A BRITISH ESKIMO.

Gisborne Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 4859, 3 May 1918, Page 7

A BRITISH ESKIMO.

FROM THE ARCTIC TO DEATH

(By Lacey Amy, in the Daily Mail.) it came to me only recently—the hardest blow of the war. A “returned postal packet,” and inside a letter of my own sent him. several weeks ago. On its face was the soulless stamp- “Deceased.” Six year's ago we met, John Shiwak . and I, in the most detached part of the Empire—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. « Far “down” the desolate coast of Labrador, a thousand miles north of my Newfoundland starting point, I came on him 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 I did know him. There, where the bitterness of ten months of the year drives tlie 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 l 'Falls,—which only a score have seen —often alone for months m weather that never emerged from zero, _ . And every summer, when the ice broke in June, there came out to me in Canada liis winter’s diary, written wearily by the light of candle, hemmed in by a hundred miles of fathomless. manless snow. And no fiction or fact of skilled writer spoke so from the heart. He was a natural poet, a natural artist, a natural narrator. In a thumb-nail _ dash of words he carried one straight _ into the clutch of the soundless Arctic. And then came war. And even to that newsless, comfortless coast it carried its message of Empire. John wrote me that he would be 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 we could meet he was in France. "When, last summer, he obtained sudden leave, I "'as in Devon. His simple note of regret rests now like a tear on my heart. But I have heard from him every week. He was never at homeTn liis new career; something about it lie did not quite understand. Latterly the loneliness of the life breathed from his lines. For he made no friends, in his silent, waiting way. His hunting companion was killed, and the great bereavement of it was like a strong man’s sob. He was cold out there, even he, the Labrador hunter. But the heavy cardigan and gloves I sent did not reach him in time. In his 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 like creatures from an angel world, the doctor for whom he worked in Labrador in the summer time, his old hunter friends. “There will he no more letters from them until the ice breaks again,, he moaned. But the ice of a new non has broken for John. He had earned his long rest. Uun there in lonesome Snipers’ Land lie lay day after day; and the cunning that made him a hunter ot fox, ana marten, and otter, and hear, and wolf brought him better game And all he ever asked was, '' hen will the war b c over?” , 0n & would he return to his husluts did traps, where few men dale a hie o ice for a living almost as cold. John Shiwak— Eskimo— patriot.