"He has opened his eyes. Look!"
"Put him in the skin again. He will be a strong dog. On the fourth
month we will name him."
"For whom?" said Amoraq.
Kadlu's eye rolled round the skin-lined snow-house till it fell on
fourteen-year-old Kotuko sitting on the sleeping-bench, making a
button out of walrus ivory. "Name him for me," said Kotuko, with a
grin. "I shall need him one day."
Kadlu grinned back till his eyes were almost buried in the fat of his
flat cheeks, and nodded to Amoraq, while the puppy's fierce mother
whined to see her baby wriggling far out of reach in the little
sealskin pouch hung above the warmth of the blubber-lamp. Kotuko went
on with his carving, and Kadlu threw a rolled bundle of leather
dog-harnesses into a tiny little room that opened from one side of the
house, slipped off his heavy deerskin hunting-suit, put it into a
whalebone-net that hung above another lamp, and dropped down on the
sleeping-bench to whittle at a piece of frozen seal-meat till Amoraq,
his wife, should bring the regular dinner of boiled meat and
blood-soup. He had been out since early dawn at the seal-holes, eight
miles away, and had come home with three big seal. Halfway down the
long, low snow passage or tunnel that led to the inner door of the
house you could hear snappings and yelpings, as the dogs of his
sleigh-team, released from the day's work, scuffled for warm places.
When the yelpings grew too loud Kotuko lazily rolled off the
sleeping-bench, and picked up a whip with an eighteen-inch handle of
springy whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy, plaited thong. He
dived into the passage, where it sounded as though all the dogs were
eating him alive; but that was no more than their regular grace
before meals. When he crawled out at the far end half a dozen furry
heads followed him with their eyes as he went to a sort of gallows of
whale-jawbones, from which the dog's meat was hung; split off the
frozen stuff in big lumps with a broad-headed spear; and stood, his
whip in one hand and the meat in the other. Each beast was called by
name, the weakest first, and woe betide any dog that moved out of his
turn; for the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning,
and flick away an inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast growled,
snapped, choked once over his portion, and hurried back to the
protection of the passage, while the boy stood upon the snow under the
blazing Northern Lights and dealt out justice. The last to be served
was the big black leader of the team, who kept order when the dogs
were harnessed; and to him Kotuko gave a double allowance of meat as
well as an extra crack of the whip.
"Ah!" said Kotuko, coiling up the lash, "I have a little one over the
lamp that will make a great many howlings. _Sarpok!_ Get in!"
He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted the dry snow from his
furs with the whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door, tapped
the skin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles that might
have fallen from the dome of snow above, and curled up on the bench.
The dogs in the passage snored and whined in their sleep, the boy-baby
in Amoraq's deep fur hood kicked and choked and gurgled, and the
mother of the newly named puppy lay at Kotuko's side, her eyes fixed
on the bundle of sealskin, warm and safe above the broad yellow flame
of the lamp.
And all this happened far away to the north, beyond Labrador, beyond
Hudson's Strait, where the great tides heave the ice about, north of
Melville Peninsula--north even of the narrow Fury and Hecla
Straits--on the north shore of Baffin Land, where Bylot's Island
stands above the ice of Lancaster Sound like a pudding-bowl wrong side
up. North of Lancaster Sound there is little we know anything about,
except North Devon and Ellesmere Land; but even there live a few
scattered people, next door, as it were, to the very Pole.
Kadlu was an Inuit,--what you call an Esquimau,--and his tribe, some
thirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut--"the country
lying at the back of something." In the maps that desolate coast is
written Navy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name is best, because the
country lies at the very back of everything in the world. For nine
months of the year there is only ice, snow, and gale after gale, with
a cold that no one can realize who has never seen the thermometer even
at zero. For six months of those nine it is dark; and that is what
makes it so horrible. In the three months of the summer it only
freezes every other day and every night, and then the snow begins to
weep off on the southerly slopes, and a few ground-willows put out
their woolly buds, a tiny stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom,
beaches of fine gravel and rounded stones run down to the open sea,
and polished boulders and streaked rocks lift up above the granulated
snow. But all that is gone in a few weeks, and the wild winter locks
down again on the land; while at sea the ice tears up and down the
offing, jamming and ramming, and splitting and hitting, and pounding
and grounding, till it all freezes together, ten feet thick, from the
land outward to deep water.
In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to the edge of this
land-ice, and spear them as they came up to breathe at their
blow-holes. The seal must have open water to live and catch fish in,
and in the deep of winter the ice would sometimes run eighty miles
without a break from the nearest shore. In the spring he and his
people retreated from the floes to the rocky mainland, where they put
up tents of skins, and snared the sea-birds, or speared the young seal
basking on the beaches. Later, they would go south into Baffin Land
after the reindeer, and to get their year's store of salmon from the
hundreds of streams and lakes of the interior; coming back north in
September or October for the musk-ox hunting and the regular winter
sealery. This traveling was done with dog-sleighs, twenty and thirty
miles a day, or sometimes down the coast in big skin "woman-boats,"
when the dogs and the babies lay among the feet of the rowers, and the
women sang songs as they glided from cape to cape over the glassy,
cold waters. All the luxuries that the Tununirmiut knew came from the
south--driftwood for sleigh-runners, rod-iron for harpoon-tips, steel
knives, tin kettles that cooked food much better than the old
soapstone affairs, flint and steel, and even matches, as well as
colored ribbons for the women's hair, little cheap mirrors, and red
cloth for the edging of deerskin dress-jackets. Kadlu traded the rich,
creamy, twisted narwhal-horn and musk-ox teeth (these are just as
valuable as pearls) to the Southern Inuit, and they, in turn, traded
with the whalers and the missionary-posts of Exeter and Cumberland
Sounds; and so the chain went on, till a kettle picked up by a ship's
cook in the Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber-lamp
somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic Circle.
