Daniel Webster cut from the seal a morsel of meal eight inches long
by two inches square. He crowded out of sight as much of the delicacy
as his mouth and part of his œsophagus would hold—about six inches—and
sliced off the visible two inches with a blow of his knife.
"I never knew before," commented Praed, "why the Eskimo nose was
so snubby. I now see it all. It is a beautiful example of the law
of survival. If you touch an Eskimo anywhere, you draw blood. The
long-nosed men of the Stone Age slashed their skins at meal-times and
died of hemorrhage. Only the short-nosed men could live. Even Daniel
carves perilously close to his lovely snub—and if Daniel's nose were a
little shorter it would be a cavity."
"Just so," I replied, indifferently. Praed's jaunty talk jarred upon
me, and his superior tone toward the Eskimos displeased me. He was
attached to the Relief Party as botanist. I believe he was a Professor
of Natural History in some Western college. He had climbed a mountain in
the Canadian Rockies, a minor peak, no difficult ascent. I am told that
a carriage road has recently been opened to the summit. But the mountain
was a virgin peak and bore a living glacier, and Praed wrote for the
papers about it and made a great achievement of his exploit. Upon the
strength of his reputation he assumed to direct the policy of the Relief
Expedition, and when the leader refused to fall in with his views, Praed
grumbled, and once or twice approached open insubordination. The leader,
a modest fellow, took his unruly botanist quietly, but several members
of the party told me the man worried him.
However, when it suited his purpose, Praed could be humble enough. He
discovered my irritation at once and evidently thought to soothe it.
"Oh, come now, old fellow," he said. "Don't take your Eskimos too
seriously; I admire them as much as you do. Here, Daniel—Dahlgren, how
do you say 'I like you' in Husky-tongue?"
"_Iblee pee-yook amishuwa_," answered I, in the pidgin-Eskimo we had
learned to use during our year in the Far North.
"_Iblee kumook amistwa_," repeated Praed. Daniel received the
communication with that heavy gravity which had won him his nick-name;
his birth-name was Meeoo. Praed shrugged his shoulders.
"I never shall learn the lingo," he sighed. "Tell him I am going to give
him this knife."
"_Ooma pilletay iblee savik_," I translated.
Daniel received the knife without comment. I caught a flash of pleasure
in his eye, but it escaped Praed.
"He doesn't seem very grateful," he said. "I despair of the aborigine.
He has no sense of humor, no gratitude, apparently no more affection
than his dogs. He is pure selfishness. He is homely, he is fearfully
unclean—"
"Professor Praed," I interrupted, "you arrived in Greenland three days
ago. After you have knocked about with these fellows for a month you
will change your opinions. As for dirt, eight or nine months in every
year that bay is skimmed over with a little matter of five or six feet
of ice. Until your party came, there was not a hatchet in the tribe to
cut baths. In winter all these little streams that you see disappear.
The Husky has to melt ice for drinking-water, and that is no light
affair for him. In summer, it's true, he might bathe; perhaps you would
like to try it."
"Those are all very well as excuses," responded Praed; "but they don't
remove facts. Your dear friends are disgustingly soiled. And I am going
to accept your invitation to take a bath."
He did accept it. He said he was accustomed to cold water, every morning
(implying in his tone, that he feared I wasn't); that he had been
baptized in the Susquehanna River through a hole in the ice, and that
he guessed he could stand a summer sea in Greenland. He took off his
clothes, swam out to a berg, grounded some forty feet off the beach,
climbed hurriedly upon the ice, and danced up and down and shouted
until we put off in a boat and rescued him. For three days afterward he
shivered under blankets and drank up the little store of whiskey that
remained in our supplies.
I was not sorry that this object-lesson had occurred. Our expedition had
lived for nineteen months among the Eskimos. Two or three of us, whose
chief duty was hunting, had learned to know the Innuit as one knows
brothers. In a savage land you choose your friends, not because they can
judge a picture or say witty things about their neighbors, but because
they will go through any emergency by your side. More than once Daniel
or one and another of our Eskimo comrades had saved us from death; more
than once we had interposed between a Husky and the Kokoia. It was not
pleasant to hear the cock-a-whoop members of the Relief Party, with
their amateur knowledge of Arctic conditions, classify our comrades
among the Greenland fauna.
