(From _The Century Magazine_)
_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom._
Up from the _kashim_, the underground council-house, came the beat of
the devil-drum, pulsing hollow and strange amid the scream of the
gale and the rumble of icebergs grinding below the snow-buried Eskimo
village.
_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom._
Ah-king-ah, the medicine-man, was trying to change the wind. Day and
night for two moons the polar blizzard had split its force on the bleak
island pyramid thrusting up through the ice of Bering Strait. It was
a wind of death, a devil’s wind, piling floe on floe until the ice
grounded, yet keeping it ever a-stir. No life could exist beneath the
pack or on top of it, and in the igloos clinging to the white slope of
the shore the people, unable to hunt, were facing starvation.
_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom._
In the temporary lull the hollow rhythm grew louder, penetrating the
walls of the missionary’s igloo, where he, the only white man on the
island, sat alone before a table clutching an open book with both
mittened hands. The twilight of the arctic noon made no impression
on the thick frost-crust of the window, but the wan rays of a
kerosene-lamp fell on the volume, and on the missionary’s gray hair
showing above the dropped hood of his reindeer parka. With every breath
a shaft of vapor clouded the chill air, for his supply of driftwood had
vanished while the blizzard was in its first month, and after he had
shared his oil with the village families there was little left for use
in his Eskimo heating-lamp.
The reverberation of the devil-drum was suddenly pierced by the wail
of a wolf-dog dying under the teeth of its hunger-maddened mates. The
man raised sunken eyes, blue and fervid with a terrible anxiety, and
listened. The sounds of cannibalistic ravening sent a tremor through
his body.
“God--God--” he flattened his palms on the open Bible and strained his
thin face upward in desperate supplication--“God, Father, change the
wind!” During a moment’s silence his gaze remained fixed on something
beyond the blackened ceiling of the igloo, beyond the driven ice-dust
of the blizzard. Then in a voice that gathered confidence as he
proceeded he filled the room with ringing phrases from the Book:
“He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven: and by his power he
brought in the south wind.
“He rained flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered fowls like as
the sands of the sea.
“And He let it fall in the midst of their camp, round about their
habitations.
“So they did eat and were well filled.”
_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom_, the devil-drum beat a
barbarous amen.
“They did eat and were well filled!” The missionary closed the Bible
and firmly, as one who has found new courage, repeated the words in the
Eskimo tongue. He rose from the table, a lean, little man even in his
heavy furs, and crossed over to a corner where a canned-milk box did
duty as a cupboard. From the curled bacon rind that hung there he cut a
thin slice and slipped it hungrily into his mouth. Chewing a bit of it
eased the gnawing in his stomach, which had not yet grown accustomed to
one meal a day, a ration made necessary since he had divided the last
of his provisions with the village.
Opening a door at the back of the igloo he made his stooping way into
another larger room--the schoolhouse and church his own hands had built
so hopefully six months before. Under his stiff fingers the light
flared up from a bracket lamp, revealing a small wall-blackboard which
had never known a chalk mark and the yellow lumber of benches that had
yet to feel the contact of Eskimo garments.
In the beginning the Eskimos had treated him with the good-natured
tolerance of their race. They accepted his presents, ate his food, and
begged or borrowed from him in accordance with their code: The white
man who outwits us is a better man than we, and we admire him; the
white man we outwit is a fool. The unsuspecting little missionary,
confident that he was making great strides into their friendship, was
unusually generous; but the moment he tried to preach the word of his
God, the moment he attempted to interfere with their customs, he found
himself up against a glacial wall of resentment.
“Leave us alone! Leave us alone!” Milli-ru-ak, the hunter, had said
to him in the squirrel-hunting season when the missionary went to
remonstrate with him for biting off the nose of his wife’s lover.
“Leave us alone! Does the Eskimo force his way on the white man who
invades his country? Why does the white man force his way on the
Eskimo? Leave us alone!”
“But Milli-ru-ak, to bite off the nose of thy neighbor----”
“Listen, white man, to the law of my fathers!” The hunter’s dark eyes
narrowed. “Had my neighbor come to me and said: ‘Milli-ru-ak, thy
woman hath found favor in my eyes. Let us change wives during the
squirrel-hunting, that our families may be allied when the children are
born’; then would I have been proud that my neighbor should have taken
his pleasure with my wife and I with his. But my neighbor was without
honor. He waited until I was gone to the hunt, then like a thief he
goes to my woman. I found him there. I bit off his nose. Such,” said
Milli-ru-ak, turning on his heel, “was the just law of my fathers.”
Aghast at this disclosure, the little missionary persistently attempted
to convince the hunter of his sins, and after a week Milli-ru-ak shot
at him--by accident. The bullet passed harmlessly between the white
man’s arm and his body, embedding itself in the shaky pulpit he was
building at the time. He could see the splintered hole now as he
placed his open Bible upon it and reached for the dangling bell-rope
behind the pulpit.
The _ding-dong_ that marked the Sabbath day was caught up by the
blizzard and carried with the boom of the devil-drum out over the
polar wastes. Every Sunday and Wednesday since the completion of the
meeting-house the missionary had doggedly rung the first and second
bell summoning an indifferent people to listen to the word of his God.
Not a soul had ever responded.
He rang the first bell longer than usual. Now that the magic of
Ah-king-ah had failed to change the wind, now that the dogs were
starving, and the people were eating the last of the moldy seal-meat
originally intended for the animals, surely, he thought, they were
ready to abandon their ways of darkness for the light of Christianity.