Kadlu, being a good hunter, was rich in iron harpoons, snow-knives,
bird-darts, and all the other things that make life easy up there in
the great cold; and he was the head of this tribe, or, as they say,
"the man who knows all about it by practice." This did not give him
any authority, except now and then he could advise his friends to
change their hunting-grounds; but Kotuko used it to domineer a little,
in the lazy, fat Inuit fashion, over the other boys, when they came
out at night to play ball in the moonlight, or to sing the Child's
Song to the Aurora Borealis.
But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was tired of
making snares for wild fowl and kit-foxes, and most tired of all of
helping the women to chew seal- and deerskins (that supples them as
nothing else can) the long day through, while the men were out
hunting. He wanted to go into the _quaggi_, the Singing-House, when
the hunters gathered there for their mysteries, and the _angekok_, the
sorcerer, frightened them into the most delightful fits after the
lamps were put out, and you could hear the Spirit of the Reindeer
stamping on the roof; and when a spear was thrust out into the open
black night it came back covered with hot blood. He wanted to throw
his big boots into the net with the tired air of a head of a family,
and to gamble with the hunters when they dropped in of an evening and
played a sort of home-made roulette with a tin pot and a nail. There
were hundreds of things that he wanted to do, but the grown men
laughed at him and said, "Wait till you have been in the buckle,
Kotuko. Hunting is not _all_ catching."
Now that his father had named a puppy for him, things looked brighter.
An Inuit does not waste a good dog on his son till the boy knows
something of dog-driving; and Kotuko was more than sure that he knew
more than everything.
If the puppy had not had an iron constitution he would have died from
over-stuffing and over-handling. Kotuko made him a tiny harness with a
trace to it, and hauled him all over the house floor, shouting: "Aua!
Ja aua!" (Go to the right.) "Choiachoi! Ja choiachoi!" (Go to the
left.) "Ohaha!" (Stop.) The puppy did not like it at all, but being
fished for in this way was pure happiness beside being put to the
sleigh for the first time. He just sat down on the snow, and played
with the seal-hide trace that ran from his harness to the _pitu_, the
big thong in the bows of the sleigh. Then the team started, and the
puppy found the heavy ten-foot sleigh running up his back, and
dragging him along the snow, while Kotuko laughed till the tears ran
down his face. There followed days and days of the cruel whip that
hisses like the wind over ice, and his companions all bit him because
he did not know his work, and the harness chafed him, and he was not
allowed to sleep with Kotuko any more, but had to take the coldest
place in the passage. It was a sad time for the puppy.
The boy learned, too, as fast as the dog; though a dog-sleigh is a
heartbreaking thing to manage. Each beast is harnessed, the weakest
nearest to the driver, by his own separate trace, which runs under his
left fore-leg to the main thong, where it is fastened by a sort of
button and loop which can be slipped by a turn of the wrist, thus
freeing one dog at a time. This is very necessary, because young dogs
often get the trace between their hind legs, where it cuts to the
bone. And they one and all _will_ go visiting their friends as they
run, jumping in and out among the traces. Then they fight, and the
result is more mixed than a wet fishing-line next morning. A great
deal of trouble can be avoided by scientific use of the whip. Every
Inuit boy prides himself as being a master of the long lash; but it is
easy to flick at a mark on the ground, and difficult to lean forward
and catch a shirking dog just behind the shoulders when the sleigh is
going at full speed. If you call one dog's name for "visiting," and
accidentally lash another, the two will fight it out at once, and stop
all the others. Again, if you travel with a companion and begin to
talk, or by yourself and sing, the dogs will halt, turn round, and sit
down to hear what you have to say. Kotuko was run away from once or
twice through forgetting to block the sleigh when he stopped; and he
broke many lashings, and ruined a few thongs, before he could be
trusted with a full team of eight and the light sleigh. Then he felt
himself a person of consequence, and on smooth, black ice, with a bold
heart and a quick elbow, he smoked along over the levels as fast as a
pack in full cry. He would go ten miles to the seal-holes, and when
he was on the hunting-grounds he would twitch a trace loose from the
_pitu_, and free the big black leader, who was the cleverest dog in
the team. As soon as the dog had scented a breathing-hole Kotuko would
reverse the sleigh, driving a couple of sawed-off antlers, that stuck
up like perambulator-handles from the back-rest, deep into the snow,
so that the team could not get away. Then he would crawl forward inch
by inch, and wait till the seal came up to breathe. Then he would stab
down swiftly with his spear and running-line, and presently would haul
his seal up to the lip of the ice, while the black leader came up and
helped to pull the carcass across the ice to the sleigh. That was the
time when the harnessed dogs yelled and foamed with excitement, and
Kotuko laid the long lash like a red-hot bar across all their faces,
till the carcass froze stiff. Going home was the heavy work. The
loaded sleigh had to be humored among the rough ice, and the dogs sat
down and looked hungrily at the seal instead of pulling. At last they
would strike the well-worn sleigh-road to the village, and toodle-kiyi
along the ringing ice, heads down and tails up, while Kotuko struck up
the "Angutivaun tai-na tau-na-ne taina" (The Song of the Returning
Hunter), and voices hailed him from house to house under all that
dim, star-litten sky.
