He continues: "Mertuk was with him, having at her back a baby not a year old. I must admit that Hans would not have been inexcusable for being allured by a pair of black eyes to cast in his lot with the roving tribes of the North. She is by far the handsomest native woman that we have yet seen, being much prettier than any woman of the mixed races of Danish Greenland. She is very small but is finely featured, and has hands and feet as delicate as a child's. Notwithstanding the general harshness of the Etah language, her voice is quite musical, and she has the most gleeful, ringing, bell-like laugh that I have ever heard." Taking his wife and babe along, Hans joined the expedition of Dr. Hayes as hunter. In midwinter, as elsewhere related in "Sonntag's Fatal Sledge Journey," Hans went south as dog driver, with the astronomer, to buy dogs for the sledge journeys of the coming spring. After a month Dr. Hayes, becoming greatly alarmed at their protracted absence, decided to send Dodge, the mate, south to trace the missing men. But deep as may have been the anxiety of Hayes for Sonntag, it did not equal the anguish of Mertuk's soul as to the fate of her loved Hans. The theory that the people of the stone age are purely animals, struggling only for food, for clothing, and for shelter, finds no support in the conduct of this tiny, ignorant, heathen woman, whose heart was filled with ideals of love and of duty. Living under conditions of ease and luxury far surpassing anything of which Mertuk's mind had before been capable of imagining, this tiny, uncivilized woman resolved to quit her abode of warmth and light for piercing cold and utter darkness, to abandon her abundant food and comfortable berth for a chance bit of frozen seal meat and a snow igloo. And for what reason? To find a missing husband, in search of whom a party was to take the field. To non-polar people no words can convey an adequate idea of the dangers to be met, of the privations to be endured. It was a period of sunless days (the sun had been gone for more than a month), in the excessive cold of midwinter, at the season of fearful blizzards, along an uninhabited stretch of coast of utter desolation, in following which one must pass the dreaded Cape Alexander either on the outer moving ice-pack or along the treacherous ice-foot at the base of its precipitous cliffs. And no one knew better than Mertuk the misery and hardships, the sufferings and perils which must be faced on such a journey. The tale of this woman's heroic resolution is thus told in his journal by Dodge, whom Hayes sent south to trace Sonntag's trail: