Eskimo clothing is much lighter in weight than it seems, and this is one reason why the Eskimo attaches of every Arctic expedition have moved around with less exhaustion than their European or American leaders. A well-made Eskimo outfit of inner and outer suits, with mittens, socks, and boots, weighs about thirteen pounds, while one imported fur coat of European deerskin will alone weigh more than that.

A custom noted at the afternoon whale-meets and pink-teas might fittingly find way into the latitudes where narrow toes and French heels obtain. Two ingenious young Kogmollyc belles had placed applique pockets mid-leg on their lower garments. When the walrus was passed round and conversation became general, the boots were slipped off quietly and one foot at a time was thrust for a resting spell into the pocket provided on the opposite trouser-leg. This act of easement was done deftly, and the neat action of instep boot-jack never lost its fascination for us.



All the way from boundary-line to ice-barrier we had seen Indians tricked out in grotesque garments borrowed from the white man and used in combination with their own tribal covering of skins and furs. These sun-bonnets and shepherd's-plaid trousers, silk hats and red-flannel petticoats, the trader had persuaded the child of the woods to buy. The debonair Eskimo is a re-incarnation of the bastard brother of Aragon's Prince, and, leaning his furry back against the North Pole, says with him, "I smile at no man's jests, eat when I have stomach and wait for no man's pleasure, sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man's business, laugh when I am merry and claw no man in his humour."



You cannot induce an Eskimo to think he wants anything just because you have found that thing to your liking. There are two reasons for this. First, long experience in the most rigorous climate which the human race inhabits has taught this man what garments are the most suitable for him in which to live and move and have his being. Second, although the Indian may ape the white man as a superior being from whom eleemosynary grub and gew-gaws may be wheedled, the Eskimo of the Mackenzie delta considers himself to be the superior of every created being. The Eskimo knows what he wants; he is always sure of it, and there is no vacillating. When he comes into the H.B. Company's post to trade, skins are his currency, the pelts of the silver-fox his gold coinage. A good silver, or black-fox is worth here about one hundred dollars in barter.

We saw a band of Nunatalmutes come into Fort Macpherson to do their summer shopping. They wanted English breakfast tea, superior rifles and ammunition, and a special brand of tobacco. Failing any or all of these, it was in vain that the Factor displayed before them the wares of John Bull, Uncle Sam, or Johnny Canuck, or any seductive lure made in Germany. Ig-ly-o-bok and Nan-a-sook-tok bought what they found to their liking, took small change out of two silver-fox skins, and put the remaining six pelts back into the wooden box which formed at once their savings bank and letter of credit for the season to come. The hungry-eyed H.B. man confided to us that two of these coveted pelts had been thus exhibited to him and thus tucked back into the Eskimo sinking-fund for three successive seasons.

As regards weapons, we found Eskimo hunters in the transition stage. The old-time spears, four feet long and tipped with ivory, are still in active service. The bows, with arrows finished in copper, flint, and bone, have been relegated largely to the boys, while Krag-Jorgensen, Lee-Enfield, and other high-power guns are bought from American whalers. The fish-hooks which I got in friendly barter are interesting to any one born with angling blood in his veins. Beautifully fashioned of ivory, copper, bone, and beads, the contrivance is a sinker, bait, and hook, all in one. The daily baskets procured with this lure incontestably proves the Husky a judicious hooker.

The Eskimo is a merger. Father Petitot shows us the close analogy between the Kogmollyc language and the tongues of eastern Asiatic tribes, ancient and modern. This Eskimo's speech, then, gives him a connection with the effete East (which is his west), while enamelled washbasins, with here and there a corrugated wash-board, prove that slowly but surely Canadian culture is reaching him from the south.

With two modifications, this Eskimo is invariably truthful. Like the Indians to the south of him, seeking to please you by answering a question in the way that you desire, he will at times tell you an untruth, for it seems to him discourteous to answer your question other than in the way which you anticipate. For instance, if you say to Roxi, "Wasn't that a grey goose we heard overhead?" Roxi will readily assent, though he well knows it to have been a mallard duck, but he would spare your ignorance. Again, it is Eskimo etiquette to belittle your own success in hunting and, in so doing, be not literally truthful. When we place this delightful trait alongside the fish-stories we are familiar with, who would seek to change the heathen?

Marriage with the Eskimo is not a ceremony, it is not even the taking of each other for better or for worse. It is an easy union entered upon and maintained so long as both parties are pleased. This arrangement has one manifest advantage,—Eskimo annals tell of no unhappy marriages. When unhappiness conies in at the door of the igloo, marriage flies out of the chimney. When a woman leaves her tentative husband, she takes herself and her babies back to the paternal topik, and no odium attaches. As the marriage vows melt into the Arctic air, the quondam husband is expected, however, to play the game. Last winter a young Nunatalmute and his sorry spouse came to the parting of the ways. She asked him to take her back to Papa, but he said, "No. You may go to-morrow if you wish, but I am ready to hunt in the opposite direction, and I hunt." Off to the chase he went and took the family auto, i.e., the sled and dogs, with him. The once-wife, travelling five days and six nights by the fitful light of the Aurora, found her way to her father, for the instinct of direction is unerring in these people; but the ex-bride's feet became badly frozen. Public opinion in this case was strongly roused against the husband and probably if there had been a tree handy he would have been lynched. This would have been the first lynching recorded in Canada. The feeling of the Eskimo community was that, when the wife announced her intention of enforcing a divorce, the bounden duty of the husband was either to drive her himself in proper state to her father's door or to let her have the dogs.

In their beliefs in the great powers of concentration and in re-incarnation we find traces in the Eskimo of those Theosophical ancestors of theirs far off on Asian shores. The ceremonies which approximate in time to our New Year's Day and Christmas show the importance they attach to concentrated thought. Early in the morning of what corresponds to our New Year's Day, two young men, one of them grotesquely dressed in women's garments, visit every igloo and blow out each seal-oil lamp. The lights are afterwards renewed from a freshly-kindled fire. The chief, asked the meaning of the ceremony, replied, "New light, new sun," showing his belief that the sun was yearly renewed at this time. This early morning visit from igloo to igloo reminds us of the "first-footing" of the Scottish village. The mummery of wearing the fantastic dress of the woman points back to the old Lord of Misrule.

About the season of Christmas, a great meeting is held in the igloo, presided over by the Angekok or medicine-man, who entreats the invisible powers for good fortune, immunity from storms, and a plenitude of blubber for the ensuing year. This invocation is followed by a family feast. Next day the ceremonies are carried on out-of-doors, where all from oldest to youngest form a ring-around-a-rosy. In the centre of the circle is set a crock of water, while to the communal feast each person brings from his own hut a piece of meat, raw preferred. This meat is eaten in the solemn silence of a communion, each person thinking of Sidne, the Good Spirit, and wishing for good. The oldest member of the tribe, a white-haired man or tottering dame, takes up a sealskin cup, kept for this annual ceremony, dips up some of the water and drinks it, all the time thinking of Sidne, the Good Spirit, while the others close their eyes in reverent silence.

Before passing the cup on to the rest of the company that they may drink, the old man or woman states aloud the date and place of his or her birth, as accurately as it can be remembered. The drinking and thinking ceremony is performed by all in succession, down to the last naked baby cuddling in its mother's artikki, the little child that cannot yet speak. The solemn rite is brought to a close by the tossing of presents across the ring from one to the other, the theory being that, as they generously deal with others, so Sidne will deal with them in the coming year. So up here on the edge of things, among our "uncivilised heathens," we have our Christmas presents and "Peace on earth, good will to men."



CHAPTER XV

MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD

"Man does not live by bread alone."

Exigencies of life have caused the Mackenzie Eskimo to formulate on vital matters an unwritten law to which each gives assent. Succinctly stated, this system of Northland jurisprudence runs thus:—

(a) Should a man, inadvertently or by malice aforethought, kill another, the wife and children of the man so killed remain a burden on the murderer so long as he or they live.

(b) A drift-log found is treasure-trove, and belongs to the finder, who indicates possession by placing upon it a pipe, mitten, or personal trinket of some kind. Whalers, missionaries and Mounted Police are a unit in testifying that precious flotsam of this kind has remained four or five years in a land of wood-scarcity without being disturbed.

(c) No one must eat seal and walrus on the same day. Thus a check is given to luxuriousness and the Eskimo is self-prevented from falling into the fate which overtook Rome.

(d) All large animals killed are to be looked upon as common property of the tribe and not as a personal belonging of the man who kills them. Thus here, under the Northern Lights, do the Farthest North subjects of the Seventh Edward work out in deeds the dream of Sir Thomas More's crescent-isle of Utopia where men lived and worked as brothers, holding all things in common.

The Eskimo realises that the pleasure of life is in pursuit, not in acquisition. Where wants are many, joys are few; the very austerity of his life has made a man of him. Laying up few treasures for the elements to corrupt, accumulating no property except a little, a very little, of the kind designated by Wemmick as "portable," he, to better and saner effect than any man, decreases the denominator of his wants instead of increasing the numerator of his havings. Surrounded by the palcocrystic ice, the genial current of his soul has not been frozen by that ice. An Eskimo family accepts life with a smile and, in the faith of little children, goes on its way.