When Kotuko the dog came to his full growth he enjoyed himself too. He
fought his way up the team steadily, fight after fight, till one fine
evening, over their food, he tackled the big, black leader (Kotuko the
boy saw fair play), and made second dog of him, as they say. So he was
promoted to the long thong of the leading dog, running five feet in
advance of all the others: it was his bounden duty to stop all
fighting, in harness or out of it, and he wore a collar of copper
wire, very thick and heavy. On special occasions he was fed with
cooked food inside the house, and sometimes was allowed to sleep on
the bench with Kotuko. He was a good seal-dog, and would keep a
musk-ox at bay by running round him and snapping at his heels. He
would even--and this for a sleigh-dog is the last proof of bravery--he
would even stand up to the gaunt Arctic wolf, whom all dogs of the
North, as a rule, fear beyond anything that walks the snow. He and his
master--they did not count the team of ordinary dogs as
company--hunted together, day after day and night after night,
fur-wrapped boy and savage, long-haired, narrow-eyed, white-fanged,
yellow brute. All an Inuit has to do is to get food and skins for
himself and his family. The women-folk make the skins into clothing,
and occasionally help in trapping small game; but the bulk of the
food--and they eat enormously--must be found by the men. If the supply
fails there is no one up there to buy or beg or borrow from. The
people must die.
An Inuit does not think of these chances till he is forced to. Kadlu,
Kotuko, Amoraq, and the boy-baby who kicked about in Amoraq's fur hood
and chewed pieces of blubber all day, were as happy together as any
family in the world. They came of a very gentle race--an Inuit seldom
loses his temper, and almost never strikes a child--who did not know
exactly what telling a real lie meant, still less how to steal. They
were content to spear their living out of the heart of the bitter,
hopeless cold; to smile oily smiles, and tell queer ghost and fairy
tales of evenings, and eat till they could eat no more, and sing the
endless woman's song, "Amna aya, aya amna, ah! ah!" through the long,
lamp-lighted days as they mended their clothes and their hunting-gear.
But one terrible winter everything betrayed them. The Tununirmiut
returned from the yearly salmon-fishing, and made their houses on the
early ice to the north of Bylot's Island, ready to go after the seal
as soon as the sea froze. But it was an early and savage autumn. All
through September there were continuous gales that broke up the smooth
seal-ice when it was only four or five feet thick, and forced it
inland, and piled a great barrier, some twenty miles broad, of lumped
and ragged and needly ice, over which it was impossible to draw the
dog-sleighs. The edge of the floe off which the seal were used to fish
in winter lay, perhaps, twenty miles beyond this barrier, and out of
reach of the Tununirmiut. Even so, they might have managed to scrape
through the winter on their stock of frozen salmon and stored blubber,
and what the traps gave them, but in December one of their hunters
came across a _tupik_ (a skin-tent) of three women and a girl nearly
dead, whose men had come down from the far North and been crushed in
their little skin hunting-boats while they were out after the
long-horned narwhal. Kadlu, of course, could only distribute the women
among the huts of the winter village, for no Inuit dare refuse a meal
to a stranger. He never knows when his own turn may come to beg.
Amoraq took the girl, who was about fourteen, into her own house as a
sort of servant. From the cut of her sharp-pointed hood, and the long
diamond pattern of her white deerskin leggings, they supposed she came
from Ellesmere Land. She had never seen tin cooking-pots or
wooden-shod sleighs before; but Kotuko the boy and Kotuko the dog were
rather fond of her.
Then all the foxes went south, and even the wolverine, that growling,
blunt-headed little thief of the snow, did not take the trouble to
follow the line of empty traps that Kotuko set. The tribe lost a
couple of their best hunters, who were badly crippled in a fight with
a musk-ox, and this threw more work on the others. Kotuko went out,
day after day, with a light hunting-sleigh and six or seven of the
strongest dogs, looking till his eyes ached for some patch of clear
ice where a seal might perhaps have scratched a breathing-hole. Kotuko
the dog ranged far and wide, and in the dead stillness of the
ice-fields Kotuko the boy could hear his half-choked whine of
excitement, above a seal-hole three miles away, as plainly as though
he were at his elbow. When the dog found a hole the boy would build
himself a little, low snow wall to keep off the worst of the bitter
wind, and there he would wait ten, twelve, twenty hours for the seal
to come up to breathe, his eyes glued to the tiny mark he had made
above the hole to guide the downward thrust of his harpoon, a little
sealskin mat under his feet, and his legs tied together in the
_tutareang_ (the buckle that the old hunters had talked about). This
helps to keep a man's legs from twitching as he waits and waits and
waits for the quick-eared seal to rise. Though there is no excitement
in it, you can easily believe that the sitting still in the buckle
with the thermometer perhaps forty degrees below zero is the hardest
work an Inuit knows. When a seal was caught Kotuko the dog would bound
forward, his trace trailing behind him, and help to pull the body to
the sleigh, where the tired and hungry dogs lay sullenly under the lee
of the broken ice.
