XV

A RATHER HECTIC START to the season's trading tapered down to more occasional bursts of activity. Evi completed his rehabilitation in my eyes by being the most successful Christmas hunter on the post, but in general the trapping did not fulfil the promise of the early days. Our team of three maintained a steady success, however, and we were soon able to devote more time to the English lessons, which had been most encouraging. One or two of them were progressing quite rapidly and we had had some good fun with our singing too. Nyla was concerning me, though. She was active and cheerful in the mornings, but then lost all her sparkle by the afternoon, becoming quiet and withdrawn.

Meanwhile, both Innuk and Rebecca kept on at me about the seal hunting in a discreet sort of way. One afternoon, when the three of us were in the post house, Innuk said, 'Powlussie told us that there are several seal holes beyond the narrows, but he did not have time to wait there because he wishes to visit his traps again.'

When I did not reply, she commented, to no one in particular, 'He does not hear me.'

Rebecca looked up from her sewing.

'Our hunting person would soon find a seal near by.'

Feeling obliged to speak, if only to stop them from swirling their conversation around me, I said, 'Why not take the dogs and go down there tomorrow?'

'Because we are not proper hunting people.'

This gave me an opening: 'I too am not a proper seal-hunting person.'

A sudden shout from outside announcing the approach of a visitor saved me from further pressures. The new arrival, Koojesse from Warwick Sound, had brought a seal with him, so I was able to make my escape.

By March, the trapping season was coming to a close, but with the lengthening days ahead we decided to squeeze in one last round of Frobisher Bay.

The journey up into the hills from the head of the bay began with a morning of smooth travel which gave promise of a quick passage to our inland snowhouse, but shortly after lunch our adventures began when we came across fresh bear tracks. The dogs were immediately alerted and set off with a great burst of energy, jerking the sledge behind them in a frantic effort to catch up with the unsuspecting animal. Even the women behaved, in true Eskimo fashion, with no little excitement at the prospect of confronting 'Nanook'.

My reaction was somewhat more subdued, but I did recognize the importance of an opportunity to replenish fresh meat supplies at a bad time of year, quite apart from saving myself from a cold trip to the seal holes. A careful examination of the tracks revealed that there were actually two bears, a mother and an older cub by the looks of things. The pair must have made a very early end to their winter hibernation for these animals were not often seen until April at the earliest.

Shortly the two came into view, making their way down to the plainland on the eastern side of the river without any great haste, presumably unaware of our presence. We cut the traces of two dogs nominated by Innuk as being the best hunters, releasing them to make full speed after our prey in the hope of slowing them down sufficiently for the rest of us to catch up. The speeding dogs caught up with the bears quite quickly, but did not cause them much delay until the larger one, becoming exasperated, stopped to deal with the annoyance by seizing one of its attackers and throwing it into the air to land some distance away. After one or two doses of this treatment, the hunters lost a certain amount of interest in the proceedings, so by the time the rest of us arrived a stalemate situation had been reached with the dogs running to and fro in front of the bears, yapping in frustration. We released the remainder of the team at once to join their fellows jumping up and down around their quarry.

The difficulty for me was to get in my shots without injuring the dogs, who were flashing about most dangerously in my line of vision. It was this thought that was exercising my mind as I checked my rifle and, seated on the box at the front of the sledge, took careful aim. My first shot was aimed straight at the larger bear's head, but to my amazement, apart from a slight shake of its body, the animal appeared to be totally unaffected. Almost at once another opportunity occurred, but this time, at the very moment I pulled the trigger, the cub lunged across and intercepted the bullet. Pandemonium broke out: both bears roared, the dogs barked furiously and the large creature broke off the engagement to dart off into the rocks while the other collapsed to lie motionless on the ground.

The growing darkness led us to break off the hunt at once, since in that sort of light we would be placed at a significant disadvantage. I did this with some trepidation.

On a night when we had been camped not so very far away, Beevee had told me of some of the dangers associated with the hunting of these great creatures. According to his rules, what I had just done was to commit one of the most serious blunders of all, for he had given a most solemn warning concerning the folly of injuring or killing a cub while its parent remained alive. The cub, although it had still been living with its mother, was already a good-sized animal if nowhere near as big as the parent. While the women completed the skinning and cutting-up process, I attempted to recall everything Beevee had said to me on that night. Gradually it all came back. In this kind of situation, the hunters must drive away from the scene at an angle to their proper course, in case the angry bear should try to pursue them. At a later stage, they should then take a sharp turn back in their true direction in order to confuse the infuriated bear, who, charging along with head on one side, would most probably miss the turn-off and career away on the wrong course.

My friends had clearly not heard of this piece of folklore, for they did not understand why I insisted on setting off in the wrong direction, but they accepted my decision without argument. We had travelled for about a mile on a course heading away from our true destination before I turned the team right round to head back over our own tracks before making a sharp turn towards our hill snowhouse. Whether this complicated manoeuvre would be successful in sending an irate bear astray remained to be seen. While not wishing for a night-time confrontation, there was good reason to hope for an encounter under more favourable conditions the following day.

