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The Seaforth News, 1949-12-29, Page 7a'960 - JANUARY 1- mt s. 4 s 8 9 10 11 12 13 '1 4 46 16 17 18 19 20 21 Id2232428262728 40 30,31 Rt35tD U11JtRCl1 lg 1 2 3 4 6 8 7 8 9 10 11 02 13 14 15 18 17 1 111 20 21 22 23 24 25 27 23 29 30 31 ;/w 19550 JULY _. 1960. 1 2 3 4 8 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14-16 16 17 18 19 20 21 2422. 25 26 27 28 29 DSO AUGUST 1950 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11, 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 go 21 22 23 2:4 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 so rf.9181A9Y sago 1 2 3 4 5 8 7. 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 18 17 18 19 2021 2228242213 20 27 28 E-� oar We Salt* Geese In The Canadian Arctic 1 havea ,uaiphtforward travel story to tell you; the story of an 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, Some 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 miles north of the Arctic Circle, said Peter Scott, well known naturalist and art- ist, in a recent BBC 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 aides, so that we seemed to be flying in a tunnel, and in the middle of it we ran into a thick snow storm. But, anyway-, eventually ' we got through to the Perry River, and landed on the snow-covered tundra about fourteen miles inland from the Arctic "Ocean. ':'dud where,' you may well ask, 'is the Perry River?' The quick answer to that is 'about the middle of the north coast of Canada, a little• nearer to Hudson's Bay than to the delta of the Mackenzie River.' \\'leu 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 the outside world. For the next two months we would be living here *lobe. 11 is hard to describe the feeling —the excitement, the anticipation, the slight anxieties as to what was in store—illness, accident, a miscal- culation iu our supplies. Alt the hazards — and there are a good many, I suppose -=-of our expedition passed through out minds as the hum of the 'plane's engines faded into the extraordinary silence of the tmnd re, 'l'hetundra can be very silent, but it is not often, because almost al- ways there is a wind blowing. But 011 this day it was still, and from afar, from the river, we suddenly heard the cry of wild geese. I t was an important moaiient for us, 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, muted call. We saw four of them 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 tremendously reciting to see them. e made our ramp on a ridge in the lee of a hill, .it was quite a low hill. only about 100 feet above the surrounding plain. But the snow !tad blows away -frmm the ridge, and so we pitched our tents on grey gravel,. and secured the guy ropes with loose boulders. That camp was our Headquarters from then -that was June 6—for the next two months. Now 1 wan[ to tell you how we ep;nt those two-in011ths—what we w ere 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 sefentist had eler leen there before. Viewing the Country from Different Aspects Two at its were printarity ornitho- logists, but the third member of the party, was a research engineer who also knew a gond deal about geo- logy and surveying. So he was look- ing at the country with rather a different eye, and ntaking rnaps of it, and so On. For the first weeks, the spring did not seem to advance at all. Is 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 ha June, and we began to think that the break-up would never conte. It was daylight all the time, but we kept a routine all the sasge, and went to bed soon after midnight. That was because we were keeping x meteorological record, and we had to read the instruments at n0oat and at midnight. Our camp was quite comfortable, really. We had three tents, and made up a fourth one out of packing eases covered with ground streets, 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 with us, and we had three little cooking stoves which kept the day tent fairly warm and dried out our wet clothes. I would like to describe the ex- troardinary snugness and comfort of my sleeping bag. 11 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 the wind blew forty miles an hour—and it did more than once, and if the tent collapsed about one's ears, which several times it threatened to do, one felt that 011 harem could possibly befall one in the cosy inner fastness of the sleeping bag. On the other hand, of course, it made it correspondingly snore diffi- cult to start the day. If one awoke to a rattling of canvas, and .peered Out through the fly to see swirling snow or fog, or both, and with visi- bility no more than 100 yards, there was not much incentive to turn out. We, were just considering .this problem one morning when we heard footsteps, on the gravel out- side. \1'e called to each other from tent to tent to snake sure that we were all still in bed. And then we realised that we had visitors. These were tlue first of the ICognruit tribe of Eskimos to come and call on us. We took 0o than into our day tent and brewed tea for them, because Eskimos are great tea drinker's. Overcoming the Language Difficulty There were two of 'their!, a luau and a boy—l-launga 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. 