C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

68 THE LADIES, THE GWICH'IN, AND THE RATjustice and the white man's creed. When travelling by dog-team, often hundredsof miles alone, over ice and snow where winter's grip has drawn the land and seatogether, when enduring physical hardship as part of the day's routine andremaining keenly alive to his duties and responsibilities, a man may rise to spiritualheights undreamed of by those who walk in trodden ways. Sometimes alsoone may find among the trappers and woodcutters a man who, in his isolationhas kept his inner integrity. Yet for every one of such men there are many otherswho become, after living for a long spell alone, peculiar or crabbed or even mad.In the end one is bound to admit that the North is, to a certain extent, aprison. Those who once go in may not easily get out, being held there by someindividual weakness or by the grip of a force too great for definition or defiance.Yet even such imprisonment may confer its own kind of freedom. Two remarksthat I heard will always linger in my memory. An Eskimo, just returned from avisit to San Francisco, summed up his experience. "I no like San Francisco. If Igot no money I got no food. If I got no money here I go 'nother man's house, getplenty food."Then there was the trapper, lately come in again after his first holiday inSeattle. "Towns won't do for me. I guess I can't cut down a tree out there when Iwant to make a fire."