The Inuits stripped as usual to the skin, but the shame-faced priest felt obliged to keep on his clothes, removing his outer fur garments only. He says: "I slept feverishly in cat-naps, with constant nightmare. Tormented by my garments, perspiring terribly from the heat, crowded between my companions like a packed herring, sickened by unhealthy odors, and suffocated by unbreathable air, what fearful agony I suffered that night! [He adds:] Save their odor and their nudity, the company of the inmates was not disagreeable. Nor did the food prove less repulsive, especially the opaline, greenish-white whale blubber, which, cut into long, thin strips, forms a choice delicacy known to the Inuits as _ortchok_. The native with his left hand holds the dainty morsel above the greedily upturned open mouth which it at once fills. Gripping the _ortchok_ fast with his teeth, with a knife in his right hand he cuts it off as near the lips as he can, swallowing it with a gurgle of joy." When Petitot asked for cooked blubber his host promptly pulled out the melting piece from the smoking, dirty lamp, and was surprised that such a delicacy was refused. When later tasted the raw blubber was found to be insipid, though the fresh oil therefrom was not unlike olive oil in its flavor. As a kind of dessert they drew on their small supply of congealed seal-oil, so rancid as to be offensive. To this food neither time nor circumstance reconciles the white man. The meal over the natives took to the soothing evening pipe, and gradually began the talk of the day and of the morrow. Mindful of the precious store goods in his pack and of his promise to the factor, Powder Horn chanted the glory of Fort Anderson, and then sang to the young stranger Inuits the praises of the missionary, whom he proclaimed to be the Son of the Sun; despite his protestations, transforming the priest into a demi-god. The long day's march had seen the scattering groves dwindle and fail--first the bankerian pine, followed in order by the balsam poplar and the aspen. Now as they broke their morning camp the canoe birch was a stunted, wretched shrub scarcely attaining the dignity of a tree, and even this was gone when they made their next camp near the Anderson delta, leaving here and there unsightly and rare specimens of the hardy larch and the arctic spruces.