Once a year a ship comes to the port, bringing the year's mail and news from the world.

When you watch that ship go out again, and you turn round and see the filthy Esquimaux and Indians, and know that you've got to live for another year with them, sit in their dirty tepees, eat their raw frozen meat, with an occasional glut of pemmican, and the thermometer 70 degrees below zero, you get a lump in your throat.
"Then came one winter.

I had one white man, two half-breeds, and an Indian with me.

There was darkness day after day, and because the Esquimaux and Indians hadn't come up to the fort that winter, it was lonely as a tomb.

One by one the men got melancholy and then went mad, and I had to tie them up, and care for them and feed them.