It's going to be a starvation winter."
But Roscoe, knowing as little as the rest of man-kind of the terrible
famines of the northern people, which keep an area one-half as large as the
whole of Europe down to a population of thirty thousand, went on. A famine,
he argued, would give him greater opportunity for study.
Two weeks later he was at York Factory, and from there he continued to Fort
Churchill, farther up on Hudson's Bay. By the time he reached this point,
early in January, the famine of those few terrible weeks during which more
than fifteen hundred people died of starvation had begun. From the Barren
Lands to the edge of the southern watershed the earth lay under from four
to six feet of snow, and from the middle of December until late in February
the temperature did not rise above thirty degrees below zero, and remained
for the most of the time between fifty and sixty. From all points in the
wilderness reports of starvation came to the Company's posts. Traplines
could not be followed because of the intense cold. Moose, caribou, and even
the furred animals had buried themselves under the snow. Indians and
halfbreeds dragged themselves into the posts. Twice Roscoe saw mothers who
brought dead babies in their arms. One day a white trapper came in with
his dogs and sledge, and on the sledge, wrapped in a bear skin, was his
wife, who had died fifty miles back in the forest.
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