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A Comely Matron.

PREFACE.

These stories were mostly written to pass a few hours of the long Arctic nights. Some are wholly fiction, others fact, or founded on fact, and the reader will easily discriminate.

Many were told me in snow igloos on my travels, when a howling blizzard and its fog of fine, drifting snow enforced a halt, maybe for two or three days on end. Others I gathered lazying outside the skin tents in the warm brilliant sunshine of the brief summer days, when the snow-buntings piped their little lark-like song overhead, or the midnight sun was high in the sky to the northward; this is the Eskimo’s happiest time—especially for their children shouting and playing amongst the rocks, or along the sandy beaches of the yet ice-bound sea.

I am painfully aware of the literary shortcomings in this little volume, but I have endeavoured faithfully to record the life of the native Eskimo as it was, or as it might have been, in the incidents related. That there are very black sheep amongst them my tales will show, and certain kinds of half-breed—notably the ‘Portuguee’—often seemed to me to be unreliable and faithless; other half-breeds, again, I have found as true as steel, and indistinguishable from the pure-bred native in their customs or outlook on life.

If I have succeeded in conveying the impression of a strenuous, indomitable, cheerful little people, in general kindly to their old folk and affectionate to their children, I have done them bare justice; to this may be added that they meet life, or death, with a high and gallant bearing, and I have always found them faithful to their word with the white man to whom they have given their confidence and in whom they trust. Arctic explorers, travellers, and scientists—such as Peary, Amundsen, Stefansson, Hanbury, Anderson, and Jenness—confirm this view. A quotation from Amundsen’s book, The North-West Passage, epitomises it: ‘The best wish I can make them (the Nechilling tribe of King William Land) is—“May civilisation never reach them.” ’ The wish, alas! was a vain one, for sixteen years later the ethnologist Jenness records them—or their near neighbours—‘doomed to become the economic slaves of the great world to the South of them.’

They are, I fear, a passing race, destined to disappear under the blighting shadow of a complex civilisation they can so well go without, until it once reaches them.

Before I too pass on, I raise my hand and salute them, for many of them have been my brave companions and true friends.

Henry Toke Munn.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Kyak-jua.

TALES OF THE ESKIMO.

I have told this story to only a few people, and my attempt to get a hearing before the Natural History authorities, both in New York and in London, completely failed, the secretaries treating me in pretty much the same manner. ‘Oh yes,’ they said indulgently, looking at my card, ‘that’s all right. We have heard about it, and we’ll take the matter up sometime. But don’t call again; wait till we write you.’ Then they rang, and one of the attendants was told to show me round, if I cared to see the place, and put me on the way to where I was staying. Of course, they thought I was a crank.

I publish the narrative, therefore, rather reluctantly, accepting the fact that it will not be believed, but with a hope that it may inspire some credulous and courageous naturalist, with a taste for adventure, to visit Spirit Island, and return with a live or a dead specimen of what I saw there. If he can do this, his name will go down in history, and the museums—and the circuses—of the world will grovel at his feet for its possession. But he needn’t ask me to accompany him.

In 1914 I was sent to the Arctic by my employers (a London firm well known in the mining world) to investigate certain localities for alluvial gold, and others for tin ore. In 1914-15 I wintered at Ponds Inlet, the north-east end of Baffin Land—lat. 72·48° N., long. 76·10° W. I made the investigations according to my instructions, and in August 1915 returned to the depot to await the arrival of my ship. By 15th October no ship had appeared, and I knew I was in for another winter. I had with me a Scottish lad to look after the depot in my absence—for the Eskimo will steal if no white man is about, and we were not short of supplies.

In the event of the non-arrival of my ship, and a second winter being enforced, I had been asked to try to investigate a certain locality on the north coast of a large island, known as Prince of Wales Land, about five hundred miles west of my depot. This island lies at the south-west end of Barrow Strait, and between Peel Sound and Franklin Strait to the east and M‘Clintock Channel and M‘Clure Strait to the west. It can be seen on any Arctic map.

I set out from the depot in February, with seven natives and three dog-sleds, leaving orders for the ship to come for me to Leopold Island in Lancaster Sound if I did not return before the ice broke up. My party were Panne-lou, my head man, who drove my sled with ten dogs; Akko-molee, who had his own sled and team of nine dogs; and Now-yea, who also had his own sled and eleven dogs, four of which were only three-quarter-grown puppies. Each man had his wife, without whom no native will make a prolonged journey, and Akko-molee had the only child in the party, a lad of about eleven years old, named Kyak-jua.