A seal did not go very far, for each mouth in the little village had a
right to be filled, and neither bone, hide, nor sinew was wasted. The
dogs' meat was taken for human use, and Amoraq fed the team with
pieces of old summer skin-tents raked out from under the
sleeping-bench, and they howled and howled again, and waked to howl
hungrily. One could tell by the soapstone lamps in the huts that
famine was near. In good seasons, when blubber was plentiful, the
light in the boat-shaped lamps would be two feet high--cheerful, oily,
and yellow. Now it was a bare six inches: Amoraq carefully pricked
down the moss wick when an unwatched flame brightened for a moment,
and the eyes of all the family followed her hand. The horror of famine
up there in the great cold is not so much dying, as dying in the dark.
All the Inuit dread the dark that presses on them without a break for
six months in each year; and when the lamps are low in the houses the
minds of people begin to be shaken and confused.
But worse was to come.
The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the passages, glaring at the
cold stars, and snuffing into the bitter wind, night after night. When
they stopped howling the silence fell down again as solid and as heavy
as a snowdrift against a door, and men could hear the beating of their
blood in the thin passages of the ear, and the thumping of their own
hearts, that sounded as loud as the noise of sorcerers' drums beaten
across the snow. One night Kotuko the dog, who had been unusually
sullen in harness, leaped up and pushed his head against Kotuko's
knee. Kotuko patted him, but the dog still pushed blindly forward,
fawning. Then Kadlu waked, and gripped the heavy wolf-like head, and
stared into the glassy eyes. The dog whimpered and shivered between
Kadlu's knees. The hair rose about his neck, and he growled as though
a stranger were at the door; then he barked joyously, and rolled on
the ground, and bit at Kotuko's boot like a puppy.
"What is it?" said Kotuko; for he was beginning to be afraid.
"The sickness," Kadlu answered. "It is the dog-sickness." Kotuko the
dog lifted his nose, and howled and howled again.
"I have not seen this before. What will he do?" said Kotuko.
Kadlu shrugged one shoulder a little, and crossed the hut for his
short stabbing-harpoon. The big dog looked at him, howled again, and
slunk away down the passage, while the other dogs drew aside right and
left to give him ample room. When he was out on the snow he barked
furiously, as though on the trail of a musk-ox, and, barking and
leaping and frisking, passed out of sight. This was not hydrophobia,
but simple, plain madness. The cold and the hunger, and, above all,
the dark, had turned his head; and when the terrible dog-sickness once
shows itself in a team, it spreads like wildfire. Next hunting-day
another dog sickened, and was killed then and there by Kotuko as he
bit and struggled among the traces. Then the black second dog, who had
been the leader in the old days, suddenly gave tongue on an imaginary
reindeer-track, and when they slipped him from the _pitu_ he flew at
the throat of an ice-cliff, and ran away as his leader had done, his
harness on his back. After that no one would take the dogs out again.
They needed them for something else, and the dogs knew it; and though
they were tied down and fed by hand, their eyes were full of despair
and fear. To make things worse, the old women began to tell
ghost-tales, and to say that they had met the spirits of the dead
hunters lost that autumn, who prophesied all sorts of horrible things.
Kotuko grieved more for the loss of his dog than anything else; for,
though an Inuit eats enormously, he also knows how to starve. But the
hunger, the darkness, the cold, and the exposure told on his strength,
and he began to hear voices inside his head, and to see people who
were not there, out of the tail of his eye. One night--he had
unbuckled himself after ten hours' waiting above a "blind" seal-hole,
and was staggering back to the village faint and dizzy--he halted to
lean his back against a boulder which happened to be supported like a
rocking-stone on a single jutting point of ice. His weight disturbed
the balance of the thing, it rolled over ponderously, and as Kotuko
sprang aside to avoid it, slid after him, squeaking and hissing on the
ice slope.
That was enough for Kotuko. He had been brought up to believe that
every rock and boulder had its owner (its _inua_), who was generally a
one-eyed kind of a Woman-Thing called a _tornaq_, and that when a
_tornaq_ meant to help a man she rolled after him inside her stone
house, and asked him whether he would take her for a guardian spirit.
(In summer thaws the ice-propped rocks and boulders roll and slip all
over the face of the land, so you can easily see how the idea of live
stones arose.) Kotuko heard the blood beating in his ears as he had
heard it all day, and he thought that was the _tornaq_ of the stone
speaking to him. Before he reached home he was quite certain that he
had held a long conversation with her, and as all his people believed
that this was quite possible, no one contradicted him.
"She said to me, 'I jump down, I jump down from my place on the
snow,'" cried Kotuko, with hollow eyes, leaning forward in the
half-lighted hut. "She said, 'I will be a guide.' She says, 'I will
guide you to the good seal-holes.' To-morrow I go out, and the
_tornaq_ will guide me."
Then the _angekok_, the village sorcerer, came in, and Kotuko told him
the tale a second time. It lost nothing in the telling.