He allowed the bell-rope to fall, and poured a bit of oil from a
deflated seal-skin container into the stone lamp in the middle of
the floor. When the flame flared up from the moss wick he held his
hands over it. Not for himself would he have used any of the precious
oil, but he hoped that some curious Eskimo might come and, seeing the
fire, spread the news of it in the village. The people might come to
him then, since there was no oil in the native igloos--no oil for
heating, no oil for melting ice for water, no oil for cooking the moldy
seal-meat. Only the medicine-man had oil now.
The dogs outside had quieted, and the voice of Ah-king-ah’s drum alone
rode the gale. The little missionary, squatting over the lamp, kept
turning his thin, expectant face toward the outside door. He was always
looking for it to open, but it never did. Fifteen minutes dragged by
before he rose and rang the second bell. In the silence that followed
its last clang the _oom-oom_ of Ah-king-ah’s drum mocked him with his
failure in the service of his Master.
Across the vapor of his breath the rows of clean new benches reproached
him with their emptiness, and from the bare wooden walls frost-pegs on
every nail-head pointed at him like accusing white fingers. He turned
slowly and, mounting the pulpit, stood, his hands on the open Bible,
his blue eyes looking down wistfully on the cheerless room. The smoky
bracket lamp behind him threw his shadow, long and grotesque, across
the bare benches, as if in pity trying to cover them. The sound of the
devil-drum filtered in faint, taunting, but the missionary cleared
his throat and, as was his wont, began his lonely Sunday service. His
voice, forlorn and strange at first, grew firmer as he proceeded.
At the end he closed his Bible and turned out the light. There was a
dispirited sag to his narrow shoulders as he went back to his living
room. Today, because death was so near to them all, the Eskimos’
animal-like indifference to him and his message made him feel small and
forsaken; made him ache with the terrible longing of the lonely white
man for his kind. For a moment he stood uncertain, his breath clouding
the cold, stale atmosphere of the igloo; then with the air of one
banishing personal weaknesses he shoved his parka hood over his head,
drew the long fur about his face, and made his way out through the snow
tunnel leading from his door to the open.
The force of the gale struck him flat against a trampled snow-bank
where red stains still defied the covering of the wind-blown snow. Not
a bone or a piece of fur remained of the dog who had died there an hour
before.
The pallor of the arctic noon was filled with frost-dust borne on
wind of such velocity that its passing was like the whiz of speeding
bullets. Through the fur about his face the man peered at the ice-pack
lying like a gray monster below him. Stationary it appeared at first,
but as his eyes grew accustomed to the murky light, it became a thing
of horrid life, heaving, quivering, forming itself into grotesque
shapes with a slowness that was as sinister and relentless as death.
Through the blizzard as far as he could see berg was creeping up over
berg, grinding, crunching, to heights of twenty, thirty feet, until the
masses tottered and crashed down on the other side, sending powdered
ice streaming on the gale like ocean spray. The awful, insensate force
loosed thus in a strange, unearthly land struck to the missionary’s
soul with primeval terror. He felt puny, insignificant, cruelly at the
mercy of that tremendous wind which was blowing the ice-pack down from
the pole and maliciously grounding it in the shallow waters of the
strait. For an instant something primitive in him was near to endowing
it with the malevolent personality the Eskimos were even then trying to
placate through Ah-king-ah’s drum.
“God, Father,” he prayed with sudden, panicky earnestness, “change the
wind!”
_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom_, reverberated the
devil-drum.
Far out on the pack, where death was certain, a dark thing moved. It
drew nearer the village, a great bull walrus scouting vainly for leads
of open water that meant life to the small herd wallowing along in its
wake. The scout rolled its three thousand pounds from side to side
over the moving ice, dexterously fastening its tusks into the base of
each berg and pulling itself to the top. On the pinnacle it reared
still higher on its flippers, sniffing the air, tusked head swaying,
short-sighted eyes trying to pierce the thick atmosphere. A moment of
decision, and through the stridor of the elements a bellowing grunt
rumbled deep and lone, signaling the advance of the herd. The valiant
creature wallowed on from point to point of vantage, progressing
through the zone of constant and terrible danger with a courageous
dignity that won admiration even from the hungry missionary, who saw it
as food, heat, life itself.
Opposite the village the walrus escaped the buckling of the ice by
a hair’s-breadth, and drawing itself up to the peak of a moving
berg, paused longer than usual to toss its mighty tusks in nervous
apprehension of a new danger. Just as the berg began to topple it
sensed the presence of human beings, and sent its wild trumpetings
to warn the herd. The gallant animal, too late to take any thought
for itself, plunged recklessly. A patch of black in the gaping angle
between two floes, a slow closing of the frigid trap, and a long-drawn
despairing roar wove itself through the hissing of the wind and the
booming of the devil-drum. As it died away, the ice was marked by a
seeping red stain.
The herd, panic-stricken at the loss of their leader, flung themselves
forward to destruction, leaving crushed bodies to mark a spotted trail
of death across the ice-field.
The last terror-driven creature was disappearing in the haze of the
blizzard when a bent Eskimo battled his way down from the _kashim_
to the edge of the heaving ice. He sheltered himself in the lee of
a floe, looking long at the evidences of tragedy before him. Three
wolf-dogs, scenting the blood, came out from under the snow and
sat on their haunches to send their hunger-cry keening through the
glimmering twilight. Starving though they were, neither man nor beasts
dared venture over the few feet that lay between them and the meat
tantalizing them on the creeping ice.
“O God, Father, change the wind!” prayed the missionary.
_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom_, propitiated the
devil-drum of Ah-king-ah.