A word as to my natives. Panne-lou was a steady, reliable fellow, a good seal-hunter and dog-driver. His wife, Sal-pinna, was a disagreeable, cross-grained—and cross-eyed—woman, but capable and a good worker. Akko-molee was taken mainly because he was a native of Admiralty Inlet, two hundred miles west of my depot, and had hunted bear on the North Somerset coast. He was only moderately useful, and very inclined to sulk on any provocation. His boy, Kyak-jua, was a capital little fellow, the life of our party, full of energy, and a great favourite with all of us. I had given him a .22 rifle, and he was constantly getting me ptarmigan and Arctic hares with it when we were on the land. His mother, Anno-rito, was a quiet, pleasant woman, and entirely devoted to her boy.

Now-yea, my third native, was an active, merry little man, willing and tireless, but irresponsible and very excitable. His number two wife (he had a couple), In-noya, was the best woman, and eventually proved to be the best man, in the party. I shall have more to say about her later on. Now-yea had left his number one wife and four children, all of whom were hers, at my depot, and I had agreed to provide for them till our return.

The pay, arranged before starting, consisted of tobacco, sugar, tea, and biscuit for the trip—or as long as our supplies lasted—and to each man, on our return to the depot, a new rifle, ammunition, a box (twenty-two pounds) of tobacco, a barrel of biscuit, some tea, coffee, and molasses, and a spy-glass, or some equivalent if they already had one; also some oddments, such as cooking-utensils, day-clocks, needles, braid, scented soap, &c., for the women, and ten pounds of tobacco to each one. These were regarded as high wages by the other natives, of whom I could have had my pick, but they were fully earned, and many extras I threw in, as the sequel will show.

My outfit—besides the supplies already mentioned—consisted of twenty pounds of dynamite, some caps and fuse, also one of these new, very small, ‘Ubique’ batteries, six short drills, and a two and a half pound hammer. We had a rifle per man, and one spare one—all single-shot ·303 carbines, except mine, which was an ordinary English service magazine-rifle; plenty of ammunition; a complete sailing-gear for each man, and two spare harpoons and lances; a hand-axe for each sled; native lamps for cooking and heating, and cooking-utensils. We had og-juke (bearded seal) skins, for boot-soles later on, and seal-skins and deer-skin legs for cold-weather footwear, plenty of dressed deer-skin for stockings and socks, deer-skin blankets and heavy winter-killed hides to sleep on. We all had new deer-skin clothes, and expected to get young seal ‘white coats’ for wear on the return journey, when the others would be too warm.

My medicines were a flask of brandy, some tabloid drugs and antiseptics, a few bandages, and some surgical needles and thread. My personal luxury was a few dozen of the excellent ‘Cambridge’ soup-powders. I took a small kayak (skin canoe) as far as Leopold Island for sealing later, if we had to wait there, and also a tent.

One item of my outfit, a small Kodak camera, I was unfortunate enough to smash hopelessly a few days before starting. I shall for ever regret this disaster—for such it proved to be—and the irremediable loss it occasioned me.

This is not a story of Arctic travel, so I will omit the details of the journey. My route lay through Navy Board Inlet, and thence west along Lancaster Sound to Prince Regent Inlet, crossing to Leopold Island, and over the North Somerset Land—which is a flat tableland in from the coast—to Peel Sound and Prince of Wales Land. We had to make about six hundred and twenty-five miles of travelling, though, as I have said, it was only five hundred miles as the crow flies, and, of course, we had to depend on sea and land animals for ourselves and our dogs to live on, and for blubber for light, cooking, and warmth. Such journeys are made every winter by some of the Eskimo, either when visiting other parties or on hunting-trips, and are by no means unusual. The main, indeed the indispensable, thing being to find seals, halts of a day or two are made for the purpose.

Now, I want to emphasise the fact that Prince of Wales Land is by no means what literary people call a terra incognita, at least so far as the coast-line is concerned. Parry discovered it a hundred years ago, and Roald Amundsen sailed his famous little ship the Gjoa down Peel Sound and Franklin Strait when he made the North-West Passage. No natives have been found on North Somerset or on Prince of Wales Land, though hunting-parties visit North Somerset occasionally.

I had not told my destination to the natives beyond North Somerset, and when we arrived at Leopold Island, and I unfolded my plans in the igloo that night, there was great consternation. We should starve; the ice would go out and leave us stranded there; and, lastly—here was the real hitch—it was a ‘bad’ country.

‘Why bad,’ I asked, ‘when you say none of you have been there?’

There was a pause before Panne-lou said reluctantly, ‘It is full of Torn-ga [bad spirits]; we are afraid of them.’

It took me half the night, talking and cajoling, before I overcame this absurd objection. Finally they consented to go on, but stipulated that we should travel close to the shore at Prince of Wales Land, to which I, of course, willingly agreed.

A small building, once full of stores, stands on Leopold Island. Naturally, it had been completely looted by the natives, but it served excellently to store our kayak and tent in, out of the weather.

