"And Pome-Lee?" cried one of the two Hungry Folk; "Pome-Lee, the son
of my mother?"
"Pome-Lee is not," Ounenk answered in a monotonous voice.
"And the Sunlanders?" from Aab-Waak.
"The Sunlanders are not."
"Then the ship of the Sunlanders, and the wealth and guns and things?"
Tyee demanded.
"Neither the ship of the Sunlanders, nor the wealth and guns and
things," was the unvarying response. "All are not. Nothing is. I only
am."
"And thou art a fool."
"It may be so," Ounenk answered, unruffled.
"I have seen that which would well make me a fool."
Tyee held his tongue, and all waited till it should please Ounenk to
tell the story in his own way.
"We took no guns, O Tyee," he at last began; "no guns, my
brothers--only knives and hunting bows and spears. And in twos and
threes, in our kayaks, we came to the ship. They were glad to see us,
the Sunlanders, and we spread our skins and they brought out
their articles of trade, and everything was well. And Pome-Lee
waited--waited till the sun was well overhead and they sat at meat,
when he gave the cry and we fell upon them. Never was there such a
fight, and never such fighters. Half did we kill in the quickness
of surprise, but the half that was left became as devils, and they
multiplied themselves, and everywhere they fought like devils. Three
put their backs against the mast of the ship, and we ringed them with
our dead before they died. And some got guns and shot with both eyes
wide open, and very quick and sure. And one got a big gun, from which
at one time he shot many small bullets. And so, behold!"
Ounenk pointed to his ear, neatly pierced by a buckshot.
"But I, Ounenk, drove my spear through his back from behind. And in
such fashion, one way and another, did we kill them all--all save the
head man. And him we were about, many of us, and he was alone, when he
made a great cry and broke through us, five or six dragging upon him,
and ran down inside the ship. And then, when the wealth of the
ship was ours, and only the head man down below whom we would kill
presently, why then there was a sound as of all the guns in the
world--a mighty sound! And like a bird I rose up in the air, and the
living Mandell Folk, and the dead Sunlanders, the little kayaks, the
big ship, the guns, the wealth--everything rose up in the air. So I
say, I, Ounenk, who tell the tale, am the only one left."
A great silence fell upon the assemblage. Tyee looked at Aab-Waak with
awe-struck eyes, but forbore to speak. Even the women were too stunned
to wail the dead.
Ounenk looked about him with pride. "I, only, am left," he repeated.
But at that instant a rifle cracked from Bill-Man's barricade, and
there was a sharp spat and thud on the chest of Ounenk. He swayed
backward and came forward again, a look of startled surprise on his
face. He gasped, and his lips writhed in a grim smile. There was a
shrinking together of the shoulders and a bending of the knees. He
shook himself, as might a drowsing man, and straightened up. But the
shrinking and bending began again, and he sank down slowly, quite
slowly, to the ground.
It was a clean mile from the pit of the Sunlanders, and death had
spanned it. A great cry of rage went up, and in it there was much of
blood-vengeance, much of the unreasoned ferocity of the brute. Tyee
and Aab-Waak tried to hold the Mandell Folk back, were thrust aside,
and could only turn and watch the mad charge. But no shots came
from the Sunlanders, and ere half the distance was covered, many,
affrighted by the mysterious silence of the pit, halted and waited.
The wilder spirits bore on, and when they had cut the remaining
distance in half, the pit still showed no sign of life. At two hundred
yards they slowed down and bunched; at one hundred, they stopped, a
score of them, suspicious, and conferred together.
Then a wreath of smoke crowned the barricade, and they scattered like
a handful of pebbles thrown at random. Four went down, and four more,
and they continued swiftly to fall, one and two at a time, till but
one remained, and he in full flight with death singing about his ears.
It was Nok, a young hunter, long-legged and tall, and he ran as never
before. He skimmed across the naked open like a bird, and soared and
sailed and curved from side to side. The rifles in the pit rang out
in solid volley; they flut-flut-flut-flutted in ragged sequence; and
still Nok rose and dipped and rose again unharmed. There was a lull in
the firing, as though the Sunlanders had given over, and Nok curved
less and less in his flight till he darted straight forward at every
leap. And then, as he leaped cleanly and well, one lone rifle barked
from the pit, and he doubled up in mid-air, struck the ground in a
ball, and like a ball bounced from the impact, and came down in a
broken heap.
