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I would point at the tent and say, "Tent," and he would say, "Tupek"; or at my sheath knife and say, "Knife," and he would say, "Chevik," and thus each learned the other's word for nearly everything about us and such words as "good," "bad," "wind" and so on; and in a few days we were able to make each other understand in a general way, with our mixed English and Eskimo.
He told us that Potokomik and the others, after suffering great hardships, had reached his tupek near the Mukalik the day before, but I could not understand his language well enough to draw from him any of the details of their trip out. At midnight Emuk made tea again and roused us up to partake of it and eat more dough cakes and beans with seal oil.
A ptarmigan was boiled and divided between Easton and me, and with that and bread and butter from Edmunds's box and hot tea we made a splendid supper. After a smoke all around, for the women smoke as well as the men, polar bear and reindeer skins were spread upon spruce boughs, blankets were given us for covering, and we lay down. Eleven of us crowded into the tupek and slept there that night.
The next day we crossed the False River, a wide stream at its mouth, but a little way up not over two hundred yards wide. At twelve o'clock a halt was made at an Eskimo tupek for dinner. The people were, as these northern people always are, most hospitable, giving us the best they had fresh venison and tea.
The Eskimos held a consultation here and then Potokomik told us that they were afraid of heavy snow and that it was thought best to cache everything that we had blankets, food and everything and with nothing to encumber us hurry on to a tupek that we should reach by dark, and that there we should find shelter and food.
You and I would not think it a very cheerful one, perhaps, but Pomiuk was accustomed to cold and he looked upon it as quite comfortable and cheerful enough. Ka-i-a-chou-ouk, Pomiuk's father, was a hunter and fisherman, as are all the Eskimos. He moved his tupek in summer, or built his igloo of blocks of snow in winter, wherever hunting and fishing were the best, but always close to the sea.
Grenfell found Pomiuk lying helpless and naked upon the rocks near the tupek of the Eskimo who had taken him in. The little lad was carried aboard the hospital ship. He was washed and his diseased hip dressed, he was given clean warm clothing to wear, and altogether he was made more comfortable than he had been in many months. Then, with Pomiuk as a patient on board, the ship steamed away.
Once we crossed an inlet where we had to climb over great blocks of ice that the tide in its force had piled there. Just at dusk the Eskimos halted. We had reached the place where the tupek should have been, but none was there. Afterward I learned that the people whom Potokomik expected to find here had been caught on their way from Whale River by the ice and their boat was crushed.
They took us into the tupek at once, which was extremely filthy and made insufferably hot by a sheet-iron tent stove. The women wore sealskin trousers and in the long hoods of their adikeys, or upper garments, carried babies whose bright little dusky-hued faces peeped timidly out at us over the mothers' shoulders.
And somewhere, back there, camped in his tupek, was his father. What a surprise his coming would be to his father! Pomiuk was carried ashore at the Post. Eskimos camped near-by crowded down to greet him and his mother and the other wanderers who had returned with them. It would be a short journey now in the boat to his father's fishing place and his own dear home in their snug tupek.
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