THE SUN GOES AWAY FOR THE WINTER 103 



I did not at the time recognize this word as the Danish 

 word kona, meaning woman. In the Herschel Island 

 jargon it is used to mean either woman or wife. 



It did not take me long to find out that the jargon was 

 not the real Eskimo, for I had brought with me an ex- 

 cellent grammar of Greenland Eskimo made by a German 

 scholar who had lived nearly all his life in Greenland. I 

 used to beg Roxy and the rest of the people to talk to me 

 in real Eskimo and they would sometimes do it for a 

 while, but they always relapsed, Roxy into the broken 

 English and the others into the jargon which they spoke 

 to Sten and which they had been using with the white 

 men since 1889. Indeed, there had been a similar jargon 

 in use between the Eskimos and the Indians to the south 

 of them even before the whites came, so that the habit 

 of talking pidgin to any kind of foreigner was ingrained 

 in all the Mackenzie Eskimos. 



I understood from Roxy, however, that the people who 

 lived to the east of the Mackenzie delta were far less 

 sophisticated. One peculiar thing Roxy told me about 

 his cousin Ovayuak (whom Mr. Firth had recommended 

 to me as the best of all the Eskimos) was that he was 

 proud of the Eskimo ways and Eskimo tongue and did 

 his best to keep them pure. This Roxy considered an 

 amiable eccentricity, but he understood that the eccen- 

 tricity would serve my purpose, so he suggested that if 

 I wanted to learn real Eskimo and find out as nearly as 

 possible what the Eskimos were like before the white 

 men came, I had better go to visit Ovayuak. The idea 

 struck me favorably at once. It had the further advan- 

 tage of bringing me near to Harrison's camp, and being 

 a little lonesome I thought of the possibility of spending 

 Christmas with him. 



