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Updated: June 6, 2025
Early, two Esquimaux men, Joas and Uiverunna, came in their kayaks to pay us a visit. They, with their families, inhabited some tents we had seen yesterday. Brother Kohlmeister spoke seriously to them on the necessity of conversion, especially to Joas, who had Christian parents, and as a child, was baptized at Okkak.
And now one day they had sent their bird arrows showering down among the birds, and were busy placing the killed ones together in the kayaks. And then suddenly a kayak came in sight on the sunny side. And when that stranger came nearer, they looked eagerly to see who it might be.
Ippegoo and Arbalik, with the sons of Okiok, tried their best to save the two kayaks, for well they knew the danger of being left on the ice without the means of escaping; but the suddenness of the disruption, the width of the various channels they had to leap, and the instability of the masses, compelled them, after much delay, to drop their burdens and save themselves.
A little after, he caught sight of his dead brother, and then his mother said: "Why do you wish to return to earth again? Your kin are here. And look down on the sea-shore; see the great stores of dried meat. Many seal are caught here, and it is a good place to be; there is no snow, and a beautiful open sea." The sea lay smooth, without the slightest wind. Two kayaks were rowing towards land.
When land was reached they leaped out of their kayaks and crowded round the strangers. It is probable that they would have seized them and their possessions at this point, but the tall strapping figure of Leo, and his quiet manner, overawed them. They held back while the india-rubber boat was being carried by Leo and Anders to a position of safety.
The day following that on which the wives of Simek and Okiok, and the mothers of Arbalik and Ippegoo with the spinster Sigokow arrived, the southern Eskimos resumed their route northward, and the pursuers continued their journey to the south the former in their sledges over the still unmelted ice-foot along the shore; the latter, in kayaks, by a lead of open water, which extended as far as the eye could reach.
It wos about five years ago, more or less, I wos out in Baffin's Bay, becalmed off one o' the Esquimau settlements, when we wos lookin' over the side at the lumps of ice floatin' past, up got a walrus not very far off shore, and out went half-a-dozen kayaks, as they call the Esquimau men's boats, and they all sot on the beast at once.
The two men remain a week in a camp to make their kayaks seaworthy. They have still bread for quite a month. Only six dogs are left; when only three remain they will have to harness themselves to the sledges. In a large strip of open water they shoved out the kayaks, fastened them together with skis, and paddled them along the margin of the ice.
But it was in the storm hunt over the kelp-beds that the wildest work went on. Through the fiercest storm scudded bidarkies and kayaks, meeting the herds of sea-otter as they drove before the gale. To be sure, the bidarkies filled and foundered; the kayaks were ripped on the teeth of the rock reefs. But the sea took no account of its dead; neither did the Russians.
And now the boy jumped down from the iceberg and swam to the kayaks and began tugging at their paddles, so that they turned over. But the men righted themselves again with their throwing sticks. And at last he was forced to hold them down himself under water till they drowned. And soon there were left no more of all those many kayaks, save only one.
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