But the Relief Party got on well with the Eskimos. They had a cargo of
knives, hatchets, saws, needles, scissors, wooden staves, and all things
that represent wealth to the Innuit. These things they distributed
freely among the settlements; it was but natural that they should win
the hearts of the Husky-folk.
Praed reappeared after his chill with a triumphant air, bearing bead
necklaces and mirrors—for trading, he said. The Eskimos, however, shook
their heads at these gewgaws, and Praed had to fall back upon useful
articles. He obtained for himself the office of chief distributor, and
waxed popular in the tribe.
One day, a fortnight or so after the episode of the bath, Daniel's wife,
Megipsu, came running up the beach.
"The man with gifts is at my tupik. He desires something. I do not
understand him. Will you come?"
I found Praed holding out the skirt of his coat toward Megipsu's little
daughter.
"Like this," he was repeating. "Make me a coat. Scion of a savage race,
if I had you at home, I should chastise you. You are stupid."
The child stared blankly at him.
"What is it, Professor Praed?" I asked.
His face turned red, and his reply came hesitatingly.
"Well, you see," he said, "your Greenland climate is not what I
expected. When the wind is quiet, everything is warm. When the gale
comes up in the afternoon, it is cold. Now the—the fur clothes; their
odor is as the odor of abattoirs. At first I didn't comprehend the
evident joy you have in them. But, on the whole, you seem so comfortable
in all weathers, that I thought I'd try a suit myself. You see, I don't
like to be lumbered with a leather jacket all the time."
"Hm!" reflected I, "Praed is learning his Greenland." All I suggested,
however, was that if he minded the smell he might carry his leather coat
out with him and leave it upon a rock until he should need it.
"And have it stolen," he said, with a glance of pity.
I perceived that he had a great deal of Greenland yet to learn. The most
northern Eskimos do not steal. I arranged with Megipsu for a sealskin
suit, however, to cost two pairs of scissors, a packet of sail-needles,
a hunting-knife, a cracker-box, and Praed's wooden signal-whistle,
which Megipsu fancied. In a week the Professor appeared in the silvery
clothes. He was highly enthusiastic. I listened patiently while he
explained the garments.
"You see, when it is warm," he said, "I can loosen the draw-string and
throw back the hood, and a draught of air comes in from the bottom
and goes out at the neck and carries off the perspiration. When the
wind rises, snap! I haul in the draw-string, cover my head, and I am
hermetically sealed. Not a chill can touch me."
"Precisely," I agreed. I had been wearing Eskimo clothes for a year and
two months. "I understand," I added, "that you are going oogsook-hunting
with Meeoo."
"Yes," he laughed. "I'm going to show the untutored savage the
superiority of the rifle over the harpoon."
He learned more about Greenland upon that expedition. There was a floe,
perhaps a mile wide, anchored near the mouth of the bay by half a dozen
grounded bergs. To this floe the Eskimo and the white man set forth
in kayaks. It was midnight when they left and we were asleep, but the
Huskies at the village told us that the Professor couldn't manage his
canoe, and finally had to permit Daniel to tow him.
Next night they returned with a seal. The Professor had many words of
praise for a country where the sun never sets and there is no loss of
working-time, but nothing to say about the hunting. At last he confessed
that Daniel had killed the seal.
"The _phoca barbata_ is a wary animal," he protested. "He will not
permit a white face to approach. Two or three of the creatures were
taking sun-baths upon the floe, but before I could creep within shooting
distance they flopped into the water—a most ungraceful gait. All Arctic
animals seem to be clumsy. I fired at one seal and I think I hit him,
but he, too, dived. At last I resigned the rifle to Daniel. The savage
squirmed over the ice like a worm. When the seals lifted their heads,
Daniel lifted his. It is not surprising that he deceived them. His black
muzzle looks precisely like that of the seal, and he wears a seal's fur.
But his methods would never do in civilization. It took him half a day
to crawl across that ice-floe."
"But he shot the seal," someone put in.
"No," replied the Professor. "That's just the point. He wormed himself
along until he could almost reach the creature, and then sprang upon it
and clubbed it to death with the butt."
I do not think Praed fully appreciated the marvellous adroitness of
the hunter, nor the thoughtfulness of the man in saving a cartridge.
He never seemed to comprehend that a charge of powder and bullet is
worth more to an Eskimo than a diamond is to a bride at home. However,
he began after that to treat the Huskies somewhat as if they were human
beings.
