Summer Life 141 



of willow twigs for fuel, before the winter snow had completely buried them. 

 She gathered too some Eriophorum seeds for lamp-wicks, and tufty moss 

 roots, mannik, for torches. Her real lamp was at Lake Numikhoin, in the 

 Colville hills, but she improvised a lamp from a hollow stone about 4 inches 

 in diameter; at first she burnt bear-fat in it, but later, when Ikpakhuak 

 shot a bearded seal, she used the ordinary blubber. .During the first days 

 of our stay Ikpakhuak made a semi-circular stone shelter on top of a ridge 

 near the camp which would command a wide view over the surrounding 

 country; every day one or other of us would spend several hours there 

 watching for caribou. He speared a few salmon, too, in one of the lakes. 

 They were bright red at this season, and mating; one could see them 

 chasing each other round boulders under the ice. On the ice off-shore he 

 shot four bearded seals. Idle hours in camp were spent in helping Higilak 

 to scrape the caribou skins. On the 21st Tutsik, Okalluk and Tufeayok 

 with their families came over from Epiullik and camped beside us. They 

 left us again on October 3 to return to Lake Numikhoin, for there was very 

 little chance of their securing any caribou in our vicinity, seeing that they 

 had bows and arrows only, while both Ikpakhuak and myself were using 

 rifles. We gave them, however, some of the carcasses and skins for helping 

 to discover the deer and pack the meat. Ikpakhuak and Higilak secured a 

 few sculpins at the mouth of the Okauyarvik creek early in the month; 

 Higilak had np proper spear, but she lashed one of my forks to the end of 

 her walking-stick and stabbed the fish with that. The weather became 

 rapidly colder, so on October 5, she took down the cloth tent in which we 

 had been sleeping since the spring, and wrapped it round our sealskin 

 kitchen; outside of this again she laid several deerskins. The sealskin 

 tent lay in a hollow, banked round with a low wall of turf, so our new 

 dwelling,. though small, was warm, and comfortable. Avranna and his wife 

 joined us on the 10th. By the iSth the caribou seemed to have all dis- 

 appeared, having migrated apparently to the south-east. All the deer we 

 had shot (about thirty-five) were cached under the stones wherever they 

 had fallen, for we intended to gather them up early in the winter, just before 

 the sealing season opened. The skins, the back-fat and the sinew we cached 

 on the shore, where Ikpakhuak now recovered his sled. Its wooden 

 runners were quite bare, for their mud shoeing had dropped off during the 

 summer, and the runners had never been shod with whale's bone. 



October 14: We set out for our old camp at Lake Numikhoin to gather up our 

 caches there and to fish again in the adjacent lakes. Everything was loaded 

 on Ikpakhuak's sled. Numerous patches of bare stony ground made it 

 drag heavily; even on the snow it was hard to pull along, because it had no 

 mud shoeing. At dusk we found a deep snow drift, and Ikpakhuak was 

 able to make a circular wall of snow-blocks, which he roofed over with our 

 tent skins; Avranna did the same for his family. 



October 15 : We broke camp early in the morning and reached Lake Numikhoin 

 shortly before dark. Okalluk and the other natives had left the place a 

 few days before, so we utilized two of their deserted snow huts. Higilak 

 immediately recovered her stone lamp from one of the caches and warmed 

 up our dwelling. 



October 16 — 18: Ikpakhuak and Avranna dismantled their caches and covered 

 the runners of their sleds with mud shoeing. We fished in various lakes at 

 odd times and caught a few trout. 



October 19: The sleds were loaded up at daybreak and we travelled east by 

 south for about five miles to Lake Kigiaktallik, the source of the Okauyarvik 

 creek. Here we found the rest of our party, except Pissuak and his family, 

 who were still at Epiullik. The natives were living in snow huts on the 

 margin of the lake and steadily fishing each day through holes in the ice. 