I will relate one incident of the journey, as it shows the stuff one member of our party was made of. The day after we left Leopold Island we camped on the tableland of North Somerset, and I decided to stay a day there, and try for some deer, both as a change from seal-meat, of which we were all tired, and also to provide a ‘cache,’ or store of meat against our return.

I sent the three men off with all the dogs early in the morning; not feeling very well, I remained at the igloo. I had taken my rifle to pieces to clean it, and had all the parts in my lap, when I heard a cry outside, and Sal-pinna said, ‘Quick! He says a bear.’ My rifle was, for the moment, useless, so I plunged out of the igloo to get the spare rifle, which was always in In-noya’s care in the other igloo. Outside I saw little Kyak-jua, about a hundred yards away, running for his life towards the igloos with a very large bear within fifteen or twenty paces of him. In-noya was out of the igloo, with the rifle, running towards them. I did not think the boy had a chance, for he was directly between the rifle and the bear, and one blow of those formidable paws would have brained him, but suddenly In-noya called sharply, ‘Tella-peea-nin; tella-peea-nin’ (‘To the right; to the right’). The boy, instantly divining he was in the line of fire, doubled to the right like a hare. A shot rang out, and the bear roared with pain, then turned and savagely bit his hind-quarter, which had been hit. The next instant he was charging full tilt at In-noya. She had dropped on one knee to shoot, and, without moving, coolly levelled her rifle again. So close was the bear when she shot, and laid him dead with a bullet in his brain, that as she sprang on one side the impetus of his charge carried him half his length over where she had knelt; the record was written plainly on the snow.

A Well-Loaded Sled.

I asked In-noya later why she did not fire sooner. ‘I had only taken two cartridges, when I ran out of the igloo,’ she said indifferently, ‘and I had to make sure of him.’ It was as fine an exhibition of coolness and steady nerve as I have ever seen.

We reached my objective on 25th March, crossing Peel Sound from North Somerset in one day’s travel of about forty-five miles. We kept very close to the Prince of Wales Land shore, and I noticed we always built our igloos now on the land, even if suitable snow was not so handy as on the ice, though we often had to negotiate some rough ground-ice before getting to shore.

A very disastrous mishap occurred the day after we arrived. Seven of our dogs, divided amongst the three teams, ate something poisonous they found along the shore, and died the same night; three more were very bad, but recovered. I cannot imagine what an Eskimo dog could find to poison him in his own country, but this was certainly the cause of death. The natives, of course, blamed the Torn-ga, and were greatly disturbed.

By 27th March I had seen all I needed to. The reported tin-vein was a vein of iron pyrite ore. I do not know who started this yarn about tin, but the description and locality of the vein agreed so closely with the data given me that I have always concluded the information was found in one of the private logs of the old Arctic voyagers, perhaps one of Parry’s or Ross’s crews.

Seals had been very hard to find since we crossed Peel Sound, and our dogs were getting hungry, so, after wasting the 28th looking for seals, which refused to come to the breathing-holes we found, we started the return journey on the 29th, and reached the north-east end of Prince of Wales Land on the 31st, only getting one small seal in that time.

About fifteen miles north of Prince of Wales Land lies a large island, and Panne-lou volunteered the information that the Eskimo name of it was ‘Spirit Island’; but he could not, or would not, tell me anything more, the subject being strictly taboo by him, and also by the others.

When we left the next morning early, a south-east breeze was blowing up Peel Sound, and it looked as if it would be a fine day for the crossing. We had made only about half-way over when one of those sudden Arctic storms swept down on us, shutting out all sight of land at once. The natives had a discussion whether to go ahead or return, and decided to push on. Panne-lou complained he was feeling ill, and was on the sled all day. Soon after the storm broke, the wind must suddenly have changed, for by five o’clock no land came in sight, and the storm was increasing in violence every minute. Panne-lou became very ill, so there was no alternative but to camp where we were.

Next morning it was blowing a blizzard, and Panne-lou was delirious and in a high fever. Even if it had been fit weather, it would have killed him to move him.

This part of the Arctic lies north of the Magnetic Pole, and the compass variation is nearly one hundred degrees; it is so sluggish and unreliable that it is quite useless for making a course in thick weather. We did not know, therefore, if we were north or south of our course.

That night—1st April—the first two dogs disappeared. My log says: ‘At 11 p.m. dogs suddenly started howling; thought it was a bear, but dogs stampeded to igloo door much afraid. Suddenly one gave a queer stifled yap, and about same time door broke and dogs tumbled pell-mell into igloo . . .’ The ‘door’ is a block of snow set up on the inside of the igloo. Now-yea and In-noya were sleeping in my igloo, to help nurse Panne-lou—for he had to be constantly watched—and as soon as the row started Now-yea, at In-noya’s instigation, jumped up, and throwing his kouletang (deer-skin jumper) on the floor of the igloo from the snow sleeping-bench, stood on it naked—Eskimo always turn in thus—and held the snow ‘door’ till it broke in his hands, letting the dogs in.