An old Scot once prayed, "O Lord, send down to Thy worshippin' people at this time the savin' grace o' continuance." Only one man has less need to pray that prayer than the Scot himself, and that man is the Eskimo. The Indian eats and sleeps as his wife works, but while there is spear-head to fashion or net to mend, the clever hands of the Eskimo are never idle. Thrifty as a Scot, ingenious as a Yankee, every bit of the little property that he has is well kept. You find around this igloo no broken sled-runner, untrustworthy fishing-gear, nor worn-out dog-harness. Civilisation has nothing to teach this man concerning clothing, house-building, or Arctic travel. Indeed, one may hazard the opinion that the ambitious explorer from the outside, if he reach the Pole at all, will reach it along Eskimo avenues with this man as active ally and by adopting his methods of coping with Northern conditions.

On account of the malignity of nature, it is rare that an Eskimo attains the three score and ten Scriptural years. Few, indeed, live beyond the age of fifty-five or sixty. If his life is short, it is happy. This pagan has grasped a great truth that his Christian brother often misses, the truth that happiness is not a luxury, but the highest of all virtues, a virtue filling the life where it originates and spreading over every life it touches.

There is about this Mackenzie Eskimo a certain other-worldliness which we insistently feel but which is hard to describe, and to us his generosity is sometimes embarrassing. At Peel River a band of Kogmollycs met us, carrying on board pieces of their ivory-carving. One man exhibited a watch-chain containing fifteen links and a cross-bar, all carved from a single piece of ivory. He wanted thirty-five dollars or the equivalent of that for his work, saying that it represented the leisure hours of two months. The engineer tried to make him lower his price, but with a courteous smile he shook his head, and the carving was dropped back into artikki recesses. Afterwards, with the air of a shy child, the clever carver came to me and offered me the chain as a gift. It was probably a difficulty of articulation rather than a desire to be scathing which induced this man subsequently to refer to the one who tried to beat down his price as "the cheap engineer."

Surprised at the magnificent physique and unusual height of this little group, one of us began measuring the chest expansions, length of limbs, and width of shoulders of the men and women we were talking with, while the other of us jotted the figures down in a note-book. Many of the men were over six feet tall, and none that we measured was under five feet nine inches. One young giant, Emmie-ray, was much interested in our researches. The whalers call him "Set-'em-Up," for his name bears the convivial translation, "Give us a drink." "You going to make better man, you get Outside—make him like Emmie-ray?" As Emmie-ray pursues the tenour of his Arctic way, hunting the walrus, standing, a frozen statue, with uplifted spear over the breathing-hole of the seal, to the end of the chapter he will think of himself as being used for a stimulating Delineator-pattern in the igloo of the white man.

Forty years ago, when Bishop Bompas came across a band of these people, instead of being awed at the appearance of a white man, they took him for a son of Cain! Their tradition was that, in the early history of the world, an Eskimo murdered his brother and fled to the inhospitable parts of the earth. The bishop, coming to them from the unknown south, must be a direct descendant of the outlaw, with his hands red with a brother's blood.

Circling the ocean-edge from Siberia, without doubt this people came originally from Asia, as the Chipewyans did before them and the Crees before that, the more newly arrived in each case pressing their predecessors farther away from the food-yielding ocean. The Anglo-Saxon estimates all habitable land by his ell-measure, fertility of the soil, its ability to yield turnips, potatoes, and flax, and forty-bushel wheat. The measure of desirability of range of northern tribes has another unit—blood, and flesh, and fish. Your Eskimo and Chipewyan and Cree cares not a potato-skin for your waving fields of grain, your apple-orchards and grape-vines. What he is after is blood and blubber and good dripping flesh; these his soul craves in the night season. These peoples who made their way into the continent by the open door at the north have come down through the years toward the habitat of the white man, not because they loved him, but because a stronger tribe has pushed them back from Arctic flesh-pots.

At the Mackenzie mouth we enjoyed the companionship of that courteous Eskimo gentleman, Roxi, and heard the story of his last winter's larder, but not from his lips. At the beginning of the season Roxi had whale-meat and fresh walrus, and also flour that he had earned from the whalers. In a characteristic burst of generosity he gave the greater part of this to needy members of other tribes who had had poor hunts and who found themselves at the beginning of the Long Night with empty Mother Hubbard cupboards. The Eskimo winter has many mealtimes, and Roxi had but a poor idea of the higher mathematics. Long ere the darkness of the Great Night relaxed its overbearing blackness Roxi got very hungry, and he had no food. Life is dear, even on the edge of things. So into the silence Roxi crept and dug down through the ice and frozen sand to the skeleton of a stranded whale killed three years before. All the sustaining flesh had been eaten from it more than a year ago, but the dried tendons were still there. By chewing these assiduously and picking bones already bare, this generous soul kept life in his body. As I heard the story, the last words of the gallant Sidney dying in agony on Zutphen's field that another's thirst might be quenched came across the ocean from another age and a far land, "Thy necessity is greater than mine." Britain's heroes, men of the finest mould, manifest on the shores of many seas.

Inherited tastes in foods, like inherited creeds, are mainly a matter of geography, or of history, or of both. An Englishman had preceded us to the Arctic, going in in 1907, and the story of his food discrimination still lives in tepee of the Cree and Eskimo topik. The North is full of rivers, the cold bottle is always at your disposal, and generally, if you are any shot at all, you can get the hot bird. But this son of a thousand earls, or of something else, wouldn't eat owl when owl was served, though he would eat crow. Now, eating crow is to most a distasteful task, and the guides questioned the Englishman regarding the gastronomic line he drew. "Aw!" replied he, "No fellow eats owl, you know. Never heard of the bweastly bird at home, but crow ought to go all right. The crow's a kind of rook, you know, and every fellow eats rook-pie."

Having put the seal's body into his own body and then encasing his skin in the seal's, the cheery Eskimo strides the strand, a veritable compensation-pendulum. The seal is so much an integral part of this people that if a geologist were to freeze a typical Eskimo and saw him through to get a cross-section he would have in the concentric strata a hybrid of Husky and seal. Holding up his transverse section under the light of the Aurora, the investigator would discover an Arctic roly-poly pudding with, instead of fruit and flour, a layer first of all of seal, then biped, seal in the centre, then biped, and seal again. This jam-tart combination is very self-sustaining and enduring. Deprived of food for three days at a stretch the Eskimo lives luxuriously on his own rounded body, as a camel on his hump.

Reading an Arctic bill-of-fare in southern latitudes may give one a feeling of disgust and nausea, for it is all so "bluggy." You feel differently about it at 70 North. You put prejudice far from you, comfort yourself with the reflection that raw oysters, lively cheese, and high game are acquired tastes, and approach the Arctic menu with mind and stomach open to conviction. It is all a matter of adjustment. Because raw rotten fish is not eaten in Boston or in Berkeley Square there is no reason why it should not be a staple on Banks's Land.

We had brought with us on our transport two years' provisions for the detachment of Royal Northwest Mounted Police stationed at Herschel Island, and we had been privileged to taste the concentrated cooking-eggs and desiccated vegetables which formed part of their commissariat. Now, a concentrated egg and a desiccated carrot or turnip bear no more family-likeness to the new-laid triumph of the old Dominick or the succulent vegetable growing in your own back-yard than the tin-type of Aunt Mary taken at the country fair does to the dear old body herself. Whale-meat is better than concentrated cooking-egg, seal-blood piping hot more to be desired than that vile mess of desiccated vegetables. I know. I feel like the old Scot who exclaimed, "Honesty is the best policy. I've tried baith."

But we do not live on seal alone in the North, for there is a bewildering bill-of-fare. Reindeer have a parasite living on the back between the skin and the flesh, a mellifluous maggot an inch long. Raw or cooked it is a great delicacy, and if you shut your eyes it tastes like a sweet shrimp. Don't be disgusted. If you have scooped shrimps from their native heath, you have discovered the shrimp, too, to be a parasite.

Another Arctic titbit is that fleshy cushion of the jaw of the whale which in life holds the baleen. What is whale-gum like? It tastes like chestnuts, looks like cocoa-nut, and cuts like old cheese. Whale-blubber tastes like raw bacon and it cannot very easily be cooked, as it would liquify too soon. It is a good deal better than seal-oil, which to a southern palate is sweet, mawkish, and sickly. Seal-oil tastes as lamp-oil smells. But you can approach without a qualm boiled beluga-skin, which is the skin of the white whale. In its soft and gelatinous form it ranks among northern delicacies with beaver-tail and moose-nose, being exceedingly tasty and ever so much more palatable than pigs-feet.

Musquash in the spring is said to be tender and toothsome, but that overpowering smell of musk proved too much for our determination. You may break, you may shatter the rat if you will, but the scent of the musk-rose will cling to it still. There is a limit to every one's scientific research, and, personally, until insistent hunger gnaws at my vitals and starvation looms round the edge of the next iceberg, I draw the line at muskrat and am not ashamed to say so. Compelling is the association of ideas, and the thought grips one that muskrat must taste as domestic rats (are rats domestic?) look. Raw fish at the first blush does not sound palatable, yet raw oysters appeal. The truth is that meat or fish frozen is eaten raw without any distaste, the freezing exerting on the tissues a metabolic change similar to that effected by cooking; and it is convincingly true that bad fish is ever so much better frozen than cooked.