"Follow the _tornait_ [the spirits of the stones], and they will bring
us food again," said the _angekok_.
Now the girl from the North had been lying near the lamp, eating very
little and saying less for days past; but when Amoraq and Kadlu next
morning packed and lashed a little hand-sleigh for Kotuko, and loaded
it with his hunting-gear and as much blubber and frozen seal-meat as
they could spare, she took the pulling-rope, and stepped out boldly at
the boy's side.
"Your house is my house," she said, as the little bone-shod sleigh
squeaked and bumped behind them in the awful Arctic night.
"My house is your house," said Kotuko; "but _I_ think that we shall
both go to Sedna together."
Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Under-world, and the Inuit believe
that every one who dies must spend a year in her horrible country
before going to Quadliparmiut, the Happy Place, where it never
freezes and the fat reindeer trot up when you call.
Through the village people were shouting: "The _tornait_ have spoken
to Kotuko. They will show him open ice. He will bring us the seal
again!" Their voices were soon swallowed up by the cold, empty dark,
and Kotuko and the girl shouldered close together as they strained on
the pulling-rope or humored the sleigh through the broken ice in the
direction of the Polar Sea. Kotuko insisted that the _tornaq_ of the
stone had told him to go north, and north they went under Tuktuqdjung
the Reindeer--those stars that we call the Great Bear.
No European could have made five miles a day over the ice-rubbish and
the sharp-edged drifts; but those two knew exactly the turn of the
wrist that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock, the jerk that neatly lifts
it out of an ice-crack, and the exact strength that goes to the few
quiet strokes of the spear-head that make a path possible when
everything looks hopeless.
The girl said nothing, but bowed her head, and the long wolverine-fur
fringe of her ermine hood blew across her broad, dark face. The sky
above them was an intense velvety-black, changing to bands of Indian
red on the horizon, where the great stars burned like street lamps.
From time to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights would roll
across the hollow of the high heavens, flick like a flag, and
disappear; or a meteor would crackle from darkness to darkness,
trailing a shower of sparks behind. Then they could see the ridged and
furrowed surface of the floe tipped and laced with strange
colors--red, copper, and bluish; but in the ordinary starlight
everything turned to one frost-bitten gray. The floe, as you will
remember, had been battered and tormented by the autumn gales till it
was one frozen earthquake. There were gullies and ravines, and holes
like gravel-pits, cut in ice; lumps and scattered pieces frozen down
to the original floor of the floe; blotches of old black ice that had
been thrust under the floe in some gale and heaved up again; roundish
boulders of ice; saw-like edges of ice carved by the snow that flies
before the wind; and sunken pits where thirty or forty acres lay below
the level of the rest of the field. From a little distance you might
have taken the lumps for seal or walrus, overturned sleighs or men on
a hunting expedition, or even the great Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear
himself; but in spite of these fantastic shapes, all on the very edge
of starting into life, there was neither sound nor the least faint
echo of sound. And through this silence and through this waste, where
the sudden lights flapped and went out again, the sleigh and the two
that pulled it crawled like things in a nightmare--a nightmare of the
end of the world at the end of the world.
When they were tired Kotuko would make what the hunters call a
"half-house," a very small snow hut, into which they would huddle with
the traveling-lamp, and try to thaw out the frozen seal-meat. When
they had slept the march began again--thirty miles a day to get ten
miles northward. The girl was always very silent, but Kotuko muttered
to himself and broke out into songs he had learned in the
Singing-House--summer songs, and reindeer and salmon songs--all
horribly out of place at that season. He would declare that he heard
the _tornaq_ growling to him, and would run wildly up a hummock,
tossing his arms and speaking in loud, threatening tones. To tell the
truth, Kotuko was very nearly crazy for the time being; but the girl
was sure that he was being guided by his guardian spirit, and that
everything would come right. She was not surprised, therefore, when at
the end of the fourth march Kotuko, whose eyes were burning like
fire-balls in his head, told her that his tornaq was following them
across the snow in the shape of a two-headed dog. The girl looked
where Kotuko pointed, and something seemed to slip into a ravine. It
was certainly not human, but everybody knew that the _tornait_
preferred to appear in the shape of bear and seal, and such like.
It might have been the Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself, or it
might have been anything, for Kotuko and the girl were so starved that
their eyes were untrustworthy. They had trapped nothing, and seen no
trace of game since they had left the village; their food would not
hold out for another week, and there was a gale coming. A Polar storm
can blow for ten days without a break, and all that while it is
certain death to be abroad. Kotuko laid up a snow-house large enough
to take in the hand-sleigh (never be separated from your meat), and
while he was shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the
key-stone of the roof, he saw a Thing looking at him from a little
cliff of ice half a mile away. The air was hazy, and the Thing seemed
to be forty feet long and ten feet high, with twenty feet of tail and
a shape that quivered all along the outlines. The girl saw it too, but
instead of crying aloud with terror, said quietly, "That is Quiquern.
What comes after?"