Innuk and Rebecca showed no surprise in the morning at my announcement that we were going to travel back towards the spot where the confrontation between bears and dogs had taken place. We could not afford to waste this opportunity to add so significantly to our shrinking food supplies and it was not right to leave the area without making an effort to locate a bear which was almost certainly wounded.

Incredibly, crossing back over the first ridge, after less than a quarter of an hour's travel, we could see blood on the snow down below us. As we came to the bottom of the dip, we found the body of the bear behind a big boulder. It had not been dead very long, for although it was beginning to stiffen with the frost, we skinned and cut it up without too much trouble.

Innuk, who seemed suddenly to have found her voice again, proclaimed that it had been my remarkable achievement to have shot two bears with one bullet. I insisted, however, that this was highly improbable, as my first shot had definitely hit this bear but for some unknown reason had failed to cause immediate death. Innuk would not have it and became quite argumentative. There had been no bullet in the cub's head, she said, because it had gone straight through the softer skull to go on to kill the mother.

Despite these differences of opinion, we were a jovial group that night and with good reason. In this round alone we had added more than twenty pelts to our collection as well as securing this large stock of meat just at the vital period of the winter. The people of Ward Inlet would be very pleased to have a change of diet; indeed, it immediately had a very favourable effect on my friends, for that evening there was no restraining them. Rebecca even favoured us with a rendition of her 'hare stopping song', which I applauded quite freely, though admittedly more to show my approval of her character than in appreciation of the artistic content of her music.

Before returning to the post, we cached some of the bear meat carefully under the snow as there were no rocks available, then set several traps round about to discourage any foxes which might show an interest.

We returned to find that Nyla was not well. She had a low fever and aching limbs, so we had to put her to bed in a little side-room where she would be warm and undisturbed. I was cheered the next day when our faithful friends Nikoo and Polly came in to see how we were getting on. We were pleased to be able to reward them with a hunk of bear meat in return for the seal meat and fat they brought us. It had been my intention to go up to the meat cache with Rebecca to bring everything back to safety as it was fairly vulnerable just buried under the snow, but after they had done their trading, our visitors announced that they were going sealing, either at the holes or at the floe edge, according to how things turned out.

Happily for me, this presented Rebecca with an opportunity to go hunting for everyone's favourite food without me, for she could take half the dogs and Ookoo's sledge, returning to the post independently when the others went off. Meanwhile I could take the rest of the team and fetch the remainder of the bear meat from our snowhouse.

My first solo outing began well. The day was mild and sunny at the start so there was no reason to anticipate the near disaster which ensued. I got over to the camp without difficulty and found that nothing had been touched. There was one fox in a trap by the cache, but it had done no harm, and though there were fresh tracks about, they were heading down towards the long stretch of plain along the head of the bay.

With the drop in pulling power owing to the small number of dogs, the day was well on before I could have started back, so I spent the night in our little trapping home not wishing to overstretch my half team. The place was quite soulless without my friends. The snowhouse was cold with no lamps and I could see how hard it was going to be when and if it was necessary to resume solo or all-male travel arrangements. This line of thought lodged in my mind as I prepared to sleep, but with it, to shock me awake again, came the realization that my year at Frobisher was speeding towards its conclusion. Geordie's warnings about involvement, so easily pushed to back of my mind to be ignored as it suited me, sounded loud and clear. I knew it would not be easy to part with my friends when the time came. Although our worlds were miles apart, the ties that had formed between us, living together so interdependently, could not be broken without painful scars which would take time to heal.

The sun came up quite warmly as I started down towards Ward Inlet the next morning, and the warmth, combined with the after-effects of my wakeful night, must have lulled me off to sleep, in which state I fell off the sledge to roll down the bank and strike my head a severe blow on a sharp rock.

The blow knocked me out cold and the afternoon was well on by the time I came to. The sun had disappeared, but whether it had gone down or just slipped behind the clouds I could not tell as I had no idea how much time had elapsed since my accident. The dogs were nowhere to be seen, but a haze of snow hung in the air like a white blanket making accurate vision impossible beyond a yard or two.

My ability to cope with these difficult conditions was greatly impaired by my head injury, which, with the full return of consciousness, was causing me pain, nausea and dizziness. I felt as though I was operating in an unpleasant dream, my mind suspended half-way between snow-hazed reality and hallucination. Only the vaguest memories of my wanderings remained with me afterwards. I remember sheltering behind a rock with the strong impression that someone was talking to me, but so quietly that the sound of their voice drifted away on the air without ever forming into words or sentences. Then, moving on again for a while, I had an eerie feeling that something was crunching the snow beside or just behind me.

The muddle prevailing in my mind kept me from making any sensible effort to consider my position even half clearly, so instead of thinking about returning to our snowhouse, which could not have been far behind me, I was urged forward by all my remaining energy in the direction of the much more distant post. By the time night descended it no longer mattered; in a state of complete detachment, I had no idea as to where I was or in which direction my footsteps were taking me. Strangely enough, some part of me must still have been responding to the stirrings of instinct, for as it happened my route, haphazard though it was, did not become circular, as is often the case, but kept to a true enough course for home.