Blubber is not a staple, as is so often misstated, but it is a much esteemed delicacy. During the summer months the Eskimo has to provide light and fuel for that long half-year of darkness within the igloo. The blubber obtained in summer is carefully rendered down and stored in sealskin bags—the winter provision of gas-tank, electric storage-battery, coal-cellar, and wood-pile. In using oil for fuel, this master artificer of the North has anticipated by decades, if not centuries, the inventive adaptability of his "civilised" cousins. The blubber appears in a blanket between the skin of the animal and its flesh, and when it is spared for food, is cut into delicious strings, an inch wide, an inch deep, and the longer the better. Give a Fur-Land kiddie a strip of this sweetmeat and he grins like that Cheshire cat he has never seen. He doesn't eat it, but drops it into the cavernous recesses of his stomach, as you lower your buckets into the well of English undefiled. "Disgusting," you say. It's all a matter of latitude. Watching a roly-poly Innuit baby finding its stomach-level with plummet of seal-blubber sustains the interest of the grand-stand for a longer period than watching your child dallying with the dripping delights of an "all-day sucker." These little babies have the digestion of an ostrich and his omnivorous appetite. Suckled at their mothers' breasts until they are two or even three years old, when they are weaned they at once graduate into the bill-of-fare of the adult. Walrus-hide is about as uncompromising as elephant-hide, and an inch thick. You see little chaps of three and four struggling valiantly with this, nibbling at it with keen delight, as a puppy does on an old shoe, or your curled Fauntleroy on an imported apple. The Eskimo mother has no green apples to contend with in her kindergarten and need never pour castor-oil upon the troubled waters. Every day in the year her babies are crammed with marrow and grease, the oil of gladness and the fat of the land.

To many Eskimo the contents of the paunch of the reindeer is the only vegetable food they get, and this is eaten without salt, as all their food is eaten. They crack the bones of any animal they kill to get the marrow, which is eaten on the spot, the broken bones being pulverised and boiled to make much-prized gelatine. To his fish and flesh the Eskimo adds a bewildering plenitude of wildfowl. Last spring, eighteen hundred geese and ducks were killed by Eskimo on Herschel Island sand-pit. It is the paradise of pot-hunter and wing-shot. Captain Ellis of the Karluk, with one Eskimo fellow-sportsman, got a bag of 1132 ducks, geese, and swans in three days' shooting, to send to the wrecked whalers off Point Barrow, Alaska.

Who are these people, and whence came they? Each little tribe is a book unread before, and full to the brim of fascination. When they are confronted with the picture of an elephant in a current magazine, they are all excitement. The book is carried eagerly to the old man sunning himself down in the anchored oomiak. Animation, retrospection, agitation chase from his seamed face all traces of drowsiness. "We used to know it." "Our fathers have told us." "This land-whale with its tail in front once lived in the land of the Innuit." We are now the ones to become excited. Intending merely to amuse these fellow-Canadians who had been kind to us, we stumble upon a story of intense interest. "Where did your fathers see this animal?" we asked. "Here, in this country. In the ice his bones were hidden," said the old man. With this he relapsed into the torpor we had disturbed, and no further word did we elicit.

Captain Mogg, of the whaling schooner Olga, two winters ago pursued his whaling operations far to the north and east. Ice-bound at Prince Albert Land, he stumbled upon a little settlement of Eskimo. These were completely isolated from and had had no communication with white men or any community of their own race. Only one of their number had seen a white man before—one old, old woman, the grandmother of the band. The captain of the Olga speaks Eskimo fluently, and to him this ancestress of the "lost tribe" had an interesting story to tell. She remembered a white man who came across the Great Sea from the west in "a big kayak," and she extended her arms to show its size. Her people had given this stranger seal-meat and blubber and the "Chief" from the great ship had presented her with a piece of cloth as red as the new-spilt blood of the seal. This grandmother-in-Ice-Land is without shadow of doubt the very child to whom M'Clure gave a piece of red flannel far back in the early fifties while prosecuting his double search for the Northwest Passage and the lost Franklin. We have M'Clure's record of the incident and the little girl's questioning wonder,—"Of what animal is this the skin?" Thus does history manifest itself on the other side of the shield "after many days."

Through the years, the Eskimo has fared better than the Indian. It would seem that the London Directorate of the H.B. Co. expected its servants within the Arctic Circle in the days that are past to do almost a Creator's part and make all things of nothing. The scanty provisions and trading goods from England which filtered in thus far were to be given to the Indians in exchange for furs, while the Factor and his people were largely expected to "live on the country."

Cannibalism was not unknown. The winter of 1841-2 was an especially hard one. On the 18th March, 1841, J. William Spence and Murdock Morrison were dispatched with the winter express from Fort Good Hope to Fort Macpherson. During the second night out, while they were asleep in the encampment, they were knocked on the head by four starving Indian women, immediately cut to pieces, and devoured. It is further reported that these women previously had killed and eaten their husbands and all their children except one little boy. Of the two murdered Scots they ate what they could that night and made pemmican of what was over, reporting afterward that one was sweet but that the other, tasting of tobacco, was not so good.

Father Petitot gives us another glimpse of that awful winter. His naive words are, "Chie-ke-nayelle, a Slavi from Fort Norman, was a winning fellow, handsome, gracious, the possessor of a happy countenance. On his features played always a smile of contentment and innocence. In his youth he had eaten of human flesh during the terrible famine of 1841. He killed his young daughter with a hatchet-blow, cooked her like flesh, and ate her as a meat-pate. It is said that after one has partaken of human flesh, the appetite for it often returns. I hasten to add that Chie-ke-nayelle, in spite of the soubriquet mangeur de monde which is irrevocably rivetted to his name, has not succumbed to such an appetite. He is indeed an excellent Christian. Nevertheless, I would not like to camp with Chie-ke-nayelle in time of famine."

Another starvation story related by the good Father is not quite so ghastly. He tells us of one "M. Finlaison of burlesque memory," who, when all provisions were out, took his fiddle and, calling the men of his fort before the door of his empty larder, played to them a Scottish reel. That was their dinner for the day,—instead of meat they had sound. The narrator adds, "In America they would have lynched the too-jovial Scotchman. In the Northwest the good half-breeds laughed and applauded the master."

The winter of 1844 also was a season of distress. Referring to this year, a beautiful young Indian woman said to the sympathetic priest, "I did not wish to eat the arm of my father. I was then a small child of eight, and I had not been able to see my old father eaten without crying out with loud screams. But my mother called to me in rage, 'If you do not eat of it, it is that you condemn us and hate us, then you will surely go the same way.' And I ate the flesh of my father, hiding my sobs and devouring my tears, for fear of being killed like him; so much was I afraid of the eyes of my mother."

Another Indian woman confesses, "I left my husband, a hunter at the fort, and took with me by the hand my only child, a boy of six, and directed my steps towards Ka-cho-Gottine. It was indeed far. I only knew the way by hearsay. Once I myself have eaten of my father, but now I am a Christian and that horrible time is far from me. I have a qualm in thinking that my stomach has partaken of the author of my days. Meanwhile his flesh has become mine, and what will happen to us both on the final resurrection day?" Here Father Petitot interpolates, "Ah! if she had only read Dante!" "I did not intend to keep my boy with me, he was too young and too weak. I did not wish to devour him. I had no heart for that. I decided to abandon him. At the first camp I left him, and knew they would eat him there. I wept on thinking of the horrible death that awaited my only child. But what could I do?" This story has a more comfortable ending than the previous one. We breathe relief in learning from the priest that the following night the little boy overtook his mother. He had walked all day and all night, following her snowshoe tracks. They went on together, the third day they snared some hares, and their troubles were over.

Father Petitot tells of a Rabbit-skin Indian who found a mummified body in the forks of a tree near the Ramparts of the Mackenzie and who came running into the Mission, his hair on end with fright, asking excitedly, "Did God make that man or was he made by the men of the Hudson's Bay?"

Another tale of his is of an Indian, Le Petit Cochon, who had a tape-worm and thought it was a whale. "Unfortunate!" exclaims the Father, "possessed of a whale! That's the difference between Le Petit Cochon and Jonah." Sucking Pig said he would join the Church if the priest would rid him of the tape-worm. But we must use the words of Petitot himself, for they are too delicious to lose. "Christmas night, 1865, after midnight mass, Le Petit Cochon, carefully purged, both as to body and soul, by an emetic, two purgatives, and a good confession, content as a King, received holy baptism. I gave him the name of Noel."

In starvation times, guests were not appreciated. Robert Campbell of the H.B. Company, writing from Fort Halkett in 1840, says, "God grant that the time of privation may soon end, and that I may not see a soul from below till the snow disappears." These days of the early forties when England was engaged with the Chartist risings at home and her Chinese wars abroad, were surely parlous times up on this edge of empire. The Fort Simpson journals of February 4, 1843, record, "The Cannibal, with young Noir, and others of the party of Laman, arrived this evening in the last stage of existence, being compelled by starvation to eat all their furs."

