My Eskimo Friends (1924)

EXPLORATION OF NORTHERN UNGAVA 115 “We cannot take the omiak farther,” said Nawri. A slot of a valley rose in half-sheer steps, winding up to the snowclad tableland fifteen hundred feet above. The “mankiller,” the leg-o’-mutton, all but the clothes we wore, and the last few scraps of food, we reluctantly abandoned to climb the valley, thence over the tablelands to pick our way to what on my map was Eric Cove. The night was light enough, for all through it welts of red and yellow from the not far-sunken sun stood out in the north. Up half sheer faces of cliffs, on hands and knees scrambling over the talus, and knee-deep through banks of sodden snow we climbed to the tablelands; then on, half bent into the wind, over plains of snow that never disappear, we tramped through darkness. It was midnight when Nawri halted us abruptly. Before us stood a void and down into it wound a tongue of snow, its far end lost in gloom. Down through the snow and on to where it gave way to a wild, roaring stream, on till the cliffs were crowding high, tortuously we picked our way. Finally the ravine widened, the stream smoothed out to long, silent reaches, and before us a single square of yellow light shone through the darkness. “Kablunak!” exclaimed the men. A more desolate post than Wolstenholme I have never seen. Three sheds of houses stand on a narrow strand between gigantic flanks of bare, ice-scoured hills. Wind, roaring down the flume of valley, blasts them with sand and gravel. At either hand down into the low-lying coast of Hudson Bay, or eastward along the bold, sheer headlands of Hudson Strait, the next two posts of the solitary fur men are hundreds of miles away. But my host, the factor, though