"Who so swift as the swift-winged lead?" Aab-Waak pondered.
Tyee grunted and turned away. The incident was closed and there was
more pressing matter at hand. One Hungry Man and forty fighters, some
of them hurt, remained; and there were four Sunlanders yet to reckon
with.
"We will keep them in their hole by the cliff," he said, "and when
famine has gripped them hard we will slay them like children."
"But of what matter to fight?" queried Oloof, one of the younger men.
"The wealth of the Sunlanders is not; only remains that in the igloo
of Neegah, a paltry quantity--"
He broke off hastily as the air by his ear split sharply to the
passage of a bullet.
Tyee laughed scornfully. "Let that be thy answer. What else may we do
with this mad breed of Sunlanders which will not die?"
"What a thing is foolishness!" Oloof protested, his ears furtively
alert for the coming of other bullets. "It is not right that they
should fight so, these Sunlanders. Why will they not die easily? They
are fools not to know that they are dead men, and they give us much
trouble."
"We fought before for great wealth; we fight now that we may live,"
Aab-Waak summed up succinctly.
That night there was a clash in the trenches, and shots exchanged. And
in the morning the igloo of Neegah was found empty of the Sunlanders'
possessions. These they themselves had taken, for the signs of their
trail were visible to the sun. Oloof climbed to the brow of the cliff
to hurl great stones down into the pit, but the cliff overhung, and he
hurled down abuse and insult instead, and promised bitter torture to
them in the end. Bill-Man mocked him back in the tongue of the Bear
Folk, and Tyee, lifting his head from a trench to see, had his
shoulder scratched deeply by a bullet.
And in the dreary days that followed, and in the wild nights when they
pushed the trenches closer, there was much discussion as to the wisdom
of letting the Sunlanders go. But of this they were afraid, and the
women raised a cry always at the thought This much they had seen of
the Sunlanders; they cared to see no more. All the time the whistle
and blub-blub of bullets filled the air, and all the time the
death-list grew. In the golden sunrise came the faint, far crack of a
rifle, and a stricken woman would throw up her hands on the distant
edge of the village; in the noonday heat, men in the trenches heard
the shrill sing-song and knew their deaths; or in the gray afterglow
of evening, the dirt kicked up in puffs by the winking fires. And
through the nights the long "Wah-hoo-ha-a wah-hoo-ha-a!" of mourning
women held dolorous sway.
As Tyee had promised, in the end famine gripped the Sunlanders. And
once, when an early fall gale blew, one of them crawled through the
darkness past the trenches and stole many dried fish.
But he could not get back with them, and the sun found him vainly
hiding in the village. So he fought the great fight by himself, and
in a narrow ring of Mandell Folk shot four with his revolver, and ere
they could lay hands on him for the torture, turned it on himself and
died.
This threw a gloom upon the people. Oloof put the question, "If one
man die so hard, how hard will die the three who yet are left?"
Then Mesahchie stood up on the barricade and called in by name three
dogs which had wandered close,--meat and life,--which set back the day
of reckoning and put despair in the hearts of the Mandell Folk. And on
the head of Mesahchie were showered the curses of a generation.
The days dragged by. The sun hurried south, the nights grew long and
longer, and there was a touch of frost in the air. And still the
Sunlanders held the pit. Hearts were breaking under the unending
strain, and Tyee thought hard and deep. Then he sent forth word that
all the skins and hides of all the tribe be collected. These he had
made into huge cylindrical bales, and behind each bale he placed a
man.
When the word was given the brief day was almost spent, and it was
slow work and tedious, rolling the big bales forward foot by foot The
bullets of the Sunlanders blub-blubbed and thudded against them, but
could not go through, and the men howled their delight But the dark
was at hand, and Tyee, secure of success, called the bales back to the
trenches.
In the morning, in the face of an unearthly silence from the pit, the
real advance began. At first with large intervals between, the bales
slowly converged as the circle drew in. At a hundred yards they were
quite close together, so that Tyee's order to halt was passed along
in whispers. The pit showed no sign of life. They watched long and
sharply, but nothing stirred. The advance was taken up and the
manoeuvre repeated at fifty yards. Still no sign nor sound. Tyee shook
his head, and even Aab-Waak was dubious. But the order was given to go
on, and go on they did, till bale touched bale and a solid rampart of
skin and hide bowed out from the cliff about the pit and back to the
cliff again.