Still these sonsy Scots kept a good heart and were able to jest at their misfortunes with the grim humour that belongs to their race. Neither empty larder nor other misfortune disheartened them. The recurrence of New Year's Day and the Feast of St. Andrew were made ever occasions for rejoicing. Up on the Pelly Forks under date of November 30th, 1848, the record reads, "Though far from our native land and countrymen, let us pass St. Andrew's Day in social glee. So fill your glasses, my lads, and pass the bottle round." Three years later, on the same anniversary, the lines are, "Very cold for St. Andrew's, and no haggis for dinner."

And as January Ist ushers in the year 1845, the Factor at Fort Macpherson bursts into verse:

"This day, Time winds th' exhausted chain To run the twelvemonths' length again. I see the old bald-pated fellow With ardent eyes, complexion sallow, Adjust the unimpaired machine To wheel the equal, dull routine.

Underneath the record a postscript appears, in another hand:

"Oh let us love our occupations, Bless the Co. and their relations, Be content with our poor rations, And always know our proper stations.



CHAPTER XVI

THE TALE OF A WHALE

"In the North Sea lived a whale."

What is a whale? Well, although the whalers dub it so, it is not a fish, but is a true mammal, the last of the mammoth creatures that trod the earth and floundered the seas of a past age. The whale is the biggest, the meekest, and the most interesting of living animals. As we go north, we readjust all our ideas of distance and immensity. Rivers are longer, lakes more majestic, and whales bigger than we have ever dreamed. Examining a stranded whale at Herschel, we see the flippers to be really hands with four fingers and a thumb enveloped in a sheath, and rudimentary hind-legs are discovered under the tough skin. Without doubt, the ancestors of the whale were land mammals which became adapted to a littoral life, and in splashing round the shore acquired the habit of swimming. Subsequently carried out to sea, they became under the new environment the structure as we see it.

Off the delta of the Mackenzie, the Circumpolar of Arctic Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) is making his last stand. Unless a close season is enforced, this cetacean carrying round his ten thousand dollar mouthful of baleen will soon fold his fluked fins like the Arab and swing that huge body of his into line with the Great Auk, the Sea-Otter, the Plains Buffalo, and all the melancholy procession of Canadian Has-Beens.



Whales divide themselves into two great classes: those furnished with teeth (the Denticete) and those in which the place of teeth is supplied by a sieve process, furnishing the baleen or "whalebone" of commerce (the Mysticete or Balaenidae). The members of the Baleen Whale family are the Sulphur-Bottoms, the Finner Whales or Rorquals, the Humpbacks, and the king of all whales, the founder of the municipality of Herschel Island, whom his pursuers call indiscriminately the "Arctic Whale," "Polar Whale," "Greenland Whale," "Bowhead," "Right Whale," or "Icebreaker."

Bowheads run in length from seventy to one hundred feet, weighing up to one hundred and ten tons each, there being authentic records of exceptional specimens whose weight reached two hundred and fifty tons. Comparisons are illuminating. The mammoth or hairy elephant in the Field Columbian Museum is nine feet six inches high and twelve feet in longitudinal measurement. The lips of a Bowhead whale are from fifteen to twenty feet in length and yield from one to two tons of pure oil each,—lips that turn a nigger-minstrel green with envy! The eyes placed in the posterior part of the head are each as big as an orange. The tongue of the whale is twenty feet long, and this member, by means of which he pushes to the top of his palate the animalculae on which he feeds (as you would a gooseberry), gives the whaler six tons of oil. The aorta is as big as a man's waist and, at each pulsation of the heart, spurts out ten to fifteen gallons of blood. The heart itself is more than a yard in transverse diameter. The toothed whales carry the teeth in their lower jaw, the most valuable of this lot being the Spermaceti or Sperm Whale or Cachalot, the Pilot Whale or Ca'ing Whale, the White Whale or Beluga, the Killer or Orca, the Narwhal, and such small fry as Blackfish, Porpoises, and Dolphins. Only the toothed whale eats fish; the others live upon animalculae and the most minute of marine life, called "brit" by the whalers. The Bowhead that we have come up to the Arctic to see feeds on the smallest infusoria. He couldn't eat a herring if by that one act he might attain immortality.

Whale errors die hard. Artists persistently depict the big animals as spouting beautiful fountains of water, but the fact is that whales breathe out air only from their lungs. They come to the surface for that purpose, the "blowing" being quite analogous to the breathing of land mammals. Noticing the condensation of a whale's breath up here in the icy Arctic, we guess at the cause which gave rise to this particular blunder. Milton in thirteen words manages to perpetrate three (whale) bulls. "At his gills draws in, and at his trunk, spouts out, a sea." Guiltless of either gills or trunk, no whale ever spouted out anything but common or seaside air.

The Bowhead is hunted for his "whalebone"; the Cachalot or true Sperm, the lord of the toothed whales, for that great lake of sperm oil and spermaceti which he carries round in a portable tank in the top of his head.

It is customary to call whales "fierce," "savage," "murderous," but this is rank libel, for the whale is timid and affectionate. Every family, however, has its black sheep. The Orca or Killer is the terror alike of sealing-rookeries, fish-schools, and whale bone whales. One Killer taken up here had in its stomach fourteen porpoises and fourteen large seals, and it choked to death on the fifteenth. Banded in Molly Maguire groups, the Killers murder the young seal-pups taking their first lessons in swimming off the Pribilofs. We have seen them, a pack of hungry sea-wolves, surround a Bowhead whale! A number of these brigands of the Bering Sea hang on to the lower lip of the big whale till the opened mouth allows a Killer to enter bodily, when the Bowhead's tongue is eaten out and the whole sea is a shambles. At the approach of the Killer even sea-lions seek the shore. And the Alaska Indian who would pose as Bad Bill of the Clambank to the third generation carves a Killer as the crest of his totem.

The American is more aggressive—shall we say progressive?—than the Canadian. The Bowhead whale has within recent years chosen for his summer habitat the pleasant waters off Arctic Canada. Each of these floating tanks of baleen and oil nets his lucky captor from thirteen thousand dollars upward?, and yet for twenty years Canadians have been content to see their more enterprising cousins from California come into their back-yard and carry off these oily prizes.



Is there much money in whales to-day? Are not oil and whalebone drugs in the market? Let us see. Off the Mackenzie mouth is Herschel Island anchorage. Here, since 1889, the American whaling-fleet, setting out from San Francisco, has made its summer stand, its winter waiting-quarters. One whale to one boat in a season covers the cost of outfitting and maintenance, and more than one spells substantial profit. In 1887, one of the Arctic whalers, the steamer Orca, captured twenty-eight whales. The Jeanette in 1905 got ten whales and a calf, the Karluk got seven whales, the Alexander eight, the Bowhead seven. The boats wintering at Herschel in that year had among them thirty-three whales and one calf. At fifteen thousand dollars each (San Francisco values for that season) the thirty-three whales netted very nearly half a million. Two years later the Narwhal took out fifteen whales, the Jeanette and Bowhead each four. Although the average bone per head is two thousand pounds, sometimes the catch runs far beyond that figure. A whale caught by Capt. Simmons of the ship John M. Winthrop carried thirty-three hundred and fifty pounds of bone in its head,—$16,750! One of these at a time would be good fishing.

The first Bowhead taken from these waters went in 1891 to the American steam-whaler Grampus, her catch for three seasons being twenty-one whales. Previous to this, even wise whale-men thought it useless to go "to the east'ard of P'int Barrow" for this big whale; since that date the catch in Canadian waters has been thirteen hundred and forty-five whales. Ignoring the oil altogether and putting the "bone" (baleen) at two thousand pounds each whale and the value of it at five dollars a pound, both conservative figures, we find that thirteen and a half millions in whale-values have gone out of this Canadian sea-pasture the past twenty years, by the back-door route.

Are there as good fish in the sea as have come out of it? Expert evidence differs. Captain George B. Leavitt, of the Narwhal, in 1907 lowered twenty-two times without striking and yet went out with fifteen whales. He says he saw that season more whales than any year previous, but that they are on the move east and north.

The general practice is for a ship to reach this water from San Francisco in the early summer; whale as long as the ice will permit; go into winter quarters at Herschel; get out of the ice as soon as possible next summer, probably the first week in July; whale as long as it can stay without getting nipped by the new ice of September; carry out its catch through Bering Strait to San Francisco as late as possible; dispose of the cargo; refit; return next season, and do it all over again. The active whaling-season is restricted to eight or ten weeks, and every one on board a whaler from captain to galley-devil works on a lay. The captain gets one-twelfth of the take, the first mate one twenty-second, the second mate one-thirtieth, the third mate one forty-fifth, the carpenter one seventy-fifth, the steward one eightieth, fore-mast sailors one eightieth, green hands one two-hundredth. Engineers get about one hundred and twenty dollars a month straight. It looks all right in the contract signed a year ago in a San Francisco waterfront dive, but it never works out as it looks on paper. The A.B. overdraws from the slop-chest (often before the whale is caught) the vulgar-fraction which stands for his share of fat things, and you come across him possessed of the sulky mood which dining on dead horse (land or marine) induces in most of us.

