My Eskimo Friends (1924)

3^ MY ESKIMO FRIENDS We zigzagged in our attempts to beat through the five hundred miles of Strait, from the island mask of Baffin Land, south to the sheer thousand-foot coast of Cape Hope’s Advance and Wakeham Bay, for the winds and squalls of snow were baffling. Too late to gain a wintering base in the Bay, we put into Amadjuak Bay three hundred and fifty miles in on the coast of Baffin Land. Here with the aid of some forty Eskimos, enthusiastic over the advent of the “kablunak,” with his precious stores and goods for trade, ship was discharged by dories and kayaks of the Eskimos catamaraned. Where they disgorged on rocky ledges of shore, old men, women with babes bobbing in their hoods, and children of assorted sizes in an antlike stream, packed boxes, bales, and bundles over the rocks to the wintering base site. Within a week a village of topeks (tents of sealskin) along with four white wedges of tents of canvas and, in the centre of them all, our hut of white lumber roofed with black tar paper stood looking out over the bare rock desolation. By the last week of September my three men and I were settled for the year and the good old Laddie/]\ist the day before the first skin ice formed over the harbour’s face, sailed slowly out, bound for her winter berth in Newfoundland. Through the ten months of winter we had enough to do. There were two thousand miles of sledging along the coast and reconnaissances inland to the great lake of Amadjuak. There, too, was the task of filming as much as might be of the lives of the Eskimos. But all of this is another story. When the winter had finally worn away, through the long light of warm July days we watched each new patch of