328 CONQUERING THE ARCTIC ICE 



sitting there the squaw opened her anout and took out a small 

 bundle of humanity, not yet twenty-four hours old. Great 

 consternation ! We wanted to know all about it, and she told 

 us that the child was born the night before, that Terigloo 

 did not wish to stay in the mountains when he could not shoot 

 cariboo (an Eskimo tradition prohibited doing so within some 

 weeks of the birth), and had come down to the lower river to fish, 

 having walked twenty-five miles that day. In a short time the 

 couple had erected their tent, and while Terigloo went out 

 with us to fish, his woman was attending to her four children, 

 cooking and sewing. The life of the Eskimo woman is hard, 

 but she does not seem to mind, and when we returned in the 

 evening Terigloo's squaw was sitting in Ned's tent, where, in 

 woman's fashion, she and Ekajuak were discussing their fellow 

 beings, criticizing John's invalid wife most severely, and laughing 

 at the care he took of her. 



When Sachawachick had come back there was no more to 

 detain us, and he, Axel, and myself started for the coast. There 

 we got a sledge, loaded it with meat, and with " Dad" in the 

 harness, and all of us helping to pull the sledge along, we started 

 for home on September 29. 



It was very hard work. A recent gale had broken up all the 

 young ice and piled it high on the beach. We had to scramble 

 over it as best we could, and to drag the sledge over the gravel 

 and pebbles of the beach. A gale which had been blowing the day 

 before had washed away all the snow, and our progress was 

 consequently still more slow and laborious, and the runners of 

 our sledge were almost broken. Sometimes we had to make a 

 detour across country, a highly disagreeable thing to do, as we 

 had to jump from one frozen " niggerhead" to another, and go up 

 and down the deep ravines which intersected the country with only 

 a few hundred yards between them. Then we broke through the . 

 ice on the Sadlerochit River and camped, tired and low spirited. 

 However, I did -not mind the hard travelling so much, as it gave 

 me an opportunity to judge how Axel would behave on the trail, 

 but, unfortunately, my impression of him was considerably less 

 favourable than it had been when I saw him coming and going 

 in the tent. I began to fear that he was not the right man 

 for hard sledge work, an impression which was materially 

 strengthened before we reached Flaxman Island three days later. 



