When taking a walk on the 3rd I passed near the Esquimaux, and found one
of them repairing the runners of his sledge. The substance used was a
mixture of moss chopped up fine, and snow soaked in water, lumps of
which are firmly pressed on the sledge with the bare hand, and smoothed
over so as to have an even surface. The process occupied the man nearly
an hour, during the whole of which time he did not put his hands in his
mitts, nor did he appear to feel the cold much, although the temperature
was 30° below zero.
On the 4th Ouligbuck set his gun for a wolf that had been prowling about
for the last few days. The usual mode is to fix the gun to two sticks
with its muzzle pointed to a bait placed at the distance of fifteen or
twenty yards, with a line attached to it, the other end of which is
fastened to the trigger; but Ouligbuck's plan was quite different from
this. He enclosed the gun in a small snow house, in such a manner that
there was nothing visible but the bait, which was not more than a foot
from the muzzle, so that the shot could scarcely miss the head of the
animal. When Ouligbuck went to his gun next morning, he saw the track of
the wolf, and followed it to the dog-kennel, in which he had comfortably
taken up his quarters; he immediately took the brute by the tail and
dragged him outside much against his will, when he was soon dispatched
with an ice-chisel. This animal was very large, but in the last stage of
starvation, with a severe arrow or gun-shot wound in one thigh. He
measured 5 feet 9 inches from the nose to the tip of the tail, (length
of tail 1 foot 7 inches,) and his height at the shoulder was 2 feet 8
inches.
On the 7th a man named Ak-kee-ou-lik, who had promised us four
seal-skins of oil, arrived and said that he could only let us have one,
because the bears had broken into his "cache" and devoured nearly all
its contents. This story I did not believe at the time, and I afterwards
found out that it was false. I felt a good deal annoyed at the man's not
keeping his promise, because we had depended much upon this supply for
fuel and light. To save the former, we had during part of last month
taken only one meal a-day, and discontinued the comfort of a cup of tea
with our evening repast. Of oil, our stock was so small, that we had
been forced to keep early and late hours, namely, lying occasionally
fourteen hours in bed, as we found that to sit up in a house in which
the temperature was some degrees below zero, without either light or
fire, was not very pleasant. Fortunately we all enjoyed excellent
health, and our few discomforts, instead of causing discontent,
furnished us with subjects of merriment. For instance, Hutchison about
this time had his knee frozen in bed, and I believe the poor fellow (who
by-the-bye was the softest of the party) was afterwards very sorry for
letting it be known, as he got so heartily laughed at for his
effeminacy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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