A trade in fur also makes out by this Pacific-Arctic, Arctic-Pacific route. We estimate that total products to the value of a million and a half find their way each year out of Canada in the ships of the whaling-fleet. "The farther north the finer fur" is a recognised law. The American ship brings flour, provisions, Krag-Jorgensen guns, ammunition, tea, trinkets to the Eskimo, and receive for these the choicest furs this continent produces.

The Canadian Provinces which propinquity would seem to call to this international whale-joust are British Columbia and Alberta. British Columbia, in her splendid whaling-stations and refineries on Vancouver Island, has tasted whale-blood, the blood of the Humpback and Sulphur bottom, the Orca or Killer, the Cachalot or true Sperm, and one would think her appetite sufficiently whetted to want to acquire the "feel" of Arctic Bowhead profits, the fattest dividend-sheets of them all. Alberta claims as rich hinterland all the coal and gas and timber, tar, furs, feathers, and fish between the parallel of 60 deg. and the uttermost edge of things. These winning bulks of blubber should by all laws of the game be hers. Some day Alberta's metropolis on the Saskatchewan, overcoming the rapids on the Athabasca and the Slave, will send her deep-sea vessels by interior waterways to pull down into Canadian pockets a tardy share of these leviathans. Will there be any left? It is hard to say.

Little wind-swept island of Herschel! We reach you to-day not by deep-sea vessel from the westward but up through the continent by its biggest northward-trending stream. Eighty miles through the Northern Ocean itself from the Mackenzie mouth brings our whale-boat grating upon the shingle. "As far as we go!" This is essentially the Island of Whales, the farthest north industrial centre in America, the world's last and most lucrative whaling-ground. It is well to take our bearings. We are in latitude 69-1/2 deg. N. and just about 139 deg. west of Greenwich; we are a full thousand miles nearer our Pole than the Tierra del Fuegan in South America is to his. And it blows. A nor'easter on Herschel never dies in debt to a sou'wester. Lifting itself one thousand feet above sea-level, this septentrional shelter for ships where the seagulls wheel at our approach, and as they wheel, whine like lost souls, is twenty-three miles in circumference, with neither water nor fuel. For six months every year comparative darkness wraps it around. Snow and ice hold it fast till mid-July; and yet people with tropic isles to choose from and green valleys where the meadow-lark sings have crowded here for twenty years to make their home!

The most incongruous lot that Fate ever jostled together into one corner,—who are they? The whaler of every country and complexion from Lascar to Swede, Eskimo men and women and big-eyed babies, half-caste hybrids of these two factors, Missionaries, and Mounted Police. It is interesting to note the order of their arrival. The whaler drawn by oily lure followed the Bowhead east and north from Bering Sea. To man his boats, to hunt caribou for him, and to furnish temporary spouses, the whaler picked up and attached to his menage the Eskimo from the mainland in little bunches en famille. Ensuing connubial complications brought the missionary on the scene. To keep the whaler and the missionary from each other's throats, and incidentally to make it easy for the American citizen to trade in Canadian baleen and blubber, came the debonair Royal Northwest Mounted Policeman, the red-coated incarnation of Pax Britannica. There winter at Herschel every year two hundred and fifty whalers and an equal number of Kogmollye and Nunatalmute Eskimo.

Pauline Cove on Herschel Island has three fathoms of water and can winter fifty ships. Landing and looking about us, we experience a feeling of remoteness, of alienation from the world of railroads and automobiles and opera tickets. Back of the harbour are the officers' quarters of the whaling company, the barracks of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, the huts of the Eskimo; in front of us the clear panorama of the mountains on the shore-line.

North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is nothing but pure translucent ice. There is going on a rapid disintegrating of these islands. The whaler calls this far fringe of America "the ocean graveyard" and "the step-mother to ships." There have been five wrecks on this coast in recent years: the Penelope off Shingle Point, the Bonanza off King Point, the Triton on the shores of Herschel itself, the Alexander near Horton River, a little missionary craft off Shingle Point, and Mikklesen's ship The Duchess of Bedford, abandoning her ambitious search for a dream-continent in Beaufort Sea to deposit her tapped-camphor-wood bones on the edge of the ocean of her quest.

The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,—a boon more prized by them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not.

In July, resurrection comes to Herschel,—saxifrages, white anemones through the snow, the whoop of the mosquito-hawk, and the wild fox dodging among the dwarf-junipers and uncovered graves! And the Midnight Sun? It is not a continual blare of light for twenty-four hours. It sweeps through the midnight heavens, but between ten o'clock in the evening and four in the morning there is a sensible change. Colour tints and lines of demarcation on sea and ships are harder to distinguish, shadows less clearcut. Birds roost and even flowers close, Nature whispering to both that, if they would reproduce after their kind in the short Arctic summer, energies must be conserved. Surely the world holds nothing more beautiful than this Polar night, this compelling gloaming, the "cockshut light" of Francis Thompson. Here the evening and the morning sit together hand in hand, and, even as you watch, lead in the day, the new day born beneath the starless sky. The July sun stabs into activity our incongruous community. On board the vessels guns are cleaned, harpoons pointed, whale-boats caulked, and the winter deck-house is lifted off bodily. Up in the rigging fox-skins and all the year's fur-booty sweeten in the sunlight, and eagerly the spring "leads" in the ice are watched from hour to hour if a way be opened to trend out in the track of the big Bowhead.

Strange people crowd the fo'castle. Two years ago the ships bound for "Outside" got nipped in early ice and were forced to winter at Herschel all unprepared. Reduced to half-rations the crew got weak, and scurvy threatened. The Mounted Police (who by the way are "mounted" in imagination only, as there is nothing for the most gallant to stride here but Husky dogs), in making examination of the men below decks, got to their enquiries a technical reply that staggered them. One able-bodied seaman, busied with between-decks blubber, proved to be a medical man with degrees from two colleges. He subsequently made at the request of the Police a searching report on the state of health of the island community, adding suggestions for its improvement. The report was signed "T.H. Toynbee Wright, M.D.," and, after making it, the A.B., M.D. saluted, donned his oily overalls, and turned once more to the savoury spoils of the Bowhead. Which all goes to prove that in these latitudes "you never can tell."

Whale-men at Herschel give whales five names according to age and size: they are "suckers" under a year, "short-heads" as long as they are suckled, "stunts" at two years, "skull-fish" with baleen less than six feet long, and "size-fish" at the age when a boy reaches man's estate. A whale needs no re-incarnation theory of the theosophist, for he crowds enough experience into one sea-life to satisfy the fact-thirst of the greediest little Gradgrind. Fancy, thrashing the sea for a thousand years! A "sucker" who happened to be disporting round the British Isles when Alfred the Great was burning those historic cakes and prefiguring with candles the eight-hour day may still be chasing whale-brit round an Arctic iceberg. The whale mates, we are told, once and for keeps. Jogging along from one ocean end to another with the same wife for a thousand years without turning fluke to look at an affinity! Shades of Chicago and Pittsburg, hide your wings! Whales follow their annual migration as regularly as do moose and caribou on land, the seal and salmon in the Pacific. Seen first in May in Bering Strait, the Bowheads trend from here north and east, doubling back on their westward journey in July and August, when the Herschel Island whalers go out to intercept them. September sees the great mammals off Southern Kamchatka, and year by year with regularity they follow this Arctic orbit, edging farther in successive seasons to the north and east. The usual track of any family of whales may be left at a tangent on account of a furious storm, excessive cold, the want of food, the harassing of an enemy, or a change in the season of their amours.

A whale, for an old party, is not so slow. Alarmed while extended motionless at the surface of the sea, he can sink in five or six seconds beyond the reach of human enemies. His velocity along the surface horizontally, diving obliquely or perpendicularly, seems to be the same, a rate of from twelve to fourteen miles an hour. Now, to carry a whale of seventy-four tons through the Arctic at the rate of twelve miles an hour would require a (sea) horse-power of one hundred and forty-five. Captain Scoresby, a whale expert, by careful calculation estimates that a surface of two square miles of the Arctic Ocean contains 23,888,000,000,000,000 of the minute animalculae on which the Bowhead feeds, so we hope there is enough to go round. He quaintly elucidates this inconceivable number by explaining that eighty thousand persons would have been employed since Adam in counting these little medusae in the two square miles. Why any one should count them we fail to conceive and gladly accept Scoresby's figures.

The poet tells of shooting an arrow into the air and "long years afterwards in an oak he found the arrow still unbroke." Those who stick harpoons into whales and suffer the animal to get away start floating rumours (a sort of cyclometer of the sea) for their grandsons to read in blubbery history three generations after. England offered knighthood and a bag of sterling pounds to him who would discover a Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. M'Clure and the heirs of Sir John Franklin disputed the honour of this achievement. In the "North Sea" lived a whale who exhibited in his own person indubitable proof of having found that elusive Anian Strait. At Herald Island, due north of Bering Strait, in 1886, a whale was caught who carried round in his inside pocket of blubber the head of a harpoon marked Ansell Gibbs. The Ansell Gibbs was wrecked at Marble Island south of Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay on October 13, 1871. Imagination sees opportunity in this for establishing hyperborean letter-service between lovers kept apart by cruel ice-floes. Eskimo Evangeline wandering under Northern Lights seeking Dusky Gabriel might find here a carrier-pigeon of utility. Is it not Pliny who gives us a delightful account of Hippo's enamoured dolphin?

