Last summer I happened to notice an Eskimo woman striving to stop a dog fight. There was nothing very unusual in the sight. Huskies, running loose in a camp, keep up a constant warfare and invariably pile on the top of any unlucky dog which has been pulled down by a stronger one.
What really attracted my attention was the way the woman undertook to save the life of the under dog. Instead of screaming shrilly and using a club of some sort to hit impartially at any head or back she could reach in the writhing, snarling knot of fighting animals, she was hopping around watching for a chance to grab a tail. Then, with a heave and a twist of her body, she would drag one dog out of the scrimmage and fling it over her shoulder, ten feet or so behind her. The unlucky animal generally landed on his head or back, which seemed to surprise and scare it far more than any kind of a blow.
Considering that a Husky weighs at least 75 pounds and that it took the woman only a few minutes to put an end to that dog fight, I could not help being duly impressed with the feat.
I pointed her out to our trader. Such was the way I met Gotehe, wife of Enekatcha, on the bleak shores of Enendeia Lake.
“Four months ago she would not have had the strength to separate two hard tacks,” was the man’s comment as she walked away. Scenting a story, I waited.
It appears that Gotehe, last February, was travelling with her husband somewhere north of where we were. One morning, when time came to break camp, she plodded on alone to make the trail. Such is the custom.
Meanwhile, Enekatcha proceeded to ice the runners of the sleigh before harnessing the dogs.
It was blowing hard and snowing. When the man had travelled an hour he missed his wife’s tracks. Before he could find them again, a blizzard came down. He wandered aimlessly all day, vainly searching. Night came.
The blizzard showed no signs of lifting. Enekatcha, believing that his wife had turned south—her back to the gale—and made for our station twenty miles away, went there. Nobody had seen her. The blizzard raged for nine days. Three times, search parties went out and came back without any news.
On the tenth day the weather cleared at dawn. At noon, Enekatcha found Gotehe a few miles from where he had missed her trail. She was squatting patiently behind the shelter of a rock, having “dug herself in” the snow.
When she had left camp nine days ago she had nothing with her but a pocket knife and a plug of tobacco. She had munched and swallowed the latter while she had used her knife to cut strips off her deerskin boots to chew. During that time she hadn’t had a fire. There was no wood to burn even if she had had matches.
“She was pretty weak,” added the trader. “So weak that she couldn’t cut in two the frozen fish which her husband handed her. The little hatchet was too heavy for her to lift. But she wasn’t even frost bitten. She was all right—just hungry. Three days at the post and she was off again with Enekatcha as if nothing had happened.”