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When I finally roused myself I found the boat tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees and my head at the lower incline. All the water in the boat had drained to that side and my shoulders and neck were immersed. The tide was out and we were stranded on the rocks. It was bright moonlight. Kumuk and Iksialook got up and with the kettle disappeared over the rocks.
We followed him toward where Kumuk was shouting, through a bit of bush, down a bank, across a frozen brook and up a slope, where we found a miserable little log shack. No one was there. It was a filthy place and snow had drifted in through the openings in the roof and side.
Some distance up the stream its valley was wooded by just enough scattered spruce trees to hold the snow, and wallowing and floundering through this was most exhausting. During the day Kumuk proposed to the other Eskimos that they take all the food and leave the white men to their fate. They had rifles while we had none, and we could not resist. Potokomik would not hear of it.
He remained our friend. Kumuk did not like the small ration that I dealt out, and if they could get the food out of our possession they would have more for themselves. That night a snow house was built, with the exception of rounding the dome at the top, over which Potokomik spread his blanket; but it was a poor shelter, and not much warmer than the open.
Men less inured to cold and privation would surely have succumbed. They were making their final fight when at last they stumbled into Emuk's tupek. Kumuk sat down and cried like a child. It was two weeks before any of them was able to do any physical work. They looked like shadows of their former selves when I saw them at Whale River.
After our tent was pitched and the Eskimos had spread the Explorer's sail as a shelter for themselves, Kumuk and Iksialook left us to look for driftwood and, in half an hour, returned with a few small sticks that they had found on the shore.
Potokomik was really a remarkable man and proved most faithful to us. It is, in fact, to his faithfulness and control over the others, particularly Kumuk, that Easton and I owe our lives, as will appear later.
The next in importance was Kumuk. Kumuk means louse, and it fitted the man's nature well.
Finally the Eskimos stopped in a gully by a little patch of spruce brush four or five feet high, and while Iksialook foraged for handfuls of brush that was dry enough to burn, Potokomik and Kumuk cut snow blocks, which they built into a circular wall about three feet high, as a wind-break in which to sleep, and Easton and I broke some green brush to throw upon the snow in this circular wind-break for a bed.
Potokomik had been rechristened by a Hudson's Bay Company agent "Kenneth," and Kumuk, in like manner, had had the name of "George" bestowed upon him, but Iksialook bad been overlooked or neglected in this respect, and his brain was not taxed with trying to remember a Christian cognomen that none of his people would ever call or know him by.
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