Captain Kelly was the first to notice that whales sing One Sunday, while officers from three ships were "gamming" over their afternoon walrus-meat, Kelly dropped his glass with, "I hear a Bowhead!" There was much chaffing about "Kelly's band," but Kelly weighed anchor and went to find the band-wagon. Every sail followed his, and the result was the bagging of three whales. Among Bowheads, this sing-song is a call made by the leader of a school as he forces passage through Bering Sea to give notice to those who follow that the straits are clear of ice. Walruses and seals and all true mammals having lungs and living in the water have a bark that sounds weird enough coming up from hidden depths. Every look-out from a mast-head notices that, when one whale is struck, at the very impact of the harpoon the whole school is "gallied" or stampeded as they hear the death-song. The dying swan may not sing, but there is no doubt about the ante-mortem Valkyrie song of the whale. From the Bowhead the sound comes like the drawn-out "hoo-hoo-oo-oo-oo" of the hoot-owl. A whaler stops coiling his harpoon-line to tell you that "beginning on 'F' the cry may rise to 'A,' 'B,' or even 'C' before slipping back to 'F' again." He assures us that, "with the Humpback the tone is much finer, sounding across the water like the 'E' string of a violin."

Whalers themselves on this grim shore die without requiem. Every year men desert from the ships. They make their way across from Herschel to a mainland of whose geography they know nothing, thinking that once they strike the shore they can find railway trains which will take them to the gold-mines. One man, Morand, left his ship without sled or dogs. He carried only a gun, twenty rounds of ammunition, some cigarette papers and tobacco. In the spring they found him about a day's journey from the ship, frozen to death. He sat with his gun leaning against his left arm, and a cigarette in his mouth. Both feet and one hand were eaten off. He had fired off nine shots, probably as a signal which was never heard.



Within recent years, on other shores but this one, an innovation has entered the whaling business. The modern plan is to have shore-refineries and from these strategic bases to send out strongly-built high-speed steamers to shoot detonating harpoons from a cannon into the whale. Such methods are pursued with profit on Newfoundland and Vancouver Island shores. The gun-harpoon, the invention of Sven Foyn, a Norwegian, is furnished at the point with a contrivance which, as it enters the whale, opens out anchor-like flukes which clutch his vitals. Connected by a line to the whaling-steamer, the harpoon holds the quarry until the whaler steams alongside, when the "fish" is soon dispatched. A nozzle is attached to the harpoon-wound, and hot air from the engine pumped into the "proposition" keeps it afloat. The Vancouver Island station has bagged as many as five whales in one day,—Cachalots, Humpbacks, and Sulphur-Bottoms.

The Eskimo say, "There is no part of a seal that is not good," and the same applies to whales. Blubber and bone have their regular markets. The viscera, scraps of fat and oddments tried out in fiery furnaces, appear in the form of pungent snuff-like powder, a much-sought fertiliser. From the Vancouver Island stations it goes across to enrich the cane-fields of Honolulu and the rose-gardens of Nippon. The Japs are eager customers for the dried or smoked whale-meat; and whale-steak broiled to a turn can scarcely be distinguished from choice porterhouse, since it is absolutely free from fishy taste. Far back in the fourteenth century the Biscayans made whale-venison their staple, and Norway to-day has more than one establishment which turns out canned whale. Newfoundlanders find whale-meat a welcome change from cod perpetual, and I have seen the Indians of Cape Flattery eat it when it hailed you a mile to windward and had more than begun to twine like a giddy honeysuckle. Now, enterprising people are talking of canning whales' milk, a dense yellow fluid like soft tallow. When the milk-maid goes out to milk a whale she must take half a dozen barrels along as milking pails. The Eskimo like it. Soon the soda-fountains on Fort Macpherson and Herschel Island will bear the legend, "Whale cream soda" and "Best Whale Milkshake."

To have an even superficial knowledge of the commercial products of the whale, one must learn of baleen, of whale-oils and spermaceti, of ambergris, whale-guano, whale-ivory, and whale-leather.

What do we do with baleen? It so combines lightness, elasticity, and flexibility, that nothing yet invented adapts itself so perfectly to all the requirements of the fashionable corset. Whalebone whips are made from single pieces of baleen seven or eight feet long. A whalebone horsewhip costs from fifteen to eighteen dollars and will outlast a dozen cheaper persuaders. The Sairy Gamp umbrella of the last generation, which boasted whalebone ribs, never "broke its mighty heart" in a rainstorm (and incidentally could never be shut up tight). Flexible steel has taken the place of whalebone in many of the arts; but new avenues of usefulness open up to baleen. Out of it artificial feathers of exquisite lightness and wigs or toupees are made. Shredded into fine filaments, baleen is now woven in with the other fibres in the manufacture of the finest French silks, imparting resilience and elasticity to the rich material. A Chicago paper of the date of this writing advertises:

WHALEBONE TEETH $5 A GREAT DISCOVERY THE NEW WHALEBONE PLATE WHICH IS THE LIGHTEST AND STRONGEST SET KNOWN DOES NOT COVER THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH Guaranteed ten years YOU BITE CORN OFF THE COB

Spermaceti, the solid waxy body carried round in the Cachalot's head in solution, is a valuable whale-product. Bland and demulcent, spermaceti is employed as an ingredient in ointments, cosmetics, and cerates. Spermaceti candles of definite size form the measure of electric light, giving rise to the phrase "of so many candle-power." Present-day spermaceti is both a saving and a destructive agent. Large quantities of it are used in Europe in the manufacture of ecclesiastical candles, and part of the same consignment may help to make self-lubricating cartridges.

Most valuable of all whale-products, the costliest commodity on this earth ounce for ounce with the one exception of radium, is ambergris. As amber was once considered "the frozen tears of seagulls," so ambergris for ages puzzled the ancients. Some called it "the solidified foam of the sea," with others it was a "fungoidal growth of the ocean analogous to that on trees." When people in the old days came across anything exceedingly costly they wanted to eat it, on the same principle which makes the baby put each new gift into his mouth. So we have historic record of pearl soup a la Cleopatra, and dishes dashed with ambergris. Milton sings of,—

"Beasts of chase, or fowl of game, In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, Grisamber-steamed."

What is this choice tidbit? It is a morbid secretion of the intestines of the sick Sperm-whale, and sells for from thirty to forty dollars an ounce. Ambergris, if discovered in the animal itself, is always in a dead or dying body, but it is usually found floating on the ocean or cast up on the shore. Many a day, as kiddies on Vancouver Island beaches, have we turned over bunches of kelp, trying to smell out that solid, fatty, inflammable dull grey substance with its sweet earthy odour. The present-day use of ambergris is to impart to perfumes a floral fragrance. It has the power to intensify and fix any odour. In pharmacy, it is regarded as a cardiac and anti-spasmodic and as a specific against the rabies. For years it has been used in sacerdotal rites of the church; and suitors of old times sought with it to charm their mistresses. The dying sperm, spouting up the ghost, offers of his very vitals to aid the lover and serve the church.

Fascinating are the finds of ambergris. The barque Sea-Fox of New Bedford, in 1866, off the coast of Arabia, took a one hundred and fifty-six pound mass of ambergris, which was sold to the Arabs of Zanzibar for ten thousand dollars in gold. The Adeline Gibbs, in the same year, took one hundred and thirty-two pounds from a bull-sperm south of St. Helena, and sold the hunk for twenty-three thousand dollars. Three winters ago an Arctic whaling-crew put into Seattle, and there leaked out the interesting story of how, not recognising the priceless unguent, they had greased their oars, masts, and knee-boots with "a big lump of ambergrease."

In modern whaling not an ounce of the carcase is cast as rubbish to the void. The intestines make a soft kid which takes any dye and is largely used for artistic leather-work. The size of these immense strips makes possible splendid belts for machinery with a minimum of joinings. The chemically-macerated bones are turned into an "indestructible" crockery-ware which is far more enduring than anything made of vegetable-fibre. The Beluga gives us the best shoe-strings in the world. You can lace your shoes with a Beluga lace for two years and be sure it will not break the morning you are in an especial hurry to catch an inter-Reuben train.

An interest attaches to living whales which outweighs the fascination with which we study their dead parts. Each species of the whale propagates with one of its own species only. The fidelity of whales to each other exceeds the constancy of birds. The whale mother gives birth to one calf, and in extremely rare cases two calves, producing every second year, the young being born between the end of March and the beginning of May. When the mother suckles her young she throws herself on one side on the surface of the sea and the calf regularly feeds at the breast (like a young Eskimo) for nearly two years. During this time the baby is extremely fat and the mother correspondingly emaciated. Perhaps nothing in nature is more touching than the devotion of a female whale to its wounded young. Whalers harpoon the babe at the breast so that they may afterwards secure the dam. In this case, the mother joins the wounded young under the surface of the water, comes up with it when it rises to breathe, encourages it to swim off, assists its flight by taking it under her fin, and seldom deserts it while life remains.