The night passed somehow, fortunately without the temperature dropping too low, but the wind increased with the day to whirl the snow about, blowing it uncomfortably into my face and down my neck. I remember an awful retching as nausea and sickness gripped me, then a sudden glimpse of the sun, which something inside tried to tell me was important, but my weakened mind could not grasp the significance before the light disappeared and dusk began to fall again. Whether my body could have withstood another night in this bleak wilderness is doubtful. More likely it would have followed my mind, which was already withdrawing to its last defences.

Rebecca found me. She asked me what had happened, but getting no reply, understood that my movements were purely mechanical. I might have lurched straight past her had she not taken hold of my arm to lead me to the sledge, and her questions, such as should we go home or back to our camp and other immediate queries, went unanswered. Rather frightened by my unstable appearance, Rebecca decided to take me home after first preparing a hot drink, which was mostly spilt on the snow owing to my lack of coordination. She then had a problem getting me anchored securely on the sledge because of my tendency to slip off on to the snow. Eventually she got me more or less wedged in, sitting in front of her, where she was less likely to lose me, and we journeyed home.

I remember nothing of this, but Rebecca gave me a full account of her stewardship afterwards, down to the last detail. She had returned from the ice almost at the same time as my dogs came down the hill with their traces trailing behind them.

The seal hunters had had a successful first day but the weather worsened during the afternoon, much as it had with me, so the next morning Nikoo had suggested that Rebecca should take two of the three seals they had secured and go home.

At first people thought that the dogs had just broken away, abandoning me somewhere up the hill, but when they found the sledge jammed between two rocks on the crest of the slopes they realized that the team had probably been wandering driverless all night. There was no sign of what had happened to me. Innuk and Rebecca had toiled up the hill together with all the dogs, but on reaching the other sledge split them up again so that Innuk could bring the meat back with a few of her team while Rebecca went on to search for me.

Innuk apparently took charge of me when we got home. She washed my head, then tied it up with a strip of material because she knew that this is how the kudloona treat wounds of any kind, before putting me to bed. Some time during the night I began to recover, coming back at first to a semi-conscious state, feeling very warm, which was hardly surprising as I was sandwiched between two human bodies. Gradually I registered that my friends had decided to restore me with the warmth of their own bodies. I did not stay awake long at that stage, but before dropping off again saw that Ookoo was sitting on the side right at the end of the bed and wondered if she had been singing or talking to me with that melodious voice of hers. Innuk and Rebecca were both sound asleep, but Ookoo was wakeful, and when she saw that my eyes had opened, she got quietly off the bed and went out of the room.

When I awoke next morning, Innuk and Rebecca were up and dressed, sitting on either side of the bed and watching me intently. Seeing me smile, they realized their attempts to restore me to health had been successful and started talking together rapidly, expressing their pleasure at my having been returned to them. Then Koolee came in with a friend and soon the room seemed full of people, all expressing their relief, which, being pleasant listening if a little embarrassing, soon lulled me off to sleep again as their murmuring voices dwindled gradually into silence.

The time passed in a haze of confusion and a headache which in the absence of painkillers of any kind simply had to be endured. Fortunately sleep intervened for reasonably long periods with beneficial effect. During this time, my friends were constantly attentive, determined not to allow me to slip from their grasp and completely undismayed at having to assist me in various basic ways. In one quite lucid spell, I woke to find Ookoo sitting by the bed talking to me, but with her words not seeming to make much sense, I asked her, 'What are you saying to me, Oookoodlea? I do not understand your words.'

She did not explain but replied, 'When you were a long way off, you asked me to talk to you because you said it was good for your ears. This is why I am speaking to you in this way.'

I accepted this without any comment, presuming that the sound of her voice had drifted into my mind to soothe my jangled nerves. I was grateful and later said so.

The fog in my head dulled my mind for about three days, then, one morning, it had gone, leaving only a slight ache behind the eyes and some heaviness.

One very ominous sound that had punctuated through the haze of my lost days was the sound of Nyla coughing. It was not a very noisy or vigorous cough, but dry, continual and to my fully conscious mind, alarming enough to send me searching for the thermometer and the cough mixture as soon as I had recovered sufficiently. The cough mixture, quite rightly seen as useless to combat the summer plague, now redeemed itself somewhat by having a moderating effect on Nyla's spasms, though it did not subdue them altogether.

With my returning health there came an opportunity, when all Innuk's and Rebecca's friends had gone across to the snowhouse one evening, to thank the two of them properly for their care and attention. They looked a bit taken aback at receiving my special thanks. Although human contact in the Innuit world lacked the romantic element present in my own, and even the bonds of affection seemed much weaker, there was a very real and deep-seated commitment in the family group to the support of one another without reservation or limitation. The precise boundaries of this commitment were not easy to define, but in my time of need I could feel their constant determination to maintain a link through to my mind and keep me from slipping away from them.

