Page:Life with the Esquimaux - 1864 - Volume 2.djvu/299

280 should get him to the vessel as soon as possible. Tunutderlien and Jennie were well, the latter as evil-disposed as ever. Sharkey, however, had to receive sad news. By his former wife he had a child, which had been given in care to another Innuit. This child would occasionally, by various acts such as are common to young children, annoy its guardian, who accordingly conveyed it to the top of a lonely and rocky mountain, sewed it up in a seal-skin, and threw it down a deep cleft, leaving it there to be frozen to death, and there its little corpse was afterwards discovered by some Innuits. We found plenty of food among the people here, and blubber, the commercial value of which would have been some hundreds of dollars, and yet all soon to be wasted. One ookgook which they had captured must have weighed quite 1,500 pounds, and its blubber was two inches thick.

The following day. May 19th, finding that Koojesse was too sick to accompany me farther, and that Sharkey had to remain with his wife, I made arrangements with the Innuit "Bill," who agreed to take Henry and myself, with my dogs, to Oopungnewing. After farewells with my Innuit friends, away we went, all six of us (Bill would have his wife and two children along too), down the bay; but in the evening a heavy snow-storm came on, and, though we tried to breast it for some time, we were at length obliged to give in, and encamp, after midnight, on Clarke's Island, which is between Jones's Cape and Chapel's Point.

The next morning, the 20th, we again proceeded, the travelling, in consequence of rough ice, being very bad, and, on arriving at a point near Twerpukjua, we were obliged to make our course over a narrow neck of land, called the Pass of Ee-too-nop-pin, which leads directly to the Countess of Warwick's Sound. The channel between Niountelik and Oopungnewing was also much broken up, and it was only with great difficulty we reached the latter-named place in the afternoon. Here I found numerous Innuit families, and also heard that Captain B had visited the place, but had gone down to Cape True fifteen days before. "Bill," my