton.

"Well, that's what's the matter," returned Oo-vai-oo-ak; "I always speak to God every morning before I go fishing. Once, when I went to Herschel Island, a missionary told me what to say. It always works. I have many fish."

The scientist, interested, queried, "And do you do the same when you go duck-hunting or goose-hunting or when you are after seal?"

"No," eagerly responded Oo-vai-oo-ak, dropping his line and pressing close to the geologist, "Is there a prayer for duck, and for geese, and one for seal? The missionary never told me that. You teach it to me, eh? I like to make sure what to say to catch that fellow,—goose and seal."

But, unfortunately for both, the university man did not have the charm.



Broadly speaking, the Eskimo's theory of things, evolved from white spirits on the ice-floes or carried across in the age of the mastodon from sires and grandsires in Asia, does not differ materially from our own. There is a Good Spirit, called by different tribes Cood-la-pom-e-o, Kelligabuk, or Sidne, who dwells high in the zenith, and to whom it is good to pray. There is an Evil Spirit, Atti, symbolising cold and death. Their heaven is a warm underworld reached by entrances from the sea. Hell is a far, white, dreary plain. The Eskimo pray to Sidne; but it is wise to propitiate Atti or Tornarsuk, and in this last idea they but follow their Chinese or Tartar ancestors. In common with all nations, the Kogmollycs have a tradition of the flood. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder said, "This world once covered with the sea." Asked why she thought so, she replied, "You have been down to the land of the caribou, eh? Little smooth stones from the sea are there, and shells."

The labrets or lip-ornaments, shirt-stud shaped effects worn in holes pierced in the cheek, strike us with interest. Is it too daring a conjecture to trace in these, which Eskimo men so sedulously cherish and resolutely refuse to talk about, a religious significance? The term "Kelligabuk" in a literal translation means "Mastodon." This animal, whose bones not infrequently are unearthed from ice-floes, has been for all time venerated as a god of the hunting grounds. Is it too fanciful to suggest that the labrets are a sort of peripatetic idol carried around on the person as an imitation of the tusks of this God-Mammoth?

East and south of the Mackenzie delta the Eskimo tell of a Supreme Goddess, Nuliayok, who was once a coy maiden and refused to marry a mortal. Wooed by a gull, she accompanied the bird to an inland home, to find instead of her dreams of delight a nest of sticks and rotten fish on a high-hung ledge. Jostled by the other fulmars, or gulls, who tried to push her off the rocks, she sent for her father. In the night-time he came and sailed with her over the water in an oomiak. The deserted fulmar-bridegroom, taking a leaf out of Prospero's book, raised a storm. The father, to lighten the craft and propitiate the storm-spirit at the same time, threw the poor bride over-board, and cut off her fingers as she clung to the boat. As the four fingers dropped into the sea they changed respectively into beluga the white whale, nutchook the common seal, oog-zook the big seal, and ibyl the walrus. After thus giving origin to the four great sea-friends of the Innuit, the Goddess Nuliayok let go the boat and went to the world beneath the sea, where she now lives in a whalebone house with a dog for husband. She cannot stand erect, but hunches over the ground, holding one foot under her as a baby does who has not yet learned to walk.

It is to Nuliayok that the spirits of sea-animals go after staying three days by their dead bodies; and this is the reason why the Eskimo breaks the eyes of a killed seal. He does not want it to witness the indignity of seeing its own body denuded of its skin. This too is the raison d'etre of the ceremonies which every Eskimo punctiliously performs in connection with the animal he kills. Each animal has a soul or spirit to be offended or placated; if pleased, the spirit of the dead animal communicates with its living kin, who in turn will deem it an honour to be killed by such considerate folk as the ceremonious Innuit. Round the igloo fire we heard another tradition of Nuliayok. The Goddess of the Sea once gave birth to a litter of white and red puppies. These she put into two little water-tight baby-boots and set them floating before a north wind. The puppies landed on southern shores and became the white race and the red race, the Europeans and the Indians. The Innuit, of course, had lived from the beginning.

We arrogate to ourselves the term of "white race," but if these Eskimo were to wash themselves daily (which they do not do yearly) they would be as white as we are. They have fleshy intelligent faces and eyes with more than a suggestion of the almond-slant of the Oriental. The idea occurs to us that the full appearance of the cheeks of the women is more likely to be caused by the exercise of chewing skins and boots than by an accumulation of fatty tissue. The men are distinguished by the thin, straggling growth of beard and moustache which adorns their Asiatic progenitors. The labrets of the men are offset by the long pendant earrings of the women, which are made from H.B. Co. beads and shells brought by Alaska Indians from the Pacific, It is only the women who here tattoo their faces, the three long stripes extending from lower lip to the chin. The men crop their hair in the style of the tonsure of the monk. Neither man nor woman provides any head covering except the hood of the artikki or smock, which hood, fringed with waving hair of the carcajou or wolverine, hangs loosely at the back until called into requisition by a winter's storm or a summer's siege of mosquitoes.