Hans brought Metek with him, and Metek's young nephew, Paulik, a boy of fourteen. Metek and Hans spoke sadly of the condition of the Esquimo settlements. We have seen that the escaping party found those of the south flying northward from starvation. The report now was that they had huddled together at Northumberland Island until that yielded to the famine, and now they had come farther north. It was a sad sight to see men, women, and children fleeing over the icy desert before their relentless foe. Yet, says Hans, they sung as they went, careless of present want, and thoughtless of the morrow. Many had died, and thus year by year these few, scattered, improvident people decline, giving earnest that in a few years all will be gone. Though light-hearted, death did bring its sorrows to these benighted heathen. Kalutunah lost a sister; her body was sewed up in skins, not in a sitting posture but extended, and her husband, unattended, carried it out to burial, and, with his own hand, placed upon it stone after stone, making at once a grave and a monument. A blubber lamp was burning outside the hut while he was gone, and when he returned his friends were waiting to listen to his rehearsal of the praises of the dead, and to hear the expressions of his sorrow, while they showed their grief by dismal chantings. If sorrow did not keep the deceased in the memory of the living, imposed self-denials did. The Angekok, or medicine man, as our Indians would call him, determines the penance of the mourner, who is sometimes forbidden to eat the meat of a certain bird or beast, under the idea that the spirit of the departed has entered into it; at another time the mourner must not draw on his hood, but go with uncovered head; or he may be forbidden to go on the bear or walrus hunt. The length of time of these penances may be a few months or a year. The reader will recollect the widow with her birds, who appeared so often in the narrative of the escaping party.