By mid April we had a steady stream of hunters coming in, all of them rounding off the season with a few furs to trade, but the excellent promise of the early weeks had not been fulfilled, reflecting the shortage of trappers. My decision not to hold Nikoo and Polly at the post, combined with the efforts of my little Frobisher Bay party, underlined the wisdom of the autumn planning, for jointly we contributed a very reasonable proportion of the post total. When the time came for Innuk, Rebecca and me to share out our booty for the season, we had caught seventy-five foxes between us. At $10 a pelt, this meant a credit of $250 each.

Innuk was to have the wolfskins, and Rebecca the cub bearskin, while the larger bear came to me. My partners were almost overcome by the size of their share, but I overruled their suggestions that more should come to me by assuring them that their efforts had greatly increased our total bag.

Meanwhile, the spring hunting had begun with Nikoo bringing us the first whitecoat of the year. The growing warmth of the sun brings a change in the hunting procedures. When the seals have their young, they make themselves a little house under the snow, by enlarging one of the breathing holes and clearing a space above, so that they can lie on top of the ice. Within her refuge, the mother gives birth to her young, a small replica of herself, but covered in a sort of white-green baby fur called a whitecoat. The seals are very vulnerable to their chief enemies at this time of year: the polar bears and the hunters' dogs. The polar bears are well equipped to locate the seal shelters by their sense of smell, which leads them unerringly to the spot, where they proceed to jump on the roof and crash into the shelter. The mother is frequently able to make good an escape but rarely manages to rescue her baby from the bear's clutches. The bear will then often use the baby as bait by seizing its rear flipper, pushing it back down into the water and swinging it backwards and forwards, coaxing the mother to come close enough to be grabbed with the bear's free paw.

The Eskimo hunters, always ready to pick up pointers from the highly respected polar bears, adopt a similar ploy for this early spring seal hunting, but because they do not have a bear's sense of smell, they use their best dog to track down the homes. The men break into the shelter by jumping in the same way as the bear and use the same tactics for capturing the mother, except that they can lower the whitecoat much further by securing the hind flipper to a good length of sealskin line.

Nikoo also brought the good news that he and Polly and Powlussie and his wife would be returning to our settlement, believing that the hunting should be good there as so few men had been operating. It was a relief to have real Eskimo hunters back in the fold who could superintend some proper sealing outings and therefore keep the homes supplied with meat and oil.

Nikoo and Powlussie rebuilt the snowhouses so that some of my winter lodgers could move back into more familiar surroundings. There was some doubt in my mind as to whether it was wise to let Nyla go back to the snowhouse, but it would have done no good to isolate her from her friends. Besides, she had responded fairly well to the cough mixture, which also helped her to sleep. I watched her sleep for a few minutes one day before she left the house. Her face was relaxed like a child's, with her lips slightly parted in a half-smile. She looked young and innocent but the flesh that had fallen away from her cheeks in the last year's awful onslaught had not come back. There was a look about her of a battle fought and lost.

With our new organization and the adequate supply of food available, it had been reasonable to suppose that my hunting services, such as they were, would no longer be in demand. Innuk had even stopped talking about seals, but then Rebecca came in one afternoon to fetch something for her mother and said as she was leaving, 'The people are going sealing on the ice tomorrow. Should the dogs go out to be fed?'

I walked straight into the trap that was concealed within this apparently innocent question.

'Yes, it will be good for them to be out hunting with the other teams.'

'The hunters will be leaving early in the morning. Shall we go with them or wait and follow afterwards?'

This question puzzled me. Rebecca was perfectly capable of deciding what time to leave for a hunting expedition, but I played along, saying, 'It will be best to go with the others.'

My assumption that Rebecca had used the plural 'we' in the sense of being inclusive of herself and the dogs was now shown to have been foolishly optimistic, if not downright stupid.

'I will fetch you when the dogs have been harnessed then.'

So that was that.

A fine day turned the routine hunt for food and oil into a camp outing because, in the morning, it seemed that nearly everybody wanted to come. Our three sledges were loaded with people, but we made a sort of race of it out as far as the narrows. Innuk and Rebecca, running up behind our team to urge them on, kept us in the lead until we were well through the narrows, but I suspected the other hunters were just being polite. After that, we spread away from each other to cover different territories.

We aimed towards a point of land about seven miles or so out from the post which the women thought would be the most likely spot for our hunt. Nikoo travelled on towards the gap between our big island and the smaller ones to the south, while Powlussie stationed himself between the two of us.

My friends each detached a dog from the sledge with its line then went off in different directions to see what they could find while Koolee and I remained to look after the team. Innuk's dog galloped off at full speed, dragging her behind him, and in a matter of minutes was scratching away at the snow not far away. Koolee ran over to fetch the dog, then came back to tell me that her mother wanted me to go over to break into the den because she was not heavy enough.

The whitecoat was inside and for a moment I feared that Innuk was going to ask me to fish for the mother, but thankfully Rebecca had seen what had happened and ran over to do the fishing. We were well rewarded when our hunter hooked a big seal on to the ice. This was our main success of the day, for though Innuk managed to locate another whitecoat with her best sealing dog, we could not tempt its mother to come to the rescue.

