se, it is well that we adjust our judgment
to the latitude of 68 deg. North and take cognizance of the fact that no
seductive "Want Columns" in the daily press here offer a niche whereby
unappropriated spinsters may become self-supporting wage-earners as
chaste typewriters, school-teachers, Marcel-wavers, or manicurists. To
keep the vital spark aglow you must kill walrus and seal in your own
proper person or by proxy, for no other talent of body or grace of mind
is convertible into that sustaining meat and heating blubber which all
must have in order to live.

Economically, then, a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a
man to hunt for her. Ethically, it works out beautifully, for each
partner to the hymeneal bargain is fat and full of content, happiness
fairly oozing out of every oily pore. And is not happiness the goal of
human endeavour, whether a man seeks it amid the electric lights, subtle
perfumes, and dreamy waltz-music of a New York ballroom, or finds it
seated with his community wives on a hummock of ice under the Aurora?

I wouldn't like to picture our cousin the Eskimo woman as being always
content with a circulating decimal of a husband instead of a whole unit,
nor would such presentment be just. The shield, like most shields, has a
reverse. Last winter, at the Mackenzie Delta, one Eskimo bride of
seventeen took her fourth consecutive husband. She is dark but comely,
but truth will not carry the analogy further. I have yet to see the
Eskimo who is like a bunch of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Three
winters ago, at Baillie Island, the three-times-widowed one had both her
feet amputated as the result of exposure to cold.

In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate
to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her
brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes. The wedding breakfast
consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat). The
ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests
present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do's bungalow is ten by twelve, one
needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as "odours of Edom and
offerings Divine."

The festivities began to warm up about midnight. An old chap, with a
retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight
suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands
above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance. His wif