Tyee looked back and saw the women and children clustering blackly in
the deserted trenches. He looked ahead at the silent pit. The men were
wriggling nervously, and he ordered every second bale forward. This
double line advanced till bale touched bale as before. Then Aab-Waak,
of his own will, pushed one bale forward alone. When it touched the
barricade, he waited a long while. After that he tossed unresponsive
rocks over into the pit, and finally, with great care, stood up and
peered in. A carpet of empty cartridges, a few white-picked dog bones,
and a soggy place where water dripped from a crevice, met his eyes.
That was all. The Sunlanders were gone.
There were murmurings of witchcraft, vague complaints, dark looks
which foreshadowed to Tyee dread things which yet might come to pass,
and he breathed easier when Aab-Waak took up the trail along the base
of the cliff.
"The cave!" Tyee cried. "They foresaw my wisdom of the skin-bales and
fled away into the cave!"
The cliff was honey-combed with a labyrinth of subterranean passages
which found vent in an opening midway between the pit and where the
trench tapped the wall. Thither, and with many exclamations, the
tribesmen followed Aab-Waak, and, arrived, they saw plainly where the
Sunlanders had climbed to the mouth, twenty and odd feet above.
"Now the thing is done," Tyee said, rubbing his hands. "Let word go
forth that rejoicing be made, for they are in the trap now, these
Sunlanders, in the trap. The young men shall climb up, and the mouth
of the cave be filled with stones, so that Bill-Man and his brothers
and Mesahchie shall by famine be pinched to shadows and die cursing in
the silence and dark."
Cries of delight and relief greeted this, and Howgah, the last of the
Hungry Folk, swarmed up the steep slant and drew himself, crouching,
upon the lip of the opening. But as he crouched, a muffled report
rushed forth, and as he clung desperately to the slippery edge, a
second. His grip loosed with reluctant weakness, and he pitched down
at the feet of Tyee, quivered for a moment like some monstrous jelly,
and was still.
"How should I know they were great fighters and unafraid?" Tyee
demanded, spurred to defence by recollection of the dark looks and
vague complaints.
"We were many and happy," one of the men stated baldly. Another
fingered his spear with a prurient hand.
But Oloof cried them cease. "Give ear, my brothers! There be another
way! As a boy I chanced upon it playing along the steep. It is hidden
by the rocks, and there is no reason that a man should go there;
wherefore it is secret, and no man knows. It is very small, and you
crawl on your belly a long way, and then you are in the cave. To-night
we will so crawl, without noise, on our bellies, and come upon the
Sunlanders from behind. And to-morrow we will be at peace, and never
again will we quarrel with the Sunlanders in the years to come."
"Never again!" chorussed the weary men. "Never again!" And Tyee joined
with them.
That night, with the memory of their dead in their hearts, and in
their hands stones and spears and knives, the horde of women and
children collected about the known mouth of the cave. Down the twenty
and odd precarious feet to the ground no Sunlander could hope to pass
and live. In the village remained only the wounded men, while every
able man--and there were thirty of them--followed Oloof to the secret
opening. A hundred feet of broken ledges and insecurely heaped rocks
were between it and the earth, and because of the rocks, which might
be displaced by the touch of hand or foot, but one man climbed at a
time. Oloof went up first, called softly for the next to come on, and
disappeared inside. A man followed, a second, and a third, and so on,
till only Tyee remained. He received the call of the last man, but a
quick doubt assailed him and he stayed to ponder. Half an hour later
he swung up to the opening and peered in. He could feel the narrowness
of the passage, and the darkness before him took on solidity. The fear
of the walled-in earth chilled him and he could not venture. All the
men who had died, from Neegah the first of the Mandells, to Howgah
the last of the Hungry Folk, came and sat with him, but he chose the
terror of their company rather than face the horror which he felt to
lurk in the thick blackness. He had been sitting long when something
soft and cold fluttered lightly on his cheek, and he knew the first
winter's snow was falling. The dim dawn came, and after that the
bright day, when he heard a low guttural sobbing, which came and went
at intervals along the passage and which drew closer each time and
more distinct He slipped over the edge, dropped his feet to the first
ledge, and waited.
