My Eskimo Friends (1924)

6o MY ESKIMO FRIENDS tion we had long been waiting for, that everywhere to westward the sea ice was fit for travel. At noon with a thirteen-dog team, Wetalltok, two of the crew, and I, struck out for the west. The visitors with their dogs and sleds accompanied us to a point less than a sleep away where was, they thought, an outcrop of sevick rocks, enough to load the kablunak’s ship many, many times. They knew that it must be a sevick rock, for like the flesh it showed red when they scratched it. Winter bared its teeth as we filed over the ice. Wind swooped down in gales; it scoured the fields and hills and sent clouds of snow smoke whirling through the air. Within the day we reached the point where the sevick lay. And sevick it proved to be — not only in loose pieces wherever were wind-swept patches of bare ground, but in a vein, from twenty-five to thirty feet wide, running north and south along the coast. Though the coast was veiled in drift, and the vein outcropped intermittently, we traced it southward for thirty miles, so vividly did the big red band of it stand out through the black and white desolation. I was to find out before the year was through that it was the richest and largest occurrence to be found on all the islands. There was no end to the gales and drifting snow. We continued northwestward over lakes and ponds and difficult boulder-stream ground into the interior. En route, we hit the ice of the northern half of Wetalltok’s great lake, which he had told me was so large that from the south end looking north there was no land, just water, like the sea. But as we travelled to its head we could see nothing, for the drift was blinding.