Unless the Circumpolar Bowhead is to become extinct within a decade, the thinking world should strengthen the hands of the Canadian authorities in an effort to put a close season for four or five years on the great Arctic Baleen Whale. At their rate of reproduction it is not so easy to restock a whale pasture as a salmon stream. Cutting down a whale which has taken ten centuries to grow is like cutting down an oak-tree with a thousand concentric rings. You cannot in one or two or twenty scant generations of man grow another one to take its place.



CHAPTER XVII

SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN

"The old lost stars wheel back, dear lass, That blaze in the velvet blue. They're God's own guides on the Long Trail— The trail that is always new."

—Kipling.

A tax on tea caused the revolt of the thirteen Colonies, a taunting load of tennis-balls lost France to the Dauphin. Eighty years ago on this Arctic edge, white beads, or the lack of them, lost a lucrative fur-trade, alienated the Loucheux and caused the death of whites. "Trifles make the sum of human things."

The old records tell the story. John Bell from Fort Good Hope, under date of August 14th, 1827, writes to the Factor at Fort Simpson:

"The beads sent in for the Loucheux trade are not sufficiently large to please them. I request you will endeavour to send in the largest size for the trade of the ensuing year. A specimen of the kind wanted I send enclosed."

The Factor at Fort Simpson, under date of November 22nd of the same year, writes to the Governor and Chief Factors at Montreal:

"I now forward a specimen of the common white beads wanted for the trade with the Loucheux Indians. It is their request and I hope it will be attended to. I would not venture to make the demand, were it not from conviction that without this favourite article these Indians look with indifference on the best of our goods. No other ornamental article is ever asked for or wanted by these natives."

The same official on March 15th, 1828, pleads with Montreal:

"The white beads demanded for the Loucheux trade I hope will be sent, and of the size according to sample enclosed. May I use the freedom of representing the importance of getting this article to the liking of the Indians, to come up by the Montreal canoes and be ready for outfit 1829? Three kegs will contain the quantity required, 200 to 250 pounds."

Again on the 29th of November, 1829, he writes Montreal:

"The White Beads asked for the trade with the Loucheux are not according to the order sent, 15 pounds only of the quantity received (200 pounds) are of the proper size, the remainder being the same as those in outfit 1825 so much complained of. They will not be satisfactory to the Indians. We request you will be pleased to make a strong representation to their Honours at Home that this article be sent according to order and sample. We now conceive to say anything further would be tiresome."

The Fort Simpson Factor on March 19th, 1830, reports to Montreal:

"The goods came. The white beads was too small and not according to order or sample asked for. The Indians would not take them and left the Fort dissatisfied."

The Trader at Fort Good Hope augments the story by recording that the Indians would be better pleased in trade with two small kegs of the special beads they wanted than with half a ton of any other trade goods which London could manufacture and send out. The sequel of the story is that, disappointed time and again in not getting their favourite beads, the Loucheux Indians failed to bring in the autumn supply of meat to Fort Good Hope and in consequence, before the snows of the winter of 1831 had melted, many of the white men attached to that post died of starvation.



We had gone North with the birds in spring and now, as we turn our faces homeward, the first migrants with strong wing are beginning their southward flight. Our travel is against current now, for we make slower time than we did coming in and consequently see more of the passing shore-line. The last specimens we gather within the Arctic Circle are the blue blossoms of the flax. In them we see the earnest of many a cultivated farm of the future. The days are getting perceptibly shorter and one by one the old familiar constellations come back in the heavens. We find it a relief to have once more a twilight and a succeeding period of dusk. Yet are we loath to leave this fascinating North with its sure future, its quaint to-days, and all the glamour of its rich past.

We had just passed Fort Norman when the sharp eyes of an Indian deck-hand saw three figures on the beach ahead. Pulling in at the point where the Gravel River joins the Mackenzie, we find a regular Robinson Crusoe group,—Mr. J. Keele, of the Dominion Government Survey, and his two associates. Going in on the Yukon side, Mr. Keele's task has been to cross the Divide between the Yukon and the Mackenzie, mapping the rocks. The only white man they had seen in sixteen months was a French priest who had passed yesterday, and whose knowledge of current events in Canada and Europe was scanty. They were glad to see us. A moose-skin boat showed how they had run the rough Gravel; the meat of two moose smoked over the camp-fire; their dogs were fat. These are men who know the woods—no hard-luck story here. It needs only Friday's funny fat umbrella to complete the picture, with the goat scampering in the middle distance.

Coming on board, the surveyors are greedy for newspapers, and we in return learn somewhat of that great slice of land which they are the first to traverse. The Gravel River is two hundred and fifty-five miles long, with "white water" all the way. The force of the current may be appreciated from the fact that it is forty-four hundred feet above the sea-level at the Height-of-Land, and only four hundred feet here where it enters the Mackenzie. All along the banks of the Gravel are moose, mountain sheep, and caribou. The winter cabin of the party was built on the Ross River and there, during the past winter, they experienced a temperature of 54 deg. below. A party of this kind must be to a large extent self-supporting, as it would be impossible to carry from the outside food for such a long sojourn. Speaking with Mr. Keele, one is forcibly struck with the fact that what the technical schools teach their students forms but a small part of the equipment of the man who would do field work in Northern Canada—packing, tracking, hunting, and breaking trail,—each man must do his share of these.

The Keele party on the great watershed, as they travelled east, crossed two families of Mackenzie River Indians going westward to hunt, on the west side of the ridge, the marten and the beaver. It was 32 deg. below, and cold. The whole families were on the march, a little baby tucked in the curve of the sled, and tottering on foot an old, old woman, bent and wrinkled and scarcely able to move. As the Indians were on their return journey toward the Mackenzie in spring, the Keele party saw them again. But the old woman was not there. Under some lonely mound where snow falls in winter and the leaves of birch and cottonwood flutter down in the shrieking winds of autumn rest the bones of the old woman, her many journeys ended. The wearer of a costly fur coat in the glittering capitals of the Old World seldom stops to conjecture how much of hardship, patient suffering, and loneliness go to the making of that luxurious garment. In order that one might be warmly clad, many have gone cold, more than one sad, tired, old head has lain down for the last time by the lonely camp-fire.

Sad is the lot of the Indian woman of the North. Fated always to play a secondary part in the family drama, it is hard to see what of pleasure life holds for her. The birth of a girl baby is not attended with joy or thankfulness. From the beginning the little one is pushed into the background. The boy babies, even the dogs, have the choicer bed at night, and to them are given the best pieces of the meat. The little girl is made to feel that she has come into a world that has no welcome for her and her whole life seems to be an apology. You read it in the face of every Indian girl or woman you meet, from the shrinking pathetic little figure in the camp to the bent old crone, whose upturned face with its sadly acceptive look gives you the flicker of a smile.

Storm-stayed at Wrigley Harbour at the entrance to Great Slave Lake, we have some splendid fishing,—jackfish, whitefish, loche, inconnu, "and here and there a lusty trout and here and there a grayling." Within an hour I get fifteen graylings to my own rod. Collectively they weigh just a little over thirty pounds. Swimming against the current, they take the fly eagerly; and one cannot hope to land a more gaudy or more gamy fish. Its big dorsal fin is rainbow-tinct, the tail an iridescent blue, and the scales pure mother-of-pearl. Mr. Keele has had "The Complete Angler" for two years with him in the fastnesses, and as he helps us prepare the catch for our evening meal over the coals, quotes blithely that the grayling is eating fit only for "anglers and other honest men."

The traverse of Great Slave Lake in the teeth of a wind is not without its interest, for the new steamer has yet to be tried in the waters of what practically amounts to an open sea. She behaves well, and brings us dry-shod into Fort Rae.



We are the first white women who have penetrated to Fort Rae, and we afford as much interest to the Indians as they afford us. Lone Fort Rae, clinging to the Northern Arm of Great Slave Lake, was noted in the past as a "meat-post." It supplied the Mackenzie District with dried caribou-meat, and formed an outfitting point for the few big game hunters who trended east from here into the Barren Grounds seeking the musk-ox. Its foundation dates back to some time before the year 1820. We cross a bridge of clever Indian construction and sit for a while to muse on a flat boulder of primal rock. This stands as bell-tower to a quaint bell cast in Rome and bears an inscription to some dead and gone Pope. The missionary priest over half a century ago paddled in here bringing the Gospel to the Dog-Ribs.



The musk-ox (Ovibos moschatus) is a gregarious animal which would appear to be a Creator's after-thought,—something between an ox and a sheep. The long hair hanging down from the body foreshortens the appearance of the legs and gives a quaint look to the moving herd. The present range of the musk-ox is from Fort Rae north to the Arctic and between the meridians of 86 deg. and 125 deg.. As it is the most inaccessible game in the world, there would seem to be no immediate fear of its being hunted to extinction. Toothed like a sheep, footed like an ox, tailed like a bear, and maned like a horse, the musk-ox does not circle up wind as the moose and caribou do, but travels in any direction he sees fit. Each little herd of ten or fifteen bunches up, tails to the middle and horns outside, to meet a common danger. The robe of the musk-ox is a rich, dark brown streaked with grey, the hair all over the body being very long, with a coat of mouse-coloured wool at its base. According to the Indians, the single young of the musk-ox is born in April. The mother buries the calf in the snow as soon as it is born, selecting a sheltered place for the cradle. Three days after its post-natal burial it is able to frisk with its dam and begin to take up the musk-calf's burden.



