The Angekok came with food, as usual, and at the same time there was a new visitor, a widow with a load of frozen birds--the little auks killed the summer before and stored for winter consumption. She declined to eat the walrus and held fast to her own food. It appeared at last that she was a patient of the medicine-man, Kalutunah, whose power over his comrades lay in his virtues as a sorcerer. Hayes says: "The widow greatly interested me. She ate birds for conscience' sake. Her husband's soul had passed into the body of a walrus as a temporary habitation, and Angekok Kalutunah had prescribed that for a certain period she should not eat the flesh of this animal. As bear and seal were scarce, she was compelled to fall back on birds. This penance [he adds] was of a kind which every Eskimo undergoes upon the death of a near relation. The Angekok announces to the mourners into what animal the soul of the departed has passed, and henceforth, until the spirit has shifted its quarters, they are not to partake of the flesh of that animal." The party, cheered by the food brought by Kalutunah, broached to him their wishes. He listened gladly to the tales of the delight and charms of Upernavik sung by Petersen, but declined to attempt the ice journey across Baffin Bay, which was known to him only as a great, ice-filled ocean wherein had perished many of his tribe, as had lately the husband of the bird-eating widow. Neither would he sell his dogs, without whom he could neither travel nor hunt. To their surprise he consented to take one of the party north to the _Advance_. The commander of the boat-party, Petersen, decided to make the journey, and with him a seaman, Godfrey, was unwisely allowed to go, and the sledge was also accompanied to the native settlement at Netlik by two other men. The Netlik visit resulted in feasts for the men who stopped there, but Petersen and Godfrey turned back a few days later to the boat camp. They said that they were in fear of their lives from an Eskimo, Sip-su, with whom they had trouble. Hayes records the despair of the party at this situation, saying: "We are at the end of our plans and in two days more shall be at the end of our provisions. We are destitute--helpless. What _shall_ we do?" The day that food failed he rejoices thus: "Again the Eskimos appear to us more as our good angels than as our enemies. Kalutunah and another hunter came to us to-day and threw at our feet a large piece of walrus beef and a piece of liver." Doubtless through the friendly influence of the Angekok other hunters came to the starving whites from time to time with meat--even the dreaded bully, Sip-su--receiving in payment bits of wood or of iron. It was none the less clear that the party, unable to hunt itself, could not hope to live through the winter on meat from the natives who at times were themselves on the verge of starvation. It was decided to obtain a sledge and dogs wherewith to make the journey back to the brig.