Powlussie and Nikoo had three seals between them, as well as the whitecoats, giving us a satisfactory bag for the day to replenish our stocks. It had been a beautiful spring day and I was already in high spirits that evening when Rebecca brought me a really lovely pair of moccasins. The design on the left slipper depicted me waiting for the wolves that day up in the hills, while on the right one was an illustration of the three of us standing beside our slain foes. To make the triumph complete, she had depicted all three wolves as having been killed.

She would take nothing for her work, this time refusing completely, saying that it had been good of us to have allowed her to come along and earn all the money. I tried to tell her that she had earned all the money herself by hard work and that without her we would not have done so well, but she just looked at me. Not knowing what else to do to show how much her gift was appreciated, I went over, took her by the hand and kissed her on the cheek.

I continued to visit Nyla every day through the late spring to check her stock of cough medicine, take her temperature and keep her believing that she would be back to her old self again by the summer. Secretly I feared she would be gone long before the geese flew south again.

The melting of the snow and lengthening of the days made me realize how soon my time at Ward Inlet would be over. I had been so immersed in the day-to-day problems confronting us since those dreadful weeks of sickness and their after-effects that there had been little time for me to worry about my coming departure. As the weeks had gone by, I had become increasingly attached to my friends of the winter, which made the thought of my leaving less and less welcome. With Nyla slipping away from us, it seemed that the long shadow of that ill-fated summer would now stretch out to cover my whole year in a final backlash of the battle we thought we had won.

Innuk especially had been my constant companion. The mission would probably have said that I ought to have married her, but it would have been impossible for me to live for ever as an Eskimo hunter, just as it would have been impossible for her to live happily in any other environment. Our union seemed somehow to become inevitable, necessary and entirely suitable yet without any permanence. Now the penalty of a painful parting had to be suffered.

I had not had this kind of involvement with Rebecca, yet her constant faith had created a need in me to try and live up to her expectations.

Innuk had clearly been considering her own position, for one morning, while we were talking in the kitchen, she suddenly inquired, 'Shall we be going to Kumarkbik for the trapping again?'

This unexpected question floored me for a moment. It had never occurred to me that my friend had been thinking of the present situation as anything but temporary. The Innuit knew that traders seldom stayed long at one post, especially at the more remote places like Frobisher Bay, but her interest was quite justified and deserved a serious answer. Knowing this, it was wrong of me to temporize when my reply could have been definite. I said, 'When the ice has gone they will probably send the Ungava to take me away to Lake Harbour.'

'Do you not wish to stay here?'

'Yes. I would like to stay but will have to go if they tell me to.'

Innuk saw my probable departure as a reflection on her own merits. She said, 'I cannot have children any more. Suzhie was not born easily and there cannot be another.'

I began to realize how little I really knew about my friend. It seemed incredible that she might think that her inability to have any further children could in any way lower her in my estimation or bring about my departure. My confusion must have shown in my face, but misinterpreting the cause she said, 'Ooleepika is a younger person.'

My astonishment that Innuk should apparently be openly recommending Rebecca's qualities as a wife gave way gradually to an entirely new line of thought. Looking back over our winter travels, it dawned on me that Innuk had been deliberately encouraging the development of a relationship between the three of us because of her own fancied shortcomings. Quite possibly the people of Frobisher Bay already thought of Rebecca as a junior to Innuk. There could be no point in dwelling on these thoughts now that the year was nearly up. I said, in an attempt to extricate myself from this extraordinary conversation in a diplomatic way, 'Ooleepika must marry a hunter. She is a good Eskimo girl.'

Whether Innuk would have accepted this as a terminating point for our discussion is in some doubt, for though she was not an aggressive person, she was quite capable of pursuing her objectives with determination. However, at that moment the door burst open to reveal an agitated boy who had been sent across by Ookoo to tell us that Nyla was bleeding badly in a coughing fit.

We rushed over to the tent (in the warmer weather the snowhouses had become too dilapidated to be used). Nyla's paroxysm had quietened down, but the evidence of her haemorrhage was all around her on the deerskins. Deep down, I had suspected for some time what the trouble was, but in the absence of any definite proof had persuaded myself that her symptoms could indicate some less mortal illness. Now that last faint hope had gone and it was not within my power to deaden the symptoms or in any way lessen the suffering. Ookoo was talking quietly to the girl as she cleaned up the blood and washed her face, so there was not much for me to do except pour out a larger dose of the cough mixture. Nyla was breathing very rapidly and in obvious distress, so when Ookoo finished cleaning up, I tried artificial respiration for a while to try and restore her breathing pattern. She relaxed gradually and some colour came back into her cheeks as she drifted into sleep.

The swift progress of the deadly disease was fearful to watch. To see a young person disintegrating with no possibility of being able to help, except in very minor ways, was like a form of torture. What a cruel fate that after her long, practically unaided battle to live, so malignant an enemy should rise up to destroy her.

