die. There were rabbits everywhere. I got all I wanted in a snare line. At one of the stores frozen rabbits were piled up like cordwood. I bought a rabbit-skin sleeping bag from an Indian for fifteen dollars. The skins had each been cut spirally in a long narrow strip and then woven—one hundred and eighty skins in that one blanket. I made a sleeping bag out of it and used it in various parts of the north for many years.
I was told that when a dogteam made a trip anywhere that winter, the dogs were easily fed by the dead rabbits found along the way.
Stories of dogteam trips were working on my imagination. I had vaguely planned to go on north sometime, but now my plans began to take shape. I decided I must leave the friendly people of Moose Factory and go northward—whenever the opportunity came along.
In the late afternoon of January 27, a bitterly cold day, I was working on some specimens in my room when I heard a shout outside: “The Rupert House dogs have come!”
I hurried out. There in front of the store was the mail packet, a team of ten dogs. The dogs lay resting on the snow, and beside the sled stood the driver, the same Willie Morrison who had been our guide in our summer canoe travel. Willie was trembling with cold, and black patches on his frostbitten face suggested what he had been through. He was waiting for his partner Charlie Hester to find out where they were to put the dogs. When Charlie came out of the store, they quickly unharnessed the dogs and tied them to the palings of a nearby fence. Someone from the store brought out a bundle of frozen rabbits and chopped them apart with an axe. At the sight of food the dogs leaped to their feet, tugging at their chains and howling in chorus. They kept it up until the men had tossed a couple of chunks to each dog. They seized the frozen carcasses and gulped them down in an unbelievably short time—then looked for more. But when they realized that no more was coming, they calmly curled up to sleep in the snow. The sun was setting by now; it was growing dark.
I had run out thinly clad and was feeling the bite of the cold. The sight of Willie shivering there and the dogs’ frozen repast sent a chill through me, and I was glad to run back into Mrs. Moore’s warm kitchen. My enthusiasm for a dogsled trip north cooled.
But plans had been made, and on the morning of January 30, when the mail team was ready to go back to Rupert House, 100 miles east, I was ready, too. This would be my first experience with dog-sledding. As we were saying good-bye, with a group assembled beside the flat fourteen-foot sled, I realized more keenly than ever what my stay with the kindly people at Moose Factory had meant to me. It was like leaving home again. Mrs. Moore had carefully wrapped a cake for my birthday in March. To the last minute she was looking out for my welfare, even braiding a pair of garters for my moleskin leggings while the dogs were being harnessed!
With a shout from Willie and a shove to loosen the runners, we were off on the long trail. The familiar landscape of Moose Factory drew away; the line of buildings grew smaller. We passed island after island where I had hunted—Pilgrim, Middleborough, and finally Ship Sands. The river widened; the north shore became a faint blue line in the distance. Then we were fairly out on “the coast,” where the white expanse of James Bay spread to the horizon. Here the storm-driven snow was packed hard and the pulling was easier for the dogs. We went through Cabbage Willows and past Blackberry Point; then one of the landmarks of this region, Sherrick’s Mount, loomed up blue and white in the winter landscape.
We trotted along beside the loaded sled, the two guides in front to steady the load in rough places. Occasionally one of us would hop on for a ride to rest a bit, but not for long. The sled was heavily loaded, and furthermore we had to run to keep warm.
That first day runs in my memory as a pleasant dream. The novelty of this new kind of travel was fascinating. We pitched the tent that night at the edge of the woods, ate a hearty meal of fried moose meat, biscuits and tea, and rolled into our rabbit-skin blankets—what greater comfort could one wish?
Now, in retrospect, I want to be back again, with a loaded sled creaking its way over rough ice or running smoothly and quietly over level places, with a good team of dogs trotting steadily in front, muzzles low, tails waving high—and the snow stretching away until broken by the blue line of woods where we might camp for the night.
I never tired of watching the husky dogs at work. Hitherto I had only seen them loafing about camps in summer, filthy, mangy-looking beasts, kicked and beaten at every turn. They certainly seemed like unpromising creatures. As winter came they improved in appearance, but I had never seen them at work until this trip. Just as I had admired the Indians in their performance in the rapids, so now I admired the huskies. It is well to withhold judgment of anyone until you have seen him at his best. These dogs—wellfurred, tireless, efficient—were at their best in harness, on the winter trail.
As we traveled on, each day seemed colder than the last. There was always a wind. Finally, as we struggled along, wild thoughts would shoot through my mind: “Can we keep this up long enough? Will that flimsy tent be protection enough against this furious weather?”
We had no thermometer, but I learned later that on at least one night it had been forty degrees below zero. The guides complained very little, yet they were not dressed as warmly as I, who had a couple of layers of warm woolen clothing topped by a parka and leggings of Hudson Bay moleskin cloth. Charlie, the silent one, had an ordinary winter coat and a small scarf around his throat. His face was bare to the wind, but he didn’t get a single frostbite. Willie, who wore a hood over his head Eskimo style, was frequently frostbitten, further disfiguring his misshapen face. But he also seemed indifferent to it all. In all my days with Willie, I could not see that he was ever moved either by pleasure or pain.
It was a great sight when, on the fourth day, we made out the snow-covered roofs of Rupert House in the distance. In a little while the guides began to adjust their caps and clothing, and to check that the load was all lashed in neatly. The arrival of the mail packet was an important event at these northern posts, and the guides were preparing for their dashing entry into the village. The dogs understood, too, and increased their speed until we could hardly keep up with the sled. With a dash we started up the bank below the store—and the sled tipped over. “Hell!” was the silent one’s comment as we all hurried to right the heavy sled.
The hospitality shown me at this trading post, the comfortable evening meal with Mr. Nicholson the trader in his warm living quarter—only someone who has had a similar experience can imagine these pleasures. But the visit here was brief. The dogteam from East Main had been there for several days awaiting the mail from the south and would start back in the morning. The guides agreed to let me go along, and I was eager to get as far north as I could.
Next morning we were again speeding over the sea ice, the two Indians from East Main and I. In such open-surface sledding the dogteam is harnessed to the sled in a far different way than in wooded country. Each dog had a towline tied to a central point on the sled. Each line was of a different length, the leader having the longest one, so he could be out in front. The whole arrangement was fan-shaped, so the dogs with the shortest traces were far out to the sides. From time to time some of the dogs would change position, crossing from one side to the other, passing under or over the other traces. Thus the traces would become tangled, forming a sort of braid next to the sled which little by little worked forward. Twice on this day we tried to stop the team to undo this tangle, but the dogs were wild to keep moving, so we let them go. This team was by far the liveliest of my whole trip.
My knowledge of Cree was very limited, and the two Indians knew very little English. I wanted to get acquainted, so I tried to ask one of the drivers what he called the porcupine in his language. Mustering what little Cree I knew and using signs, I said: “Peyuk mistik—mitsu, mitsu, mitsu” (“One tree—eat, eat, eat”). I was trying to tell him that this animal often spends days in one tree, eating the inner bark. The driver knew porcupine habits so well that he broke into a big smile, told me the Indian name, gave me to understand that there were some porcupines back in the forest. At least we had communicated!
East Main is only seventy miles from Rupert House, and we arrived on the second day. Now I had a long wait, for no dogteam was going north for many days. But I had a profitable and restful time in the quarters of the friendly trader, Mr. Jobson. He had been in the service for about forty years, and I learned