Day after day the blizzard continued unabated. The supply of moldy
seal-meat dwindled, vanished. The people began eating the walrus-skin
coverings of the oomiaks. They chewed the hide dry because there was no
oil for cooking except in the house of the medicine-man. The thin-faced
children and babies suffered mutely, sucking on sealskin ropes, on
thongs of snow-shoes, on anything that contained a bit of nourishment.
The dogs, with uncanny prescience, left the habitations of their
masters for the heights back of the village. There in the graveyard,
where the iron chains still clanked a warning against the hanging-posts
of Sautock, Beelack, and O-tock-tock, the gaunt beasts riddled the
sepulchers and fought like werwolves over what they found. Not even
Milli-ru-ak, the greatest hunter on In-ga-lee-nay, could battle his way
up through the blizzard to shoot at them for food.
Hunger gnawed at the stomachs of the people and marked their faces
with hollows, yet there were no lamentations, no visible evidences
of despair. After the fatalistic manner of their race they waited
patiently, stoically, for a change of weather--or for death.
One night the old mother of Miak, the witch-woman, froze to death. The
next day every family moved to the _kashim_, where, by shutting out the
air and huddling close together, the people could keep warm without
oil. Once a day Ah-king-ah brought them hope and comfort by lighting
the stone lamp and chanting magical words to the almighty devil.
The missionary in his igloo spent desperate hours on his knees pleading
with his God to change the wind. In the darkness he paced his room,
warming his thin body by the exercise and striving for courage by
repeating over and over the promises of the Bible. Sternly he reduced
the rations for his scant daily meal until hunger brought upon him
that strange fanatical exultation which is akin to the ecstasy that
causes the fasting prophet to prophesy, or the medicine-man to perform
his greatest feats of magic. With the passage of each dreary day the
conviction grew upon him that this unprecedented blizzard had been
sent to test his zeal as a worker in the vineyard of the Lord. This
blizzard was his opportunity to win an entire village from the heathen
sway of the medicine-man. With every atom of his being the little
missionary grew to believe that if once he could persuade the people
to enter the meeting-house, if once he could induce them to pray to his
God, the wind would die, and the hunters be able to get food.
This conviction forced him every afternoon through the gale to the
_kashim_. He ignored every rebuff, ignored utterly the danger to
himself, although he knew that Ah-king-ah, should he forget the fate
of the priest-murdering medicine-men, might have him killed as a witch
who had brought misfortune on the village. Sometimes, by dint of
superhuman self-denial, he brought bits of hardtack for the strangely
quiet little ones clinging to their mothers in the _kashim_. Always he
pleaded with the elders to turn from shamanism to the true God. The
Eskimos, apathetic from prolonged hunger, suffered his presence. While
he was with them, there was at least the light of his kerosene lantern.
Otherwise, the _kashim_ was always in darkness now, for Ah-king-ah’s
oil was gone.
Construing this tolerance as an encouraging sign, the earnest little
man brought his Bible, and standing under the swinging light of the
lantern, he translated page after page of Exodus--the promises of
the Lord to the Children of Israel, the feeding of the wanderers in
the desert. But the Eskimos sat stolid, unmoved, apathetic. Even his
ardent rendering of the miracle of the loaves and fishes fell flat.
Ah-king-ah, as if in weary scorn of his rival, stretched himself on the
skins of his shelf and slept, or appeared to sleep.
One day, by accident, the missionary read of the magicians and
sorcerers who competed with Moses and Aaron at the court of the
Egyptian Pharaoh. Milli-ru-ak raised his eyes from a sad contemplation
of his ailing infant son asleep in its mother’s arms. Miak, the
witch-woman, leaned forward over her empty lamp to listen. A stir of
interest went among the people. Here at last was something they could
understand.
The white man had heretofore preached only a kind and beneficent
God, but seeing in this an opening in the wall of their indifference,
he plunged into detailed descriptions of the misfortunes that had
visited the Egyptians. His gaunt face and sunken eyes glowed with
fervor. Hunger lent a delirious and terrible vividness to his speech.
Vicariously, the starving Eskimos were drowned in his Biblical rivers
of blood. They were tormented by plagues of frogs and boils, locusts
and lice. They were terrified by hails and thunders. Aware of the
Eskimos’ almost idolatrous love for their offspring, he loosed his
tongue of all restraint when he pictured the smiting of the first-born.
To the sound of the howling blizzard he dwelt long on the pathos of the
dead childish faces in those desolate homes along the Nile. Ah-king-ah
bestirred himself and sat up. There was a murmuring among the hunters.
