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WINTER ON WETALLTOK^S ISLANDS 6i
A half sleep from Wetalltok’s lake we struck the sea. Drift again filled the air. The dogs wailed now and then; some of them vomited from the cold. Suddenly they gave tongue. Before I knew what had happened, Wetalltok was at their head, rifle-cracking his long lash. Beyond him, crouching over his snowblind, arms folded on knees and harpoon in lap, sat an Eskimo. Through a breathing hole no larger than the butt end of his harpoon he was watching for seal to rise. Since dawn, Wetalltok said, he had been waiting there. As quietly as may be we detoured and in a moment the drift had swallowed him.
By nightfall we picked up the orange square of an igloo’s lighted window. It was the igloo of one Rainbow. Not a seal had he killed for eight days, said he. All that he had to live on was sea pigeons, from an open tidal pool near by. Just before we arrived he had killed one — the first in two days — and his wife, who was plucking it, held it up for me to see. Though they knew that I had little or nothing in the way of food to give away, their own troubles were forgotten in the concern for the visitor who had come among them. While Rainbow helped Wetalltok with the dogs out-of-doors, the good wife hustled here and there putting to rights her igloo’s disarray. She sent her daughters scurrying out-of-doors for a pail of clean tea-water snow, while she unrolled my sleeping bag, pulled off my kooletah, and laid it over her feebly burning lamp so that it would be warm by morning. Nor did she allow her children, while we ate our beans and bacon, to hover around, for fear it would prove embarrassing. When they saw me crawl in to sleep, they spoke in whispers. I dozed off to the hiss of driving snow and the