104 On the trail of vanishing birds 



was a jukebox, the only one in the settlement. They had a couple 

 of Bing Crosby records, and the rest were mostly hillbilly or cow- 

 boy tunes, which the natives go for in a big way. But three or 

 four evenings of this was enough. You could walk downstream as 

 far as the Anglican church and upstream as far as a low bank 

 where there were some Indians living in tents, before the mud 

 got to your knees, but you had to walk pretty slow to kill an hour 

 over this route, so we didn't depend on it for steady recreation. 

 It was more fun to stick around the beach just below the C.P.A. 

 landing and watch the natives who were always coming and going 

 by boat and canoe. 



The radio station, operated by the Canadian Army's Corps of 

 Signals, installed a little 100-watt long-wave transmitter after the 

 war. Naturally, there was a big boom in battery radio sales right 

 away, and shortly, no matter how remote or how primitive and 

 cheerless in other respects, no native trapper's camp was com- 

 plete without one. Phonograph records were the standard pro- 

 gram material, but thanks to ''Red" McLeod's patience and 

 special interest, the natives contributed some of the most color- 

 ful and most entertaining broadcasts with their own Eskimo or 

 Kutchin singing and drum music. Red found them eager to per- 

 form before a mike, once they got the hang of it. 



We heard an amusing story about the first effort to broadcast 

 church services on Sundays. As in many Northern outposts there 

 are two hard-working churches in Aklavik, the Anglican and the 

 Catholic, and they are great rivals for the natives' favor. When 

 McLeod first decided to put Sunday services on the air he quite 

 naturally offered an hour to each of the churches. The Anglican 

 priest, a bustling, energetic Canadian with thoroughly modern 

 ideas, accepted at once, but the good father from the rival church, 

 an old-country Frenchman with a beard as long as his cassock, re- 

 fused to participate on the grounds that it would be undignified 

 and improper in every way. The Anglican father laboriously pre- 

 pared sermons in the Eskimo lingo every Sunday and dutifully de- 

 livered them over the hitherto unblessed Arctic air. He even as- 

 sembled his native choir, and the good old Anglican hymns, sung 

 in the native tongue, of course, were also sent out over the subzero 



