The berry bushes aren’t far, a five-minute hike into the hills. Lassie insisted on being held by the little boy, and I follow behind the pair. Halfway through the journey, a black swarm of insects finds me and I am assailed by a blitzkrieg of bites. I cinch my hood tight, but the cotton sweatshirt and sweatpants do little to impede their inch long syringes and razor sharp teeth. The swarm doesn’t seem to be remotely interested in the little boy, and I wonder if he is hiding a can of OFF somewhere or if his people have a long-standing treaty with the mosquitos.

The swarm evaporates leaving me counting my bites, and I trudge through the tall grass to catch up.

The little boy is standing near a bush. He picks a red berry from a bush and says something. All that matters is the shake of his head. I make a mental note the “small red berry with black dot” is bad. He shows me another couple berries that are head-shakers, then a couple that are head-nodders. I fold up the bottom of my sweatshirt into a basket and we spend the next ten minutes filling it with an assortment of head-nodders.

When we return to the sandbar, it is closing in on 3:45 a.m.

The three of us sit in a small circle and gorge ourselves on the berries in silence.

I watch the little boy hold out a berry to Lassie, then pull it away at the last moment. Lassie paws at his hand and the little Eskimo opens it and Lassie eats the berry from his palm.

I walk to the water and cup my hands in the water. My lips are about to touch the water when I hear a sharp sound.

The little boy runs up to me. He shakes his head.

He doesn’t want me to drink the water.

“We’ve been drinking the water for the past four days,” I say, making a four with my fingers.

He pats my stomach with his hand and shakes his head. He walks five feet up the sandbar, falls to his knees and starts digging.

After a couple minutes he has a three-foot hole dug.

I stand over him and look down.

Nothing happens for a long minute.

Then slowly the hole begins to fill with water.

It is coming up from the bottom, through the sand, which acts as a filter.

The little boy cups his hand in the growing pool and drinks.

He waves me forward.

I take a drink.

It tastes better than it had previously. The coarse sand, which was actually just tiny rocks, filters out the silt from the river bottom. I’m dubious this method makes the water safer to drink than from the river directly, but I‘m not going to turn my back on three thousand years of Eskimo-ing.

At 3:58 a.m. my watch beeps.