***

It was not long before another perfect spring day encouraged the hunters to try their luck at the floe edge. It occurred to me to return Rebecca's kindness in making the moccasins by asking her to come out hunting with me, instead of the reverse which was usually the case. Innuk went over to the house to ask her and the girl appeared like a shot out of a gun. She burst into the kitchen and asked, 'Am I to come hunting with you, Issumatak?'

I hastened to reassure her, 'Yes. The sun will bring the seals out down by the islands.'

My decision to go out was not made entirely from gratitude. Looking out over the bay through my binoculars, I had noted several seals basking in the sunshine. This meant that the time had come for a new and for me vastly preferable form of hunting. Instead of jumping about on the little snow shelters and using the baby to ensnare the mother, now it was a straight-out stalk. The idea was to use a pair of binoculars to select a suitable victim, then, with the aid of a portable screen, approach to a range where the seal could be killed with one shot.

The screen consisted simply of a piece of white material fixed on to a frame and pushed in front of oneself as cover to prevent the seal taking fright. A hole in the middle of the material allowed the rifle to be pushed through with sufficient space to line up the sights. The first shot had to be effective, because if the prey were merely wounded it would slip easily back into the water over the frozen blood never to be seen again.

In days gone by, the Eskimo hunters, not having any white material, had done the stalking without a screen. Instead they pretended to be another seal worming its way across the ice by raising and lowering their heads at about the same frequency as the intended victim. Sometimes, as they got closer, they used a chant to persuade the seal to remain stationary long enough for them to be able to use their rifle or spear. As might be imagined, this method was rather long-winded and not always successful despite a long and patient shuffle across the watery ice.

Beevee once told me a tragic story in connection with this technique about a sealer in Pond Inlet who had brought his son with him to look after his rather restless team of dogs. During the afternoon, the boy wandered away from the sledge to play. Pretending to be a seal enjoying the spring sunshine, he lay down on the ice and began raising and lowering his head. Suddenly, with incredible speed, the dogs were up and off, growling and straining as though they had gone mad. Their wild excitement affected two other teams waiting unattended near by who bolted after them. By the time the boy saw what was happening, there were nearly thirty dogs pounding savagely towards him. The child screamed. Everyone dropped their harpoons and ran, desperately striving to head the team off. His father fired his rifle, shouting as though he had just killed a seal in the hope of distracting the snarling hunters. The boy got up, still yelling and shouting, but too late to save himself. The huskies tore into him, so that he went down again, disappearing beneath the swarm of ferocious, drooling dogs.

The hunters arrived quickly on the scene, but it was several moments before they could drive off the hunt-maddened teams. The pitiful remains of the partially devoured child were lifted off the bloodstained snow, then laid carefully on to Beevee's sledge and covered with a deerskin.

Rebecca had not made herself a screen yet so I said that we would share mine and take turns with the stalking. By a stroke of luck, my first stalk was successful. Although my approach had been very cautious, the seal altered position at the last moment, then obligingly turned its head round to look in my direction just as I pulled the trigger to bring about its own destruction, clean and immediate.

Rebecca, who was quite the best possible hunting companion, behaved as though no one had ever shot a seal before when, arriving with the dogs a minute or two later, she jumped off the sledge to rush over and express her admiration. Her genuine delight over this seal was so infectious that it overwhelmed all my reservations and cautions, so I took her by the hands and hugged her as we jumped up and down on the ice.

In a few moments, we came back to earth again to get on with our business of skinning the seal and decided to feed the dogs right away.

Rebecca wanted me to do the stalking again, but I insisted that she take her turn as arranged. There were two seals apparently sleeping close to the western shore of our inlet, so we moved off in that direction and my companion set off to creep towards them.

Rebecca made a good approach towards her prey, except that she was awkwardly placed with regard to the seal's head at which she had to aim. Manoeuvring without alerting the prey to its danger at close range was not easy, but the girl crawled patiently round to correct her angle, took careful aim and fired. The seal rolled towards the water, but Rebecca, dropping everything else, rushed at it with her hook just in time to haul it back on to the ice. I hurried the team over to the scene, where we celebrated the second kill of the morning, though with slightly more restraint this time.

We had had a good day, and yet throughout it my talk with Innuk had been weighing on my mind. My answer the other day had not been entirely honest, for it was no use maintaining the pretence that my coming departure was a matter of chance. The arrangements were definite and final as made last year when the powers that be had decided that my appointment at Frobisher was to be for one year, followed by removal to Southampton Island in the north-west corner of Hudson's Bay. Perhaps it was my subconscious wish to remain here with these good friends who had supported me so well, certainly it would never have occurred to me at the same time the previous year that leaving was going to be so difficult. Now the time was near, it was hard to know what to say in a way that would not hurt their feelings or let them think that it did not matter to me. When we had finished our tea on our return, I tried to explain to them both by saying, 'The big company boss told me last year in his letter that they would be taking me away this summer, so when the Ungava arrives I shall have to return to Lake Harbour with them.'

'Can you not tell them that you wish to stay with us here? Then they will send you back again.'

'They would just get angry if I said that, but they would still make me go.'

Innuk did not reply to this, but Rebecca put her word in.

