WINTER COLD 



old days, when the houses were not so good as they 

 are now, the missionaries have had to take turns to 

 sit up all night and keep the vegetables from freezing. 

 It strikes me as a new light on a missionary's life : 

 one pictures him sitting up to comfort and relieve the 

 suffering, but one does not realise that in the in- 

 terests of his own health in the grim land that he has 

 chosen to serve he must, perforce, sit up and nurse 

 the potatoes. 



So much for the winter cold it is a very vivid 

 memory to me. Early in December the Okak brook 

 was frozen solid, and the people, instead of fetching 

 water, came with hatchets and buckets and carried 

 away lumps of broken ice to thaw. One little girl 

 used to come every day with a sack on a little sledge, 

 and drag it home filled with the smaller bits that 

 other people had pushed aside : it seemed a strange 

 idea the family's drinking water kept in a sack. As 

 for ourselves, we were rather more squeamish than 

 the Eskimos, who took no notice of the fact that the 

 dogs were constantly trampling their chopping-place 

 on the brook ; we sent a couple of men, with an iron 

 tank on a sledge and twenty dogs to pull it, across 

 the bay to the big river. They reached water by 

 jabbing a hole in the ice with a tok a sort of enor- 

 mous chisel with a six-foot handle and ladled it out 

 with a tin mug. By February the ice on the river 

 was eight feet thick, and they had to make a pit with 

 steps up the side : one man stopped in the pit, and 

 ladled the water into buckets, while the other man 

 carried the buckets up the steps and emptied them 

 into the tank. So we got our water. The men 

 were able to bring about two hundred gallons 

 at a load, and they made it their duty to keep the 



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