My dad never ever kept a dog team in his life. He didn't like driving dogs. They always built their own catamaran. It was strong, because it had to carry everything, but it really was the frame of a komatik.

He put the family in the canoe on the catamaran and pulled it down. If we had to go in water on the ice or anything, we kept dry. We were quite young, and my mother would walk with him.

It certainly was not hard that time of the year. We were on smooth ice. We had the canoe for protection in case of holes. That lake is an extremely deep lake, so they used to pull them down that way.

We came down that spring and went over to Kenemish. We had a cabin over there.

That fall we came back here to Northwest River and bought a little log house down by the river. We stayed here that winter because my brother and I were old enough to go to school. My mother and father both were determined that we were going to go to school until we were finished, for which we can be thankful.

To me it was a break to go to school. I preferred it to a lot of other things I had to do. I really appreciated it. My mother needed help as much as anyone in this community did, with a big family. But we helped to do the work after school and on weekends.

I enjoyed school a lot. Being the eldest of the family, I had very little childhood, because there was always lots for me to go out and work at when I got home from school.