The Eskimos spent the afternoon in journeying up and down the hill fetching meat and skins. Before long, our camp began to look like a slaughterhouse, with skins, meat, seal carcasses and blubber scattered about beside the tent.
It seemed to me that we had been successful enough without any further hunting, but the Eskimos, their stalking instincts now thoroughly aroused, decided to make another sortie the following morning. They set off straight after breakfast, soon disappearing along the river course in the same direction we had taken the previous day.
I didn’t go with them, but pottered around the lower reaches of the river with a gaff to see if there were any fish going upstream to their home in the lakes. I had no success, so took advantage of the Eskimos’ absence to make myself a cup of coffee and was enjoying this with a hunk of bannock when there was a sudden noise outside the tent. I called out, thinking it was the men come back sooner than they had intended, but there was no response.
The silence continued for a moment or two, then was broken by a sort of tearing sound interspersed with low growling. Clearly, an animal was helping itself to what it no doubt considered to be our ample meat supplies, and as it did so, an unnerving thought struck me. My rifle was outside, leaning up against the far end of the tent; the only weapon on hand was a small meat knife, not really suitable for a confrontation with a savage creature.
My visitor was obviously wasting no time in getting down to its meal, which it consumed to the accompaniment of an increasingly ferocious munching, growling sound, which did nothing to quiet my rising panic. Once or twice there was a lull, which made me hopeful that the animal had departed, but a few seconds later the meal was resumed, with what seemed to be redoubled energy and noise.
The difficulty of explaining to the Eskimos my apparent inaction while our hard-earned meat supplies came under the fierce attention of a thief at last drove me to take action. As I stood up, silence fell, but my hopes that the creature had been frightened off were soon shattered as the noisy feeding sounds began again. I crept to the door, suddenly flung it open, then slammed it shut again. Except that a piece of the door fell off, this achieved nothing, for the noise continued unabated.
There was nothing for it but bold action, so, feeling anything but courageous, I opened the door again, stepped briskly outside, and forced myself to peer round the corner of the tent.
I had never before seen a wild animal at close quarters, except behind the bars of a zoo, so the sight that met my eyes both horrified and fascinated me. The most enormous creature was sitting on its haunches, tearing blubber from a handy seal carcass and clearly not at all pleased by the interruption. The bear, for there was no doubt as to the identity of the thief, looked hard at me and it took all my resolution to stand my ground in a sort of eyeball to eyeball confrontation.
I had no plan in mind, and do not know how the situation would have been resolved, had not the bear, having completed his inspection of me, slowly shaken its head, dropped quietly on all fours and loped away. I just stood there and watched the great animal wander off, without making any attempt to get my rifle and shoot it. There was something about the casual indifference in the rear view of the bear, moving without haste in its chosen direction, that left me standing and gaping after the thing until it disappeared behind a pile of rocks.
Shortly afterwards the hunters returned. They had not come across any more deer, but when they heard about the bear, they rushed off immediately to try their luck but were too late to catch up with it and lost its tracks somewhere in the rocky ground at the entrance to the gulley. Somehow, although the bear had given me an anxious quarter of an hour, I felt relieved that it had not met its death at our hands.
As we had been reasonably successful with our hunting, we now decided that it would be wise to head for home, before the weather deteriorated, for it was apparently most unusual to experience long spells of fine weather during the fall. We loaded the meat, skins and blubber into the boat before dark, so that our catch would be safe from any more roving beasts, while we would also be saved a delaying job in the morning.
The night was cold and frosty. We rose early while the stars were still bright, determined to get a good run home in daylight if possible, and after we had breakfasted the men did not dally. The tent was packed up and taken down to the boat with all our other possessions. No time was lost, so that as Kilabuk was turning the flywheel to persuade the sometimes reluctant engine into life, the dawn was just streaking the sky along the ridge of high eastern hills.
Despite our good start we did not fare too well, for by daylight the night crispness had gone out of the air and the clouds were jostling angrily along the northern horizon. It was no surprise when the wind burst down on us as we came out into the open to cross the mouth of a nearby fiord. We made very slow progress, for the further we moved out to sea, the worse the conditions became. We could not turn back, since that would have meant contending with a following sea, which might have been dangerous with our heavily loaded stern.
We approached a black, desolate island half-way across the open stretch and eventually came into sheltered water. At the far end of our tiny harbour, a natural path led up between the boulders. We unloaded our tent and the cooking utensils, carrying them up this path for some distance until we came out on to quite a pleasant, short plateau, where the men at once erected our shelter and I attended the Primus stove.
I had by now firmly established myself as chief cook, the main advantage of this position being that, within limits, one could choose the menu. After our cold anxious morning it seemed to me that we deserved a ‘special’, so I fried some deer steaks in butter. It cooked a little like beef, red and juicy, and though the meat was a trifle tough, at least it was a change from the inevitable seal. My friends made no comment, eating their food in silence. Perhaps they would have preferred a seal stew.
The weather did not abate during the afternoon, as we had hoped it might, so we brought up the sleeping bags and skins and prepared to camp until the storm died down. Shortly after darkness, our lantern began to flicker as the oil ran out. The reserve can of oil and the candles were still down in the boat, somewhere among the skins in the stern where they would not be easy to find in the dark, so we settled in for the night, in the hope that the weather would have moderated sufficiently by morning for us to make another early start. Our hopes were not realized, for when we woke before dawn the booming wind told us that we would not be travelling that day.
During the morning we fetched enough gear from the boat to make ourselves as comfortable as possible, which was just as well for by the afternoon heavier clouds had rolled up and the wind was fairly slapping the rain and sleet into the walls of our tent. Beevee lit his lamp and Kilabuk told me more about his people and how they had made the best they could of the limited resources of this wild country.
Before the Europeans came, and indeed for quite a long time after they had arrived, the Eskimos lived mainly in tents, of either deerskin or sealskin, during the summer months. The fur was generally removed from the skin before drying and scraping took place, and by the time the women had finished and sewn the skins together with deer thread, they had a waterproof tent that allowed a fair amount of light to penetrate to the interior. There was no wood in the country, so whalebone was commonly used to support the tent, which was usually quite low and often sloping gently back in the direction of the prevailing wind, so that when the gales came, the storm swept over the top of the home rather than buffeting into it.
Another of my fellow passengers on the Nascopie, an archaeologist, had told me that in the distant past the people had made their houses of stone and whalebone, packing the crevices with earth and mud while covering the top with various kinds of skin. The ruins of these houses were apparently fairly easy to locate, because after a family had left one of them and the roof fell in, the earth gradually covered the remains where they stood, leaving the outline visible for centuries, though less and less clearly as time went by. My friend had been an expert at finding these old homes, sometimes up