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Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913-18 



October 20 — 21 : The women and children fished n'ear camp, while the men col- 

 lected the dried fish and meat from their various caches and fished in lakes 

 more remote. By the 21st we were ready to start for the coast again. 



October 22 — 29: We entered the Okauyarvik creek at the south-east corner 

 of Lake Kigiaktallik and followed it down to its mouth. Caribou were 

 sighted after a few miles, and we camped to enable Ikpakhuak and Avranna 

 to go in pursuit of them. The first night we slept in snow huts, the second 

 in tents with snow passages, as the snow was too shallow for proper houses. 

 We halted one day, the 24th, to fish in a lake. The other natives continued 

 the journey on the 25th, but Ikpakhuak and his family stayed behind to 

 enable him to go hunting. He shot a caribou, so his family stayed over 

 another day while he brought it in to camp. We overtook the other natives 

 at Okauyarvik falls, about four miles from the mouth of the creek, on the 

 28th, and reached the coast on the following day. 



Fig. 44. An Eskimo autumn encampment at Lake Kigiaktallik, S.W. Victoria island 



October 30— November 8 : This was the transitional period between the summer 

 and the winter life. Pissuak and his family joined us on the 6th, so that 

 our whole party was united again as in the spring. The women were busy 

 making our winter clothing; one or two of them had already begun the 

 task in the hills, but they had been too busy fishing and travelling to make 

 much progress. Higilak went out one morning with her husband's ice- 

 chisel and_ chipped a rectangular block of fresh-water ice from a lake to 

 make a window for the hut and give her more light for sewing. One or 

 two more deer were shot while we were bringing in the carcasses of those we 

 had killed and cached a few weeks before, and the pokes of blubber that had 

 been left on Read island in the spring were collected again and brought in 

 to camp. Ikpakhuak replastered the runners of his sled, for the mud 

 shoeing he had put on at Lake Numikhoin had been badly chipped by 

 stones when we descended the Okauyarvik creek. He made too a new head 

 for his harpoon, and in odd moments scraped several skins for Higilak. 

 By November 7 the strait was frozen solid, so early the next morning he and 

 I started out with a light sled and crossed over to Bernard harbour. The 

 others followed us a week later, and remained beside our station till the 

 end of the month, when they crossed over to the Liston and Sutton islands 

 and commenced sealing. 



