Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/100



Six years' experience among the wild men of this barren coast had brought him to their level of filthy ugliness. His companions were his wife, who carried her first-born in a hood upon her back; her brother, a bright-eyed boy of twelve years, and "an ancient dame with voluble and flippant tongue," her mother. They were all dressed in skins, and, being the first Esquimaux we had seen whose habits remained wholly uninfluenced by contact with civilization, they were, naturally, objects of much interest to us all.

Hans led us up the hill-side, over rough rocks and through deep snow-drifts, to his tent. It was pitched about two hundred feet above the level of the sea, in a most inconvenient position for a hunter; but it was his "lookout." Wearily he had watched, year after year, for the hoped-for vessel; but summer after summer passed and the vessel came not, and he still sighed for his southern home and the friends of his youth.

His tent was a sorry habitation. It was made after the Esquimau fashion, of seal-skins, and was barely large enough to hold the little family who were grouped about us.

I asked Hans if he would go with us.

"Yes!"

Would he take his wife and baby.

"Yes!"

Would he go without them.

"Yes!"

Having no leisure to examine critically into the state of his mind, and having an impression that the permanent separation of husband and wife is regarded as a painful event, I gave the Esquimau mother the benefit of this conventional suspicion, and brought them both aboard, with their baby and their tent and