We are all day and all night crossing Great Slave Lake from Fort Rae to Fort Resolution. Food values and the outgoing cargo of fur are the topics of conversation. Years ago a delicate baby at Rae required milk, and with trouble and expense a cow was evolved from somewhere and deposited at the front door of the H.B. Co. Factor there—a cow but no cow-food. All animals must learn to be adaptable in the North. She was fed on fish and dried meat, lived happily, and produced milk after her kind. One of Mr. Keele's men tells of a horse on the Yukon side which ate bacon-rinds with a relish. The dogs at Smith eat raspberries, climb trees for a succulent moss, and when times are really hard become burglars, burgling bacon in the night season, and even being ghoulish enough to visit Indian cemeteries to pick a bone with the dead. A dog in the North Country is surely qualifying for some canine heaven in the asphodel meadows. I know of no created being who is undergoing a sterner probation than this creature forced by man and the exigencies of Fate to work like a horse in winter and live on air in summer.

From Great Slave Lake to Chipewyan the days are enlivened with stories from the outgoing traders. We learn that when the church was still young, some priests on the Mackenzie hungered after flesh-pots in the wilderness and wrote to the Pope, asking him whether beaver-tails were to be considered fish, or flesh. Rome evidently was not "long" on North American mammals and put itself into the class of Nature fakers forever by declaring said tails "fish" and not flesh. This is why you can discuss beaver-tails on top of the world on Fridays to this present and commit no sin.

The stories give us some idea of the difference between winter and summer travel across Great Slave Lake. Captain Mills tells of two Indian women, one old enough to have a daughter of forty, who drove a dogsled one hundred and forty-eight miles from Providence to Rae, in four days. The older one walked ahead of the dogs and made the trail while the other drove. Coming back, it took them five days, and the old woman explained, "We didn't make such good time, as we had a man with us." It was her son-in-law whom she brought back with her.

A striking picture is given us of a woman who walked alone from Hay River to Province on snowshoes, taking thirteen days to do it. She had no matches, and carried her fire with her, keeping it alight in a little copper kettle. This, of course, necessitated her guarding it very closely and stopping to renew the fire from time to time; for if the burning wood was once permitted to die down, her life in that intense cold would go out with it.

How cold does it get? Mr. Campbell Young, of our little group, says that he has been out when a thermometer—one obtained from the U.S. Meteorological Station—registered seventy-six degrees below zero, and has worked in weather like that. "I've been trapping in that temperature, when of course the weather was absolutely still, and I tell you I'd rather be out in seventy-six below than to cross Smith Portage with the mosquitoes." Mr. Christie, of the Keele Survey Party, says, "Last winter I had to go out and get a moose for the camp, and on the second day I met the Mounted Police boys who told me it had been seventy-five below. I had started out when it was quite mild, only forty-five below. You know when it is below fifty, for then your breath begins to crackle, and that's a sure sign." Mr. John Gaudet says, "I was driving last winter on Lesser Slave Lake when it was sixty-four below. Yes, it was quite cold."

At Resolution we see once more our old friend Dr. Sussex, happy and busied among his Indians. It is just hail and farewell. The little "red lemonade" kiddies are the first to greet us as we come into Fort Smith, and here everybody goes visiting. Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald tells us that her grandfather had two wives, and was the father of twenty-two children. She says she and her brother are glad of this, as it gives them so many friends in all parts of the country; and we notice that at every port where we stop Mrs. MacDonald has friends to visit—a cousin here, and an auntie there. The fancy bag in which you carry your calling cards and little friendly gifts up here is a "musky-moot"; the more formidable receptacle, which gives your friends warning that you may stay a day or two, is a "skin-ichi-mun." Visiting a little on our own account, we note that we have penetrated to a latitude into which the gaudy calendars of the advertiser have not yet made their way. Each man, foolish enough here to want a calendar, marks out his own on pencilled paper. We come across an H.B. Journal of the vintage of 1826 where the reckless scribe introduces two Thursdays into one week, acknowledging his error in a footnote with the remark, "It is not likely that the eye of man will ever read this record."

At Fort Smith we leave the steamer Mackenzie River to take passage in the Grahame from Smith's Landing, and once more essay the Mosquito Portage. We find our winged friends in fine fettle. Their eyes are not dimmed, their strength not abated. For miles we notice blackened and dead stems of young spruce, cut off as if by machinery, at a uniform height of two and a half feet from the ground. The top of the dead stem shows the depth of the snow when the rabbits, running along the surface, had nibbled off and eaten the growing spruce. A fur-trader at our side says, "While at Fort Macpherson I noticed that the ice always melted in the spring in Peel's River before it did in the Mackenzie. It would break up in the Peel about the Queen's Birthday and begin to go out. Reaching the Mackenzie, it came up against a solid mass of unbroken ice which sent it back to flood the whole country. It was a curious experience to paddle round in a canoe for miles and miles where one had set rabbit snares but a few weeks before. The poor rabbits themselves were at a loss, for no kind monition apprised them of the coming flood. We could see whole colonies of them,—each a shipwrecked sailor on his own little raft of bark, buffeted here and there with the stream and peering out across the swollen waters, like Noah's dove, seeking some green thing."



CHAPTER XVIII

TO MCMURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE

"Think o' the stories round the camp, the yarns along the track— O' Lesser Slave an' Herschel's Isle an' Flynn at Fond du Lac; Of fur an' gun, an' ranch an' run, an' moose and caribou, An' bull-dogs eatin' us to death! Good-bye—good luck to you!"

Our arrival at Chipewyan is opportune. Honorine Daniels, unceremoniously known as 'Norine among her friends (and they are legion), is about to join hand and fortune with one of the Mercredi boys. 'Norine owns a cottage in her own right, and to-night under her roof-tree there is to be a wedding-dance. We wait round, hungering for an invitation, finally to be told largely, "You don't need no invitation, everybody goes."

We go with the crowd. The room is full to overflowing. Babies are deposited on the benches along the wall, dogs look in at the window. The air is heavy with mosquitoes and tobacco-smoke. But joy reigns. Nobody is too old or too obese to dance. Old Mr. Loutit and lame Jimmy Flett each secures a sonsy partner. There are three fiddlers, and these relieve each other in turn, for fiddling, beating time with your moccasin on the earthen floor, and "calling out" is hard work for one man. There are but two kinds of dances,—the Red River jig, and a square dance which probably had for honourable ancestors the lancers on the father's side and a quadrille on the mother's.

Endurance is a sign of merit in the Red River jig. A man or woman steps into the limelight and commences to jig, a dark form in moccasins slips up in front of the dancer, and one jigs the other down, amid plaudits for the survivor and jeers for the quitter.

It is the square dance that interests us, our attention being divided between watching the deft forms in the half light and listening to the caller-off. Louie-the-Moose first officiates. His eyes look dreamy but there is a general's stern tone of command in his words:

"Ladeez, join de lily-white han's, Gents, your black-and-tan! Ladeez, bow! Gents, bow-wow! Swing 'em as hard's ye can.

"Swing your corner Lady, Then the one you love! Then your corner Lady, Then your Turtle Dove!"

Over and over again Louie reiterates his injunction, to the accompaniment of pattering moccasins and a humming chorus from door and windows. There are phrases of variation, too. We catch the words, "Address your pardner," "Adaman left," "Show your steps," "Gents walk round, and all run away to the west."

Then Michel Manvil takes hold of the situation. He stands up to it, and we hear

"Ladies round ladies, and gents all so! Ladies round gents, and gents don't go!"

Why should they, we wonder!

The third fiddler is a full-blooded Chipewyan. In some dancing academy in the woods he has learnt a "call-off" all his own, and proud indeed is he of his stunt. We manage to copy it down in its entirety, fighting mosquitoes the while and dodging out into the open now and again for a little air.

"'Slute your ladies! All together! Ladies opposite, the same— Hit the lumber with yer leathers, Balance all, and swing yer dame! Bunch the moose-cows in the middle! Circle, stags, and do-si-do— Pay attention to the fiddle! Swing her round, an' off you go!

"First four forward! Back to places! Second foller—shuffle back! Now you've got it down to cases— Swing 'em till their back-teeth crack! Gents, all right, a heel and toeing! Swing 'em, kiss 'em if you kin— On to next, and keep a-goin' Till you hit your pards ag'in!

"Gents to centre; ladies round 'em, Form a basket; balance all! Whirl yer gals to where you found 'em! Promenade around the hall! Balance to yer pards and trot 'em Round the circle, double quick! Grab and kiss 'em while you've got 'em— Hold 'em to it; they won't kick!"

The perspiring musician pushes his instrument into the hands of Running Antelope and turns to us with, "There's another verse, but I don't always give it." We ask him to repeat it for us, but he seems a little at a loss. "It's hard to call it out without the fiddle. When yer playin' you just spit it out—the words come to you."