"He will speak to me," said Kotuko; but the snow-knife trembled in his
hand as he spoke, because however much a man may believe that he is a
friend of strange and ugly spirits, he seldom likes to be taken quite
at his word. Quiquern, too, is the phantom of a gigantic toothless dog
without any hair, who is supposed to live in the far North, and to
wander about the country just before things are going to happen. They
may be pleasant or unpleasant things, but not even the sorcerers care
to speak about Quiquern. He makes the dogs go mad. Like the
Spirit-Bear he has several extra pairs of legs,--six or eight,--and
this Thing jumping up and down in the haze had more legs than any real
dog needed. Kotuko and the girl huddled into their hut quickly. Of
course if Quiquern had wanted them, he could have torn it to pieces
above their heads, but the sense of a foot-thick snow wall between
themselves and the wicked dark was great comfort. The gale broke with
a shriek of wind like the shriek of a train, and for three days and
three nights it held, never varying one point, and never lulling even
for a minute. They fed the stone lamp between their knees, and nibbled
at the half-warm seal-meat, and watched the black soot gather on the
roof for seventy-two long hours. The girl counted up the food in the
sleigh; there was not more than two days' supply, and Kotuko looked
over the iron heads and the deer-sinew fastenings of his harpoon and
his seal-lance and his bird-dart. There was nothing else to do.
"We shall go to Sedna soon--very soon," the girl whispered. "In three
days we shall lie down and go. Will your _tornaq_ do nothing? Sing her
an _angekok's_ song to make her come here."
He began to sing in the high-pitched howl of the magic songs, and the
gale went down slowly. In the middle of his song the girl started,
laid her mittened hand and then her head to the ice floor of the hut.
Kotuko followed her example, and the two kneeled, staring into each
other's eyes, and listening with every nerve. He ripped a thin sliver
of whalebone from the rim of a bird-snare that lay on the sleigh, and,
after straightening, set it upright in a little hole in the ice,
firming it down with his mitten. It was almost as delicately adjusted
as a compass-needle, and now instead of listening they watched. The
thin rod quivered a little--the least little jar in the world; then it
vibrated steadily for a few seconds, came to rest, and vibrated
again, this time nodding to another point of the compass.
"Too soon!" said Kotuko. "Some big floe has broken far away outside."
The girl pointed at the rod, and shook her head. "It is the big
breaking," she said. "Listen to the ground-ice. It knocks."
When they kneeled this time they heard the most curious muffled grunts
and knockings, apparently under their feet. Sometimes it sounded as
though a blind puppy were squeaking above the lamp; then as if a stone
were being ground on hard ice; and again, like muffled blows on a
drum: but all dragged out and made small, as though they traveled
through a little horn a weary distance away.
"We shall not go to Sedna lying down," said Kotuko. "It is the
breaking. The _tornaq_ has cheated us. We shall die."
All this may sound absurd enough, but the two were face to face with a
very real danger. The three days' gale had driven the deep water of
Baffin's Bay southerly, and piled it on to the edge of the
far-reaching land-ice that stretches from Bylot's Island to the west.
Also, the strong current which sets east out of Lancaster Sound
carried with it mile upon mile of what they call pack-ice--rough ice
that has not frozen into fields; and this pack was bombarding the floe
at the same time that the swell and heave of the storm-worked sea was
weakening and undermining it. What Kotuko and the girl had been
listening to were the faint echoes of that fight thirty or forty miles
away, and the little telltale rod quivered to the shock of it.
Now, as the Inuit say, when the ice once wakes after its long winter
sleep, there is no knowing what may happen, for solid floe-ice changes
shape almost as quickly as a cloud. The gale was evidently a spring
gale sent out of time, and anything was possible.
Yet the two were happier in their minds than before. If the floe broke
up there would be no more waiting and suffering. Spirits, goblins, and
witch-people were moving about on the racking ice, and they might find
themselves stepping into Sedna's country side by side with all sorts
of wild Things, the flush of excitement still on them. When they left
the hut after the gale, the noise on the horizon was steadily growing,
and the tough ice moaned and buzzed all round them.
"It is still waiting," said Kotuko.
On the top of a hummock sat or crouched the eight-legged Thing that
they had seen three days before--and it howled horribly.
"Let us follow," said the girl. "It may know some way that does not
lead to Sedna"; but she reeled from weakness as she took the
pulling-rope. The Thing moved off slowly and clumsily across the
ridges, heading always toward the westward and the land, and they
followed, while the growling thunder at the edge of the floe rolled
nearer and nearer. The floe's lip was split and cracked in every
direction for three or four miles inland, and great pans of
ten-foot-thick ice, from a few yards to twenty acres square, were
jolting and ducking and surging into one another, and into the yet
unbroken floe, as the heavy swell took and shook and spouted between
them. This battering-ram ice was, so to speak, the first army that the
sea was flinging against the floe. The incessant crash and jar of
these cakes almost drowned the ripping sound of sheets of pack-ice
driven bodily under the floe as cards are hastily pushed under a
table-cloth. Where the water was shallow these sheets would be piled
one atop of the other till the bottom-most touched mud fifty feet
down, and the discolored sea banked behind the muddy ice till the
increasing pressure drove all forward again. In addition to the floe
and the pack-ice, the gale and the currents were bringing down true
bergs, sailing mountains of ice, snapped off from the Greenland side
of the water or the north shore of Melville Bay. They pounded in
solemnly, the waves breaking white round them, and advanced on the
floe like an old-time fleet under full sail. A berg that seemed ready
to carry the world before it would ground helplessly in deep water,
reel over, and wallow in a lather of foam and mud and flying frozen
spray, while a much smaller and lower one would rip and ride into the
flat floe, flinging tons of ice on either side, and cutting a track
half a mile long before it was stopped. Some fell like swords,
shearing a raw-edged canal; and others splintered into a shower of
blocks, weighing scores of tons apiece, that whirled and skirled among
the hummocks. Others, again, rose up bodily out of the water when they
shoaled, twisted as though in pain, and fell solidly on their sides,
while the sea threshed over their shoulders. This trampling and
crowding and bending and buckling and arching of the ice into every
possible shape was going on as far as the eye could reach all along
the north line of the floe. From where Kotuko and the girl were the
confusion looked no more than an uneasy, rippling, crawling movement
under the horizon; but it came toward them each moment, and they could
hear, far away to landward, a heavy booming, as it might have been the
boom of artillery through a fog. That showed that the floe was being
jammed home against the iron cliffs of Bylot's Island, the land to the
southward behind them.