His complete enlightenment as to the Eskimo character came all in a
blaze at the end of our stay in Greenland. Our work there was done. Our
explorations had been successful, our scientific collections were almost
completed. There were only the loose ends to be gathered up.
The Professor had seen some desirable flowers in a valley across a
glacier. Near that same glacier, in the preceding summer, I, who was
acting as mineralogist of the main party, had piled a few specimens in a
cranny to be carried to camp later, and I thought I might as well have
them. We started forth together. Daniel and one or two other Huskies
went with us for comradeship.
At the edge of the glacier we halted. It was a stupendous thing,
crawling through a gap in the hills down into the sea like a section of
the Midgard serpent. Halfway up the flank, I remember, there was a round
hole, and out of it spouted a waterfall, red with basaltic mud. One of
the Æsir might have made such a wound with his spear.
The back of the monster was rugged with crevasses.
"You can't cross here," I counselled. "You'd better try farther up,
where it's smoother. I'll climb the cliff and take an observation, while
you wait here and eat your luncheon. It doesn't do to hurry too much in
Greenland."
I was almost an hour making my way up the crags to a point where I could
take a bird's-eye view of the mass of ice. It was not a wide glacier—the
cliffs opposite were not more than four miles away—but the great number
of icebergs it threw off bore witness to the rapidity of its motion.
[Illustration: While he explained the garments.—Page 292.]
Suddenly, almost below me upon the blue-white ice, appeared four or five
black figures. They emerged out of a cleft near the edge and marched
steadily toward the centre of the glacier. The surface beyond them and
upon either hand was criss-crossed with blue crevasses. Glints from the
shining icicles hanging down their sides darted up to me as I stood, a
mile away. It was very picturesque, but I had no heart for enjoyment.
"The man is crazy!" I burst out and scrambled down the rough stones to
overtake him.
In a quarter of an hour I had reached the bottom of the gorge, between
the glacier and the mountain. A furious torrent roared along the side of
the ice, but a few pinnacles of rock protruding out of the stream gave
foothold to cross. Opposite my landing-place a huge blue cleft in the
ice, with a gradually rising peak, furnished easy ascent to the surface.
As soon as my head was clear of the cleft, I saw one of the Eskimos
running toward me. I hastened to meet him.
"Pra' has fallen!" cried the man. "The ice has eaten him. He has gone
to sleep forever."
"Damnation!" I shouted. "Run to the ship. Tell all the white men to come
and bring a rope!"
[Illustration: I was ... making my way up the crags.—Page 292.]
He sped into the cleft and I moved on. Surmounting a mound in the ice,
I could scan the whole surface. A quarter of a mile beyond me, the dark
figures of the party crouched beside a long narrow crevasse. As I drew
near, the tall figure of the Professor rose and faced me. He made no
move to meet me, and when I had approached within a few feet of him, I
saw that his hands hung limp at his sides and that he was sobbing. He
could not speak, but he pointed to the crevasse. I threw myself at full
length upon the ice and peeped over the brink.
A hundred feet below me, on the edge of a block of ice that hung
unsteadily upon a mass of _débris_, lay Daniel. His head was doubled
unnaturally forward upon his chest. The trash about him was stained with
red. He must have died in an instant.
One look was enough. I sprang to my feet and faced the Professor.
"How did that happen?" I exclaimed. "Good God, man, speak! Don't act
like a baby!"
Praed burst out sobbing afresh. It was a moment before he could control
his tongue. When he spoke he clinched his hands and gazed blankly up
the glacier toward the sun.
"It was I," he said; "he saved me. I fell—"
"Well?" I demanded.
"Do you see that shoulder of ice on this side of the crevasse, and the
shelf jutting out opposite?"
I peered over the edge once more. The wall hung slightly out at the top
and I had a good view of everything beneath. The cleft was not more than
five feet wide, but, except for the _débris_ lodged below me, it sank
away into darkness. It may have been a thousand feet deep.
Some twenty feet down the side a ledge, perhaps twelve inches broad,
started from the wall. Upon the opposite wall, about six feet higher,
as far as I could estimate, allowing for the foreshortening, there
was another shelf, considerably broader. Upon it sprang up the stumps
of two or three heavy icicles that had grown down from an ice-bridge.
Doubtless, anciently the _débris_ caught below had been part of this
bridge, and in its fall had carried the upper ends of the icicles with
it. One end of the shelf slanted up almost to the surface.