The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow--
They beg for coffee and sugar; they go where the white men go.
The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight;
“They sell their furs to the trading-post: they sell their souls
to the white.
The People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler’s
crew;
Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few.
But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man’s ken--
Their spears are made of the narwhal-horn, and they are the
last of the Men!
Translation.
“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. Half-way 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 and snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that no
one can realise 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 travelling 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 soap-stone affairs, flint and steel, and even matches, as
well as coloured 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 his 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 deer-skins (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 the 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 dot 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
heart-breaking 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 humoured 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 “An-gutivaun 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-littern 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 deer-skin
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 seal-skin 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 soap-stone 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 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. His trouble 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 wild-fire. 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 said, ‘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 Underworld, 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 humoured the sleigh through the 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 nearly 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 colours--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 travelling-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 travelled 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
tell-tale 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 tablecloth. Where the water was shallow these sheets would be
piled one atop of the other till the bottommost touched mud fifty feet
down, and the discoloured 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 skirted 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 neighbour’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 towards 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 lasted for only 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.
Kadlu looked at the girl from the North, and said quietly, “WE build a
house.” He pointed to the north-west 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,
deer-skins 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 jeweller 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.
‘ANGUTIVAUN TAINA’
[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!