'Now that so many of our hunters are dead, would they not allow you to stay and help us?'

'They would not think that I am a proper hunting person.'

The women fell silent, probably accepting the fact of my departure. I did not feel that my friends could realize from this brief conversation how much I had appreciated their company and support, but we had to move on to practical details.

'You both have many foxes of credit in my book. Do you want to spend that now or wait until the new stock arrives?'

Rebecca had already made up her mind. She said at once, 'My father's rifle is very old and does not shoot well. Is there enough for me to buy a new one?'

I was pleased to be able to help by buying the rifle at cost price through my own account, which would mean that she would only have to pay about half the price. The company would not approve of such a move, but Rebecca had been a great help to us and deserved some extra recognition. She accepted happily and Innuk came down to the store with us to watch her make her choice. She deliberated quite expertly over the two rifles that were available, then made her selection on strictly practical grounds, though it somehow seemed wrong that a fine girl like this, probably only about my own age, should have to be buying a rifle in order to keep a home going instead of having a hunter of her own. Rebecca bought a few other items, mainly for her mother, then went off home with her new weapon, cartridges and the rest, still leaving a substantial credit for future use. Innuk made no purchases so would be quite a wealthy lady, at least for the coming year.

***

We lost Nyla at the end of June. Late one evening, Ookoo came over because her patient had had another terrible paroxysm of coughing. That Ookoo had come to the end of her resources was in itself an indication that we were losing control of the situation and one glance at the sleeping platform where Nyla lay was confirmation enough. The skins were in disarray where the girl had pushed them aside in her battle for air and, as she coughed, blood spattered in all directions.

Fully aware of the futility of trying to fight death with cough medicine, I nevertheless got the girl to swallow a dose, then tried to counter the laboured breathing with a period of artificial respiration. Shortly the awful gasping relaxed a little and Nyla lay propped up on my knees in a kind of exhausted peace, but when I tried to substitute a folded deerskin for my knees, the tears began to run down her cheeks in silent despair. Perhaps she was weeping for all the years she would never see or for the children she would never have. Perhaps the tears mourned the mother who could not be there to comfort her daughter in those last hours, for a hand reached slowly out from under the skins to grope for mine, and this so distressed me that the kindly Ookoo reached across and gripped my arm.

In a little while, the crying stopped, and suddenly Nyla spoke in a hoarse whisper, 'When am I going to die Issuma?'

I could only answer truthfully, 'I don't know, Nyla, I don't know.'

'You will live to be an old man. Why do I have to die so soon?'

There was no answer to this, and as if to fill the heavy silence, Ookoo began speaking and her deep soothing voice seemed to give the sick girl some sort of calming reassurance for her eyes closed and her breathing became more even.

I looked down at the deep-sunk eyes, the skeletal cheeks, the bloodstained lips and my mind went back to the night of the storm and the bonnie Eskimo girl who had helped us so efficiently. What a long battle she had had to endure, only to have to die by inches in the end.

There was silence in the home except for Ookoo's voice. The lamp began to flutter and outside a dog barked, then at last Nyla fell asleep for a time, and though I knew that my help was only minimal, there was some satisfaction in feeling her hand slipping out of mine and watching her face relax in peace.

I hardly knew what to expect the next morning, for it had seemed unlikely that Nyla would last more than a few hours, so it was no surprise to find her already detached from the world in a restless coma, though still battling for air with laboured and rattling gasps, a sure sign that her ordeal was coming to its end. She did not react at all when Ookoo wiped her face with a flannel, but her breathing became more and more difficult, so that her back arched with each desperate effort to draw in air, until her strength gave out and with one long, rough sigh of despair, she was gone.

We buried Nyla up on the river bank beside Suzhie that afternoon, but this time I did not read the poem for it was clear that she had not had that sort of attitude to dying. Instead we gathered round the bend in the river, then, with the damp mist hovering about us, sang the hymn which had almost become a theme song for our little group since that night we had marched home from the hare hunt beneath the northern lights. We sang as loudly as we could, because, regardless of whether Nyla could rightly be classed as a 'Christian Soldier' or not, if one had to die so young, it was better to march away with your head in the air than to crawl into eternity on your knees.

The sea ice soon swept out of the harbour. The winter covering had hung on so long that it was pitted all over with black pools of water, but showed no sign of movement until one morning our old adversary the north wind took a hand in the matter, rushing down the gulley and out into the cove, smashing the ice on either side of the narrows before sweeping it away into Frobisher Bay.

Nikoo and Powlussie had been hard at work on my boat for most of the previous week, repairing the damaged timbers, caulking, puttying and painting to restore it completely after the damage sustained during our expeditions the previous fall. We were tempted to push it straight down into the water when everything was dried and set, but decided to wait until the weather moderated for our first outing.

We had a surprise a day or two later when a boat arrived from Twerpukjuak, but they told us that the strong wind had cleared the ice right over to the far side of the west coast, leaving them an open passage all the way down. They brought us a box of eggs of various kinds to provide us with a welcome change of diet.

