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How We Saw -eese
The Canal 'an Arcle
I have a :straightforward travel
story to tell you: the story of au
expedition which three of us made
during the summer • to the north of
Canada. A good many people go
into the Canadian Arctic every sum-
mer, and, indeed, there are a good
many, too, whose business keeps
them there all the year round, and.
perhaps, for many years. Sonie of
that north country is quite easy to
get to in these days of flying, but
some is still rather inaccessible, The
Perry River, where we went, is one
of these inaccessible places, al-
though . it is not particularly far
north—only about seventy-five utiles
north of the Arctic Circle, said Peter
Scott, well known naturalist and art-
ist, in a recent 1313C broadcast.
We went there by 'plane—mostly
uneventfully—but we had one rather
unpleasant stretch, flying down a
gorge with low, dark clouds down
to the tops of the cliffs on both
sides, so that we seemed to be flying
in a tunnel, and itt the middle of it
we ran into a thick snow storm.
Eur, anyway. eventually we . got
through to the Perry River, and
landed on the snow-covered tundra
.about fourteen miles inland from the
Arctic Ocean.
'_And where,' you may weil ask,
01s the :Perry River?'s The quick
answer to that is 'about the middle
of the north creast of Canada, a little
nearer to Hudson's Bay than to the
delta of the Mackenzie River.'
When all our equipment had been
unpacked, our pilot and his com-
panion climbed back into the 'plane
and took off again. We watched the
'plane until it was a speck in the
sky. It was our last link with tate
outside world. For the next two
months we would be living here
ale ee.
It is hard to describe the feeling
—.-tete excitement, the anticipation,
the slight anxieties as to what was
in store—illness, accident, a miscal-
culation in our supplies: All the
hazards -- and there are a good
many, 1 suppose—of our expedition
paseci
through our minds as the
hum of the 'plane's engines faded
into the extraordinary silence of the
tundra.
'fire tundra can be very silent, but
it is not often, because almost al-
ways there is a wind blowing. But
on this day it was still, and from
afar, front the rivet', we soddenly
hoard the cry of wild geese.
It was an important moment for
u,, because we had conte there es-
pecially to find these geese — the
lovely, miniature Snow Geese, called
Ross's Geese --white birds with
black tips to their wings, and a
rather soft, routed call. We saw four
of thein flying up the river, which
was still at that time mostly frozen
with only 'a trickle of water running
down on top of the ice, But it was
trwnendously exciting to see theme
We made our camp on a ridge in ,
the lee of a hill. It was quite a low
hill, only about 100 feet above the
snrrouuding plain. But the snow had
.blown away from the ridge, and so
we pitched our tents on grey gravel,.
and secured the. guy ropes with
loose boulders. That camp was our
lteadgnarters from then—that was
June ti—for the next two months.
Now 1 want to tell you how wa
spent those two months—what we
were there for. Our- first and main
object was to study the birds, and
particularly Ross's Geese, because,
as far as anyone knows, this is the
only part of the world where the
Ross's Geese breed, and no scientist
had ever been there before.
Viewing the Country from Different
Aspects
Two of tis were primarily amities-
logists, lint the third member of the
party was a research engineer who
also knew a good deal about geo-
logy and surveying. ; o he was look-
ing at the country with rather a
different eye, and making maps of
it, and so on.
For the first weeks, the spring
did not seent to advance at all. It
was windy and cold and raw in the
daytime, with frequent snowstorms,
and at night we sometimes had
about fifteen degrees of frost, That
was in June, and we began to think
that the break-up would never come:
ft was daylight all the time, but
we kept a routine all the sante, and
went to bed soop after midnight.
That was because we were keeping
a meteorological record, and we had,
to read the instruments at noon and
at midnight.
Our camp was -quite comfortable,
really. We had three tents, and
made up a fourth one out of packing
cases covered with ground sheets,,::,
which we used as a sort of labora-
tory for our scientific work. One,
tent was a fairly big bell tent, and
we used that by day and ate in it.
We had taken most of our food
witlt us, and we had three little
cooking stoves which kept the day
tent fairly warns and dried out our
wet clothes,
I would like to describe the ex-
troardinary snugness and comfort
of my sleeping bag. It was a bag
inside a bag, all made of quilted
eiderdown. And after a long day,
there was no better imaginable lux-
ury than to climb into this bag and
pull up the zipper. One felt that it
was a sort of haven, a home in a
cheerless world, and if tine wind
blew forty miles an hour—and it did 1
morethan once, and if the tent
collapsed about one's ears, which
several times it tin•eatened to do, one
felt that on harm could possibly
befall one in the cosy inner fastness
of the sleeping bag.
On the other hand, of cour,e, it
made it correspondingly more diffi-
cult to start the day. if one awoke
to a rattliug of canvas. and peered
out through the fly to see swirling
snow or fug, or botb, and with visi-
bility no.utore than 100 yards, tiler
was not much incentive to turn ou
\\ e were just considering the
problem one morning wizen w
heard footsteps on the gravel out
side. \\- a called to each other froi
tent to tent to make sure that w
were all still in bed. And then w
realised that we had visitors. Tiles
were the first of the Kognutit trib
of Eskimos to come and call on us
We took them into ottr day ten
and brewed tea for them, becau:
Eskimos are great tea drinkers.
Overcoming the Language
Difficulty
There were two of them, a pian
and a boy—Haunga and Kaota.
They could talk no word of English
and we,"at that time, of course, could
talk practically no (Eskimo. But with
-signs and with drawings we man-
aged.
It was still snowing hard an hour
later when they set off over the
hill on their way back to their camp,
And we did not see any more of
these Itogmuit Eskimos for about
ten days. And then, when the rivet'
had begun to thaw out and the level
of it had gone up about fifteen feet,
with great humps of ice, six feet
thick, floating down ' '1, another
patty of Eskimos ntr. ; tineir camp
about a mile away from ours.
