64 THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE KARLUK 
Boston City Club for its new club-house but we 
needed it and had to use it for trousers and mittens. 
Everybody was still wearing American clothes at 
this time, with deerskin boots. 
We had the deck covered with snow about two 
feet deep to make the ship warm; when the top of 
the snow became dirty we took off a few inches and 
replaced it with clean snow. The outside of the 
ship was banked up and we built a kind of runway 
from the deck to the ice with walls made of blocks 
of snow. This made our passage between the ship 
and the ice easv. 
«/ 
November 11 the sun left us for good; we were 
now to be without it throughout the twenty-four 
hours for seventy-one days. 
The young Eskimo widower, Kataktovick, came 
to me the next day and asked me for a fountain 
pen, to write letters to his Eskimo friends, I pre¬ 
sume. Some weeks before he had asked me for 
a book to read; after a fortnight he brought it back, 
said that he had read it and asked for some maga¬ 
zines. We had a good many and the pictures were 
interesting so I let him have them gladly. On this 
particular day he came into my cabin and saw me 
writing with a fountain pen. Kataktovick did not 
ask outright for the pen but simply said that he 
wanted something to write with. I offered him a 
pencil but he shook his head and said that was not 