That which sobbed made slow progress, but at last, after many halts,
it reached him, and he was sure no Sunlander made the noise. So he
reached a hand inside, and where there should have been a head felt
the shoulders of a man uplifted on bent arms. The head he found later,
not erect, but hanging straight down so that the crown rested on the
floor of the passage.
"Is it you, Tyee?" the head said. "For it is I, Aab-Waak, who am
helpless and broken as a rough-flung spear. My head is in the dirt,
and I may not climb down unaided."
Tyee clambered in, dragged him up with his back against the wall, but
the head hung down on the chest and sobbed and wailed.
"Ai-oo-o, ai-oo-o!" it went "Oloof forgot, for Mesahchie likewise knew
the secret and showed the Sunlanders, else they would not have waited
at the end of the narrow way. Wherefore, I am a broken man, and
helpless--ai-oo-o, ai-oo-o!"
"And did they die, the cursed Sunlanders, at the end of the narrow
way?" Tyee demanded.
"How should I know they waited?" Aab-Waak gurgled. "For my brothers
had gone before, many of them, and there was no sound of struggle.
How should I know why there should be no sound of struggle? And ere
I knew, two hands were about my neck so that I could not cry out and
warn my brothers yet to come. And then there were two hands more on my
head, and two more on my feet. In this fashion the three Sunlanders
had me. And while the hands held my head in the one place, the hands
on my feet swung my body around, and as we wring the neck of a duck in
the marsh, so my week was wrung.
"But it was not given that I should die," he went on, a remnant of
pride yet glimmering. "I, only, am left. Oloof and the rest lie on
their backs in a row, and their faces turn this way and that, and the
faces of some be underneath where the backs of their heads should be.
It is not good to look upon; for when life returned to me I saw them
all by the light of a torch which the Sunlanders left, and I had been
laid with them in the row."
"So? So?" Tyee mused, too stunned for speech.
He started suddenly, and shivered, for the voice of Bill-Man shot out
at him from the passage.
"It is well," it said. "I look for the man who crawls with the broken
neck, and lo, do I find Tyee. Throw down thy gun, Tyee, so that I may
hear it strike among the rocks."
Tyee obeyed passively, and Bill-Man crawled forward into the light.
Tyee looked at him curiously. He was gaunt and worn and dirty, and his
eyes burned like twin coals in their cavernous sockets.
"I am hungry, Tyee," he said. "Very hungry."
"And I am dirt at thy feet," Tyee responded.
"Thy word is my law. Further, I commanded my people not to withstand
thee. I counselled--"
But Bill-Man had turned and was calling back into the passage. "Hey!
Charley! Jim! Fetch the woman along and come on!"
"We go now to eat," he said, when his comrades and Mesahchie had
joined him.
Tyee rubbed his hands deprecatingly. "We have little, but it is
thine."
"After that we go south on the snow," Bill-Man continued.
"May you go without hardship and the trail be easy."
"It is a long way. We will need dogs and food--much!"
"Thine the pick of our dogs and the food they may carry."
Bill-Man slipped over the edge of the opening and prepared to descend.
"But we come again, Tyee. We come again, and our days shall be long in
the land."
And so they departed into the trackless south, Bill-Man, his brothers,
and Mesahchie. And when the next year came, the _Search Number Two_
rode at anchor in Mandell Bay. The few Mandell men, who survived
because their wounds had prevented their crawling into the cave, went
to work at the best of the Sunlanders and dug in the ground. They hunt
and fish no more, but receive a daily wage, with which they buy flour,
sugar, calico, and such things which the _Search Number Two_ brings on
her yearly trip from the Sunlands.
And this mine is worked in secret, as many Northland mines have been
worked; and no white man outside the Company, which is Bill-Man, Jim,
and Charley, knows the whereabouts of Mandell on the rim of the polar
sea. Aab-Waak still carries his head on one shoulder, is become an
oracle, and preaches peace to the younger generation, for which he
receives a pension from the Company. Tyee is foreman of the mine. But
he has achieved a new theory concerning the Sunlanders.
"They that live under the path of the sun are not soft," he says,
smoking his pipe and watching the day-shift take itself off and the
night-shift go on. "For the sun enters into their blood and burns them
with a great fire till they are filled with lusts and passions. They
burn always, so that they may not know when they are beaten. Further,
there is an unrest in them, which is a devil, and they are flung out
over the earth to toil and suffer and fight without end. I know. I am
Tyee."