Wonderful White World

WHERE THE HIGH WINDS BLOW (219 pp.)--Bruce D. Campbell-- Scribner ($3.50)

"No hostile nation will take their land from them--no man envies them their existence. . . . They are one of Nature's mystery people: they have no ambitions, they live only to eat and eat only to live. . . ."

This is no latter-day Swift describing a happy breed of his imagination. It is a young Canadian writing of his little-known Eskimo neighbors in the Far North. Husky, handsome Bruce D. Campbell spent four years there as a trader for the Hudson's Bay Co. Three years later, his R.C.A.F. bomber was shot down over Germany, and he became a prisoner of war. To pass the time, he wrote this book about the wonderful white world of the 6.000 North American Eskimos (world Eskimo population: 35,000).

Trader Campbell had not been long at his post at Cape Wolstenholme when his manager showed him a girl brought in by an Eskimo hunter. "He thinks you need a woman," the manager casually explained. Offended by her dirt and smell, Campbell sent her packing.

Kutakalook was different. She was a post servant and had received a sweater as a Christmas present from Campbell. "Kutakalook was the most attractive Eskimo girl I had ever seen," he comments judiciously. "She was spotlessly clean. . . . Here, sitting on my bed, was a girl who was offering herself to me . . . in return for the sweater."

Other Eskimo notions were equally disconcerting to Campbell. When seals are killed, the Eskimos remove the eyes and swallow them so the animal cannot watch itself being skinned. The first time Campbell went on a walrus hunt, it all but turned his stomach to see a native gulping down handfuls of live maggots from the carcass. Once he tried a live worm from a slaughtered caribou, and found it most disagreeable.

Campbell was nowhere near so adventurous when, during a visit at an Eskimo camp, he was offered a wife for the night. That offer (rejected) illustrates his theme: "The Eskimo is communistic--he shares everything. He shares his sled, his dogs and his wife. He does not explain life. He lives."

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