11 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 Koginuit Eskimos for about ten days. And then, when the river had begun to thaw out and the level of it had gone up about fifteen feat, with great lumps of are. aix feet thlek, floating down • t, another party of .Eskimos sin. their 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 them 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 -man naris. Kabloona is their word for white man, and what was the good of hav- ing a Kabloona name if the Rab- loona did. not use it? For the next five weeks we took Patsy and his sixteen -year-old son, Taanoo, with us on our various ex- plorations. 1 wonder If I can de- scribe that lad to you. He was a typical young Eskimo, fairly short and thick -set, with straight, black hair cut in a fringe, and a brown face flushed with rosy cheeks, which gives all young Eskimos a most wonderful, rich colouring. He wore a parka, which is a sort of tonic wills a hood trimmed with brown and yellow wolverine fur. The caribou is the most important animal to these particular Eskimos: It is rather like a reindeer, and they hunt it for its flesh and for its hide and they use the bones and the !torn for all kinds of household utensils, and tete sinews for sewing, and so on, which means that very little of the caribou is wasted. It was Topelakon and his collea- gue, Taipei', who led us to the big breeding colony of Ross's Geese, or han owau, as the Eskimos call g os them. It was the only. colony we found 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 hills with innumerable lanes. At last, in pouring rain, we cause to Lake "Arloue--a little larger than its immediate neighbours and with five islands on it, each of the islands dotted, alinost covered, with the white birds sitting on their nests. I 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 260 nests, and we were the first, White people ever to see this partic- ular colony, or indeed this lake, \Ve called it Lake Arlone after toy roup panion's wife. Of course, we had to make our own names for any geographical 950 scow m95( R9S® 1 2 1 4 5 8 7 0 9. 10 11 12 13 14 15 10 171.8192021 2223 24, 26 28 27 28 29 00 ' 2 8 4 5 8 7 8 9 1031 121314116 1e 17 13 19 20 21 2 ;,, 24 25 26 27 28 28- 1 it WAY 11 1 2 3 4 6 7 3 9 10 11 T24,13 114 16 14 17 18.119 20 22 23 24.25 28 27 20 30 31 d 1 ( !`5 ea 1111ra whit' H named to refer to, becatt1e the map of that part o£ the world was eery like the Bell - man's chart in The Hunting of this Snack. Do yon remember '—'a per- fect and absolute blank, It aas just plain whits except for a dotted line representing what was thought to be tate course of the Perry River itself—acid tee forted that e: ,'u that was wrong. We went to Lal,e Arlene a sec- ond time, just after the Ross's' Geese had hatched their goslings— exquisite little halls of silvery -yet - low down. And we found a strange variation in the colour of this down.. Some goslings were almost canary yellow, and others were platiuumt blonde, and, since this was unknown to science, we were rather pleased with the discovery. About the middle of July a fourth man joined out. party. He was the pilot of a float -plane, and he flew in just as soon as the lakes were open enough for him to land. So fur the last two weeks of our expedi- tion we could explore by 'plane, and we covered an area about the siva of Wales fairly thoroughly. We found some new lakes which were quite big, and a new river, more them fifty miles long, and a hili which dominated the landscape although, actually, it was only about 800 feet high. And then came the sad day wheta we had to leave. We had grown tretnendously found of our patch of tuudra—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. We had grown fond of it in the warm, early days of August, when we had even though about bathing in that lake below our camp, But above all, we had grown fond of our g1sett friends the Eskimos. 1 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 atilt and beautiful— the whole scene was black and orange, 1 remember I took the canoe down over the rapids, whick was exhilarating and, for a moment, o her breath -taking, and perhaps a little foolhardy. Next day, with a fairly full load in the 'place, 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 8141 opening which was just long enough, and we got safely off. And ea.-cept for getting very slightly lost on the first, unmapped stretch of our • hotnew at do •s cute ware returned nod by way of Hudson's Bay without mishap. So our adventure was end- ed, None ()tit very firalnatit. eon clay say, Well, no; but for us it was quite an adventure, all the same. We ]tad 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, sad then it sud- denly tarns fierce and dangerous. And so you have to watch it. -They tell aleshe-makes people happy wherever she goes." "1ou creak 'isbeliever'!" . Front the. .lass-ro„at; "1,. the world round of flat'” "Neither. Dad says its ,rooked," JUMP 1 2 3 4 8 5 7 8 8 1101 11 12 13 14 15 18 1"7, 18 19 20 21 22 23 2?: 26 26 27 28 29 300 71;0 OMBER•`•M 1 �1 L 3 4 S i5 C 8 8 10 11 12 13 14„ x5 15 17 18 19 20 21 2 23 24 25 23 27 28 229 30 31 - • Irk 1950 NOVEtr:8ER ;i 1.850 DECEMBER 1?r•3.:H 1 2 $ 4 ' , a i 5 6 7 8 9 10 1'i 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. 12 13 1 4 1G 16 17 111 10 11 12 13 14 15 14 1 ct n0 31 S42 23 24 2 17 18 19 20 23 22 (23 23 '.7 211 29 30 '''a, 26 26 27 28 29 36 t -_r