A BRITISH ESKIMO

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 169, 6 April 1918, Page 6

A BRITISH ESKIMO

FROM THE AKG'TIC TO DEATH. (By Lacey Amy, in the "Daily Mai).") It came to mo only recently-the hardest blow' of the war. A "returned postal packet, aud inside a letter of iny own sent him several weeks ago. On its face was the soulless stamp "Deceased." Six years ago we met, John Shiwak and i, ill the most detached part of the Umpire— the hyperborean places where icebergs are horn, where seal grunt along the shore, where .cod run blindly into the nets of adventurous fishermen gone north in a midsummer eight weeks of perilous, comfortless, uncertain industry. Par "down" the desolate coast of Labrador, a. thousand miles north of my Newfoundland starting point, I came on liirn in a trifling settlement that hugged shivering_ and unsteady about -a long white building, a trading post of the Hudson Bay Company—the merest collection of windowless Boards that housed human beings only in the less harrowing summertime. For John Shiwak was an Eskimo.

Just one week I knew him, and then we separated never to meet again. But in that week I came to know him better than from a year's acquaintance with less simple souls, and his record to his glorious end proves how well T did know him. There, where the bitterness of ten months of the year drives the two straggling thousand human beings of half as many miles of coast-line to the less grim, less bleak interior, John Shiwak had awakened to the bigness of life. He had taught himself to read and write. Every winter he trailed the hunter's lonely round back within sound of the Grand Falls,. which only a score have seen—often alone for months in weather that never emerged from zero.

And every summer, when the ice broke in .Time, there came out to me in Canada his winter's diary, written wearily by the light of candle, hemmed in liy a hundred miles of fathomless, manless snow. And no fiction or fact of' oVillcd writer ypnke from the heort. He was a natural rioet, a natwral artist, a. natural narrator. In a thumb-nail dash of words -he carried one straight into the olntcli of the soundless Arctic.

And then cnme war. And even to tb.it newslcss, comfortless coast it carried its message of Empire. John wrote me that lie would he-a "soljer." I dismissed it as one of his many vain ambitions against which his race would raise an impossible barrier. And months later came his note from Scotland, where he was in training. I followed him to England, but before wo could meet he was in Trance. When, last summer, he obtained sudden leave, I was in Devon. STs simple note of regret rests now like a tear on my heart. But I have heard from him every week. He was never at homo in his new career; something about it he did not quite understand. Lattorly the loneliness of the life breathed from his lines. For he made no friends, in his eilent, waiting way. His hunting companion was killed, and the great bereavement of it was lik,o a strong man's sob. He was cold out there, even he, tho Labrador hunter. But tho heavy cardigan and gloves I sent did not reach him in time. . . . In bis last letter was a great longing for home—his Eskimo father whom he had left at ten years to carve his fortune, his two dusky sisters who were to him liko creatures from an angel world, the doctor for whom ho worked in! Labrador in tho summer time, his old hunter friends. "There will be no more letters from them until the ice breaks again," he moaned. But the ice of a new world has broken for John. He had earned his long rest. Out there in lonesome Snipers' Land lie lnjfr day after day; and tho cunning that made him a hunter of fox, and marten, and otter, and bear, and wolf brought him better game. And all he ever asked was, "When will the war be over?" Qnly then would he return to his huskies and traps, where few men dare a life of ice for a living almost us cold. John Shiwak—Eskimo-patriot.