"This has never been before," said Kotuko, staring stupidly. "This is
not the time. How can the floe break _now_?"
"Follow _that_!" the girl cried, pointing to the Thing, half limping,
half running distractedly before them. They followed, tugging at the
hand-sleigh, while nearer and nearer came the roaring march of the
ice. At last the fields round them cracked and starred in every
direction, and the cracks opened and snapped like the teeth of wolves.
But where the Thing rested, on a mound of old and scattered ice-blocks
some fifty feet high, there was no motion. Kotuko leaped forward
wildly, dragging the girl after him, and crawled to the bottom of the
mound. The talking of the ice grew louder and louder round them, but
the mound stayed fast, and, as the girl looked at him, he threw his
right elbow upward and outward, making the Inuit sign for land in the
shape of an island. And land it was that the eight-legged, limping
Thing had led them to--some granite-tipped, sand-beached islet off the
coast, shod and sheathed and masked with ice so that no man could have
told it from the floe, but at the bottom solid earth, and not shifting
ice! The smashing and rebound of the floes as they grounded and
splintered marked the borders of it, and a friendly shoal ran out to
the northward, and turned aside the rush of the heaviest ice, exactly
as a ploughshare turns over loam. There was danger, of course, that
some heavily squeezed ice-field might shoot up the beach, and plane
off the top of the islet bodily; but that did not trouble Kotuko and
the girl when they made their snow-house and began to eat, and heard
the ice hammer and skid along the beach. The Thing had disappeared,
and Kotuko was talking excitedly about his power over spirits as he
crouched round the lamp. In the middle of his wild sayings the girl
began to laugh, and rock herself backward and forward.
Behind her shoulder, crawling into the hut crawl by crawl, there were
two heads, one yellow and one black, that belonged to two of the most
sorrowful and ashamed dogs that ever you saw. Kotuko the dog was one,
and the black leader was the other. Both were now fat, well-looking,
and quite restored to their proper minds, but coupled to each other in
an extraordinary fashion. When the black leader ran off, you remember,
his harness was still on him. He must have met Kotuko the dog, and
played or fought with him, for his shoulder-loop had caught in the
plaited copper wire of Kotuko's collar, and had drawn tight, so that
neither could get at the trace to gnaw it apart, but each was fastened
sidelong to his neighbor's neck. That, with the freedom of hunting on
their own account, must have helped to cure their madness. They were
very sober.
The girl pushed the two shamefaced creatures toward Kotuko, and,
sobbing with laughter, cried, "That is Quiquern, who led us to safe
ground. Look at his eight legs and double head!"
Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his arms, yellow and black
together, trying to explain how they had got their senses back again.
Kotuko ran a hand down their ribs, which were round and well clothed.
"They have found food," he said, with a grin. "I do not think we shall
go to Sedna so soon. My _tornaq_ sent these. The sickness has left
them."
As soon as they had greeted Kotuko, these two, who had been forced to
sleep and eat and hunt together for the past few weeks, flew at each
other's throat, and there was a beautiful battle in the snow-house.
"Empty dogs do not fight," Kotuko said. "They have found the seal. Let
us sleep. We shall find food."
When they waked there was open water on the north beach of the island,
and all the loosened ice had been driven landward. The first sound of
the surf is one of the most delightful that the Inuit can hear, for it
means that spring is on the road. Kotuko and the girl took hold of
hands and smiled, for the clear, full roar of the surge among the ice
reminded them of salmon and reindeer time and the smell of blossoming
ground-willows. Even as they looked, the sea began to skim over
between the floating cakes of ice, so intense was the cold; but on the
horizon there was a vast red glare, and that was the light of the
sunken sun. It was more like hearing him yawn in his sleep than seeing
him rise, and the glare only lasted for a few minutes, but it marked
the turn of the year. Nothing, they felt, could alter that.
Kotuko found the dogs fighting over a fresh-killed seal who was
following the fish that a gale always disturbs. He was the first of
some twenty or thirty seal that landed on the island in the course of
the day, and till the sea froze hard there were hundreds of keen black
heads rejoicing in the shallow free water and floating about with the
floating ice.