A shock, but a welcome one, was to see that, both Annawa and Savik were members of the party. It turned out that Ali had after all gone up the coast. She must have had some quality that was not apparent to the eye, for her hunter friend up there had so pined for her company that he made a special trip down by sledge at the end of the winter to lure her back, which so astonished Savik and the others that she was gone before they had had time to react.

The biggest and best surprise of all was that Savik had come to ask Ookoo to be his wife and to take her family back to Warwick Sound with him.

She accepted gladly, thus settling the long-running dispute and ensuring that she would now have a hunter and a home of her own, all of which was excellent news.

We got our boat safely into the water, and then of course we had to have an outing to celebrate the launch. The whole gang wanted to come with us, so we packed in as many as we could but had to take the Twerpukjuak craft as well to accommodate the overflow.

This was to be an entirely carefree day out; we would, as always, seize any opportunity which might arise to stock up the larder or the fuel supply, but it was clear from the level of noise as we set out that everyone intended to enjoy themselves to the full.

Our first stop was made at the island to allow the young people to hunt for eggs.

Nikoo and one or two of the others went off again to see if they could find any seals, while Innuk, Rebecca, Ookoodlea, Polly and Koolee sat on the rocks with me. They were talking about some of the events of the past winter, but in such a way as to suggest that they had not yet fully realized our days together were coming to an end, or that my departure would mean a change in conditions for most of them.

Our extraordinary year together, brought about by the disasters which had almost overwhelmed us, would never be repeated in any of our lives, but thankfully my friends had the ability to accept whatever circumstances life imposed upon them. Our experiences had had a greater effect upon me than upon my companions, for I had never before lived as part of such a close and interdependent group for whom, for a time, simply staying alive had been the only real objective.

As they talked, my mind went back to my first days at Ward Inlet. At that time these women would have seemed all much the same to me, now I knew and respected each of them. Innuk, with quiet patience pursuing her objectives to a successful conclusion. Rebecca, the willing worker, whose long slender fingers indicated artistic talents which were never likely to be properly developed. Polly, who would have been an outstanding person in any community. Koolee, the bright, inquisitive child. Ookoodlea, whose ability to help the sick was highly respected, yet who never pretended to be anything more than an Eskimo housewife.

I lay back on the rock pondering such thoughts while Rebecca fanned the flies away from my face. My faithful Eskimo friend. I suppose it was because she flattered me so and said such nice things about me, but I was going to miss her as much as Innuk who had been my closest companion.

Sleep must have overcome me, for suddenly Rebecca was shaking me, 'Issuma, Issuma.'

My mind flashed back momentarily to our snow homes at the head of the bay in a confusion of bears and wolves, but it was only to tell me that the hunters were down on the beach with their seals and should we boil the kettle?

Later on, we went across to the mouth of the river to hook fish out of the pools with Powlussie's home-made gaffe. It was great fun and when we returned home Innuk cooked a lovely fish supper to round off the day.

I am glad that we had that last happy outing together, all of us, in the sunshine of a summer's day, for just a little more than twenty-four hours later I would pass that same river mouth again, but this time in the Ungava on the first leg of my passage to Hudson's Bay.

After the excitements of the day, we had a quiet evening, although nearly everybody came up to the house to talk about one matter or another. Polly, who was sitting at the table and surprisingly had not yet produced her bit of mirror, suddenly looked up and motioned the rest of us to silence. In the quiet we could hear the distant, but unmistakable bark of the Ungava's engine as the vessel approached our harbour.

My thoughts had been much occupied over these last days with the problem of what to give my special friends as a parting gift. They both had a reasonable nest-egg of money from the winter furs and to increase this sum seemed too impersonal. I wanted the present to be something special to show them how much I had appreciated their company and support during the winter. The only things in my possession that would tell them this in a way they would understand were my two rifles, so when they came into the kitchen to tidy things up, I told them that this was what I wanted to do, giving Innuk the big rifle and Rebecca the .22

My belief that such presents would impress my friends was correct. They looked utterly astonished, but in a few moments their expressions relaxed and I could see that they had understood what I was trying to tell them. Innuk handed the big gun back to me, saying very quietly, 'A woman should not take the rifle of a hunter.'

I managed to persuade Rebecca to take the smaller weapon, but Innuk, quite adamant about the other, asked if she could have the playing cards and the draughts game instead.

Everybody gathered outside the house to say goodbye when the time came. After shaking hands with them all, I gave my two trapping companions a big hug each before turning quickly to go down towards the shore where Nikoo was waiting with the dinghy.

The Ungava's engines were already running and we were on our way before Nikoo had even reached the shore.

I stood staring at the little group of people who were waving and shouting to me and sent a last, silent message over the water.

'Goodbye, Innuk. Goodbye, Rebecca. I know that I shall never see you again but you will not be forgotten. Thank you for being such lovely people and may the good spirits watch over you all the rest of your days.'

Fittingly for such a sad departure, the sun had hidden somewhere behind a drizzling mist that now closed around us, like a curtain falling on a year of my life, as we headed through the narrows towards Frobisher Bay and Hudson Straits.