The mothers caught their children to their breasts and swayed back and
forth, moaning. The missionary, light-headed from hunger and emotion,
reeled under the swinging shadows of the lantern.
“Would ye, like the Egyptians, harden your hearts against the word
of God and bring death to your children?” he shouted. “Oh, come, my
friends! Come with me before your little ones lie dead in your arms.
Pray to Almighty God and be delivered! Follow me before it is too
late!” Carried away by the effect of his eloquence on the hitherto
indifferent Eskimos, he caught at the lantern and lurched forward
toward the exit of the _kashim_. “Follow me to the house of God!”
The mothers rose with hysterical cries. The hunters began to get down
from their shelf. But before the missionary had reached the ladder,
Ah-king-ah was standing in the middle of the floor. Calm and dignified,
he made a single motion with one hand. Not a soul moved farther to
follow the white man.
The next day, when the missionary climbed to the opening of the
_kashim_, he found the hole covered. His knocks and pleas for entrance
met with no response, because Ah-king-ah was sitting on the door to
hold it down.
Night brought a drop in temperature and an increase in the force of the
gale. The grinding and crash of the ice-pack seemed to threaten the
very foundations of the island. With the exception of the missionary,
every soul on In-ga-lee-nay was packed in the _kashim_. Men, women,
and children chewed desperately on dry walrus-hide and clung together
to keep from freezing. The little ones wedged between their parents
whimpered in misery. At last the company, weary from many wakeful
nights, jerked and flung their arms about in troubled sleep.
When morning broke Milli-ru-ak’s child was dead.
The wailing of the mothers mingled with the roar of the blizzard and
the increased fervor of the medicine-man’s incantations. Before the day
was done, two more little ones died.
It was then that Milli-ru-ak, with three of the council men, appeared
in the igloo of the white man.
“We will pray to your God,” said the hunter, wearily.
The peals of the bell that summoned the people to the prayer-meeting
were freighted with the little missionary’s joy in the fulfilment of
his mission. He had wrested a whole village from the dominance of the
medicine-man!
The sunken eyes in his gaunt, unshaven face glowed with fanatic
happiness as he looked down on the crowded room. Eskimos filled the
benches, stood about the walls, and squatted on the floor about the
last of his oil burning in the stone lamp below the pulpit. Of all
the village only Ah-king-ah was absent. The people sat silent, grave,
attentive, their eyes fixed on the Bible lying open on the pulpit.
The missionary began his exhortation, raising his voice above the
raging of the blizzard and the rending of the icepack. Thrilled by a
sense of achievement and inspired by faith, he spoke with a confidence
and an eloquence he had never known before. Within him woke the spirit
of the evangelist. During the hour he worked upon his congregation he
felt himself rising to the sublime heights from which Jesus himself
had dominated all physical conditions. So exalted was he that his
preaching aroused a measure of faith in the starving Eskimos, even as
the incantations of Ah-king-ah had done.
“Such is the might and goodness of our God,” he shouted after he had
combed the Bible for incidents showing the stilling of storms, the
feeding of the hungry, the raising of the dead. “And He is the same
yesterday, today, and forever! Oh, down on your knees, my friends!”
he cried with sudden vehemence. “Down on your knees and prove him
now--now!”
His impassioned utterance swept his listeners to their knees, shouting,
praying, pleading in long, fragmentary prayers for food, for life, for
a change of wind. The fervid little white man leading them felt the
whole room to be charged with power--an invincible power that flowed
from him and from each one and definitely made its connection with the
Infinite Mind that rules creation.
When he sprang to his feet at the end of the supplication, his thin
face was alight.
“Go home, my people!” his voice rang out with confidence. “Go home and
wait on the salvation of our Lord. Sharpen your spears; put an edge on
your skinning-knives. Make ready your gears, for the day of hunting is
near!”
“If the white man’s God answers, we will all become Christians!” cried
Milli-ru-ak, rising and bringing the others with him.
“Yea! Yea!” came the chorus of assent. Miak, the witch-woman, sidled
close to the pulpit, putting out a curious, but cautious, finger to
feel the Bible.
“If the white man’s God changes the wind,” she croaked, slanting a
wise, bleary eye up at the missionary, “the people of In-ga-lee-nay
will come when the bell calls and listen again to the words in the
black medicine-book.”
From the supreme heights of his faith the missionary watched his
fur-clad congregation depart, seeing in them brands he had plucked from
the burning, souls he had saved from destruction. Finally, in his cold
living-room, he staggered toward his bunk and in sudden exhaustion sank
upon it. He had scarcely drawn the fur robes about him when he was
plunged into a heavy, dreamless sleep.