It was good to eat seal-liver again; to fill the lamps recklessly with
blubber, and watch the flame blaze three feet in the air; but as soon
as the new sea-ice bore, Kotuko and the girl loaded the hand-sleigh,
and made the two dogs pull as they had never pulled in their lives,
for they feared what might have happened in their village. The weather
was as pitiless as usual; but it is easier to draw a sleigh loaded
with good food than to hunt starving. They left five-and-twenty seal
carcasses buried in the ice of the beach, all ready for use, and
hurried back to their people. The dogs showed them the way as soon as
Kotuko told them what was expected, and though there was no sign of a
landmark, in two days they were giving tongue outside Kadlu's house.
Only three dogs answered them; the others had been eaten, and the
houses were all dark. But when Kotuko shouted, "Ojo!" (boiled meat),
weak voices replied, and when he called the muster of the village name
by name, very distinctly, there were no gaps in it.
An hour later the lamps blazed in Kadlu's house; snow-water was
heating; the pots were beginning to simmer, and the snow was dripping
from the roof, as Amoraq made ready a meal for all the village, and
the boy-baby in the hood chewed at a strip of rich nutty blubber, and
the hunters slowly and methodically filled themselves to the very brim
with seal-meat. Kotuko and the girl told their tale. The two dogs sat
between them, and whenever their names came in, they cocked an ear
apiece and looked most thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A dog who has
once gone mad and recovered, the Inuit say, is safe against all
further attacks.
"So the _tornaq_ did not forget us," said Kotuko. "The storm blew, the
ice broke, and the seal swam in behind the fish that were frightened
by the storm. Now the new seal-holes are not two days' distant. Let
the good hunters go to-morrow and bring back the seal I have
speared--twenty-five seal buried in the ice. When we have eaten those
we will all follow the seal on the floe."
"What do _you_ do?" said the sorcerer in the same sort of voice as he
used to Kadlu, richest of the Tununirmiut.
Kotuko looked at the girl from the North, and said quietly, "_We_
build a house." He pointed to the northwest side of Kadlu's house, for
that is the side on which the married son or daughter always lives.
The girl turned her hands palm upward, with a little despairing shake
of her head. She was a foreigner, picked up starving, and could bring
nothing to the housekeeping.
Amoraq jumped from the bench where she sat, and began to sweep things
into the girl's lap--stone lamps, iron skin-scrapers, tin kettles,
deerskins embroidered with musk-ox teeth, and real canvas-needles such
as sailors use--the finest dowry that has ever been given on the far
edge of the Arctic Circle, and the girl from the North bowed her head
down to the very floor.
"Also these!" said Kotuko, laughing and signing to the dogs, who
thrust their cold muzzles into the girl's face.
"Ah," said the _angekok_, with an important cough, as though he had
been thinking it all over. "As soon as Kotuko left the village I went
to the Singing-House and sang magic. I sang all the long nights, and
called upon the Spirit of the Reindeer. _My_ singing made the gale
blow that broke the ice and drew the two dogs toward Kotuko when the
ice would have crushed his bones. _My_ song drew the seal in behind
the broken ice. My body lay still in the _quaggi_, but my spirit ran
about on the ice, and guided Kotuko and the dogs in all the things
they did. I did it."
Everybody was full and sleepy, so no one contradicted; and the
_angekok_, by virtue of his office, helped himself to yet another lump
of boiled meat, and lay down to sleep with the others in the warm,
well-lighted, oil-smelling home.
* * * * *
Now Kotuko, who drew very well in the Inuit fashion, scratched
pictures of all these adventures on a long, flat piece of ivory with a
hole at one end. When he and the girl went north to Ellesmere Land in
the year of the Wonderful Open Winter, he left the picture-story with
Kadlu, who lost it in the shingle when his dog-sleigh broke down one
summer on the beach of Lake Netilling at Nikosiring, and there a Lake
Inuit found it next spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who was
interpreter on a Cumberland Sound whaler, and he sold it to Hans
Olsen, who was afterward a quartermaster on board a big steamer that
took tourists to the North Cape in Norway. When the tourist season was
over, the steamer ran between London and Australia, stopping at
Ceylon, and there Olsen sold the ivory to a Cingalese jeweler for two
imitation sapphires. I found it under some rubbish in a house at
Colombo, and have translated it from one end to the other.
"ANGUTIVUN TINA"
[This is a very free translation of the Song of the Returning Hunter,
as the men used to sing it after seal-spearing. The Inuit always
repeat things over and over again.]
Our gloves are stiff with the frozen blood,
Our furs with the drifted snow,
As we come in with the seal--the seal!
In from the edge of the floe.
_Au jana! Aua! Oha! Haq!_
And the yelping dog-teams go,
And the long whips crack, and the men come back,
Back from the edge of the floe!
We tracked our seal to his secret place,
We heard him scratch below,
We made our mark, and we watched beside,
Out on the edge of the floe.
We raised our lance when he rose to breathe,
We drove it downward--so!
And we played him thus, and we killed him thus
Out on the edge of the floe.
Our gloves are glued with the frozen blood,
Our eyes with the drifting snow;
But we come back to our wives again,
Back from the edge of the floe!
_Au jana! Aua! Oha! Haq!
And the loaded dog-teams go,
And the wives can hear their men come back,
Back from the edge of the floe!_
[Illustration]