Fiesta Queen — .Pert Colleen
Delaney, above, was "Senorita
of the Fiesta" at the Orange
Bowl Festival.
The two families, each living in a
white, canvas tent, became 'our great
friends and loyal' helpers. The most
intelligent of tient was a little man
called Topelakon. Besides their Es-
kimo names, most of these natives
had English names as well—they
had been baptised down at the trad-
ing post at the mouth of the river by
a passing missionary many years be-
fore. Topelakon's English name was
,Patsy, and we found that they liked
us to use their white -roan name.
Kabloona is their word for white
than, and what was the good of hav-
ing a Kabloona name if the Kab-
loona did not use it?
For the next five weeks we took
Patsy and his sixteen -year-old son,
7.'aanoo, with us on -our various ex-
plorations. 1 wonder if .I. can de- '
scribe that lad to you. .lie was a
typical young Eskimo, fairly short
and thick -set, with straight, black
• hair cru in a fringe, and a brows,
face flushed with rosy cheeks. which
gives all young I1skinios a most
wonderful, rich .eolonn•iug..11e wore
a parka, which is a sort of tunic
With 11 hood trimmed with brown
and yellow wolverine ftp'.
a `.Cite caribou is the most important
e 1 animal to these particular Eskimos,
; Jt.is ranter like a reindeer, and they
s tent it for its flesh and for its hide
e and they use the bones and the horn
- for all kinds of household utensils,
n 1 and the sinews for sewing, and so
e on, which means that very little of
e the rection is wasted.
it ryas '1'opelal:On need lit, colleg-
e gee, 'l'aipan, who led us to the big
t breeding colony of Ross's Geese, or
Kaugoean, as the Eskimos call
them, It was. the only colony we
foetid where the birds were breeding
this summer. It was a two day's
journey inland, up out of the alluvial
valley of the Perry, among small,
rocky (tills with innumerable 'lakes,
At Iasi, in pouring rain, we came to
Lake Arlone--a -little larger than its
immediate neighbours and with five
islands on 11, each of the islands
dotted, almost covered, with the
white birds sitting on their nests, ,
1 wonder if you can imagine the
thrill when we first saw these is-
lands, and found the birds we had
come all this way to look for. There
were 2b0 nests, and we were the first
white people ever to see this partic-
ular colony, or indeed this lake. We
called it Lake Arlone after my emu.
panion's wife.
Of course, we had to make our
- Own ttatites for any geographical
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features which we wanted to refer
to, because the map of that part of
the world was very like the Bell -
man's chart in The Bunting of the
Snark. Do you remember?—'a per-
fect and absolute blank.' It was just
plain white, except for a dotted line
representing what was thought to
be the course of the Perry River
itself—ancl we found that even that
was wrong,
\\-e went Lake Anc-
ond time, jutost after therloe Rossase'n
Geese had hatched their goslings—
exquisite little. balls of silvery -yel-
low down. And we found a strangle
variation in the colour of this down -
Some goslings were almost canary
yellow, and others were platinum
blonde, and, since this was unknown
to science, we were rather pleased
with the discovery.
. • About the middle of July- a fourth
man joined our party. He was the
pilot of a float -plane, and he flew'
in just as soon as the lakes were
open enough for flim to land. So for
the last two weeks of our expedi-
tion we could explore by 'plane, and
we covered an area about the size
of Wales fairly thoroughly. Wo
found some new lakes which were
quite big, and a new river, more than
fifty miles long, and a hill which
dominated the landscape although,
actually, it was only about 800 feet
high.
And then came the sad day wheel
we had to leave, We had grown
tremendously found of our patch of
tundra—the patch of boggy moor
and stony ridges—which, by this
time of the year, was quite clear of
snow and richly covered with flow-
ers—heathers and heaths, saxifrages,
and dwarf rhododendrons, and the
beautiful stars of Dryas, which is,
perhaps, the commonest, and cer-
tainly, I think, one of the most
cheerful of the Arctic flowers, Ws,
had grown fond of it in the warn,
early days of August, when we had
even thougli about bathing in that
lake below our camp, 3ut above all,
we had grown fond of our great
friends the Eskimos.
I shall never forget my last night,
coming down the Perry river by
canoe in the midnight dusk. We had
been catching some Ross's Geese
to bring back alive, and the whole
operation had been rather success-
ful, The sky was clear, and the
night was very still and beautiful—
the whole scene was black and
orange, l remember 1 took the
canoe down over the rapids, which
was exhilarating and, for a moment,
r her breath -taking, and perhaps a
little foolhardy,
`ext day, with a fairly full load
in the 'plane, including a dozen live
geese, we took off from the mouth
of our river. The pack -ice had drift-
ed into the bay, but we found ars
opening which was just long
enough, and we got safely off. And
except for getting eery slightly lost
on the first, unmapped stretch of
our homeward course, we returned
by way of Hudson's Bay without
mishap. So our adventure was end-
ed.
None of it very dramatic, you may
say. Well, no; but for us it was
quite an adventure, all the sante. \\'a
had planned it carefully, and, on
top of that, we were very lucky that
nothing went seriously wrong. You
see, the Arctic is quite friendly until
things go wrong, and then it sod.
denly tutus fierce and dangerous.
And so you have to watch it,
"They tell Inc she makes people
happy wherever she goes."
"You mean 'whenever'!"
From the class -room: "Is the
world round or flat?" "Neither. diad
says its crooked."
Y -'MSA-✓•- .4'.N,.ai•tli-YW
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1950 OCTOBER 1195t8
1
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30 31
1950 NOVEMBER it> 1 195
EGENiBER 195,
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