Meantime I had slipped on my kouletang and some deer-skin stockings, and, as soon as the door was clear of dogs, cautiously crawled out with my rifle, expecting to find an unusually bold and hungry bear at our ‘storehouse,’ a small snow-house built against the side of the igloo, containing the meat, blubber, harness, &c., which the dogs might damage or eat. As a rule rifles are kept outside, to prevent the frost coming out of them; but the natives insisted that they must all be taken inside that night.

I saw or heard nothing; it was a very dark night, and the drifting snow was blinding, stinging the eyes like sand. I crawled back, half-frozen, and we put up another snow door. The other igloo, fifteen or twenty yards away, had the same experience, so there must have been two visitors, as we each lost a dog at the same time.

The blizzard lasted three days, and though we built porches for the dogs in front of igloo doors and shut them in, we lost two dogs each night in the same mysterious manner. The ‘doors’ were always broken inwards, and a dog quickly and neatly snatched away. Obviously no bear was doing this, for his methods would have been more clumsy.

On the third night I made a hole in the igloo over the ‘door,’ and as soon as the dogs yelped put my rifle through and fired three or four shots into the porch. Next morning Akko-molee’s dog was gone, but outside our porch our dog lay dead. His neck was broken and his throat torn out.

By this time the natives were completely demoralised, with the exception of In-noya. Now-yea sat shivering, as if with ague, the whole night, and Sal-pinna was little better. She had trodden on a knife-blade in the igloo, and cut her foot so badly that I had to put seven stitches in it. In Akko-molee’s igloo they remained in their blankets all the time, and he would hardly answer me when I called to him.

Meanwhile Panne-lou improved but little, and I kept him alive on a few spoonfuls of brandy-and-water every hour. On the third day the fever had abated, but he was still wandering and semi-conscious.

There was good excuse for the natives. An igloo is not the slightest protection against an attack; an arrow or a lance would go through it like paper. It was a trying job, therefore, to sit inside expecting something—one could not tell what—to happen. For the natives, who believed implicitly it was the Torn-ga, it was worse than for me. In-noya, however, never lost her self-control, and she and I fed and watched Panne-lou in turn.

On the morning of the fourth day—3rd April—the storm had blown itself out, but there was a dense fog, and we could not see more than a hundred yards or so. The natives would have harnessed the dogs and left at once, in spite of my urging that it would certainly kill Panne-lou to do so, but until it cleared they did not know which way to go, for till we saw some land, or even the stars to steer by, we were completely lost.

Akko-molee said the fog showed there was open water not far away, and vaguely opined it was a bad sign. A pressure-ridge was behind the igloos; in fact, it was at this we found snow suitable for building. I asked Akko-molee to walk in one direction along it for a short distance with a sealing-dog to try to find a breathing-hole, as we were completely out of feed, and the poor brutes were starving. I would walk down the pressure-ridge in the opposite direction for the same purpose. I arranged we should both return the moment the fog cleared. Now-yea, who was much too shaky to go away alone, was to remain at the igloo on guard.

Akko-molee demurred at first, but finally consented to go, adding, ‘Only a very little way, though.’ In-noya looked after Panne-lou, who was now sleeping quietly and in a profuse perspiration. I made some soup for him, gave her a few instructions, then left with my sealing-gear and rifle, leading a dog.

It was nine o’clock in the morning. I walked along the pressure-ridge for eight or ten minutes, when, to my surprise, I came to open water. The tide ran strongly in Barrow Strait, I knew, and the gale must have opened the ice up. We had, therefore, got far to the north of our course to reach the floe-edge, as the ice fast to the land is called. The water seemed to be of some extent, but the fog made it impossible to see how large it was. As the floe-edge is generally very irregular, deep bights forming in it where the moving pack exercises pressure, it would be very dangerous to move before we saw where we were.

It was a mere chance that we had not driven into the water or on to the moving ice in the blizzard. Seeing a seal in the water a short distance from the pressure-ridge, I let the dog go, as I did not need him, and he ran back to the igloo; I then sat down and waited for the seal to appear. Presently I shot one, but found the tide was running away from the floe, and I lost him, so I waited till it turned, which it did in about three hours. I then shot two seals, though I had to wait another hour before they came in to the floe. By this time a fairly strong tide was running under it.

As I was tying the seals together to drag them back to the igloo, I caught through the fog, in the direction of the pressure-ridge, a glimpse of a man walking down to the water’s edge. It was only an uncertain impression, for the fog shut him out immediately. I rather wondered why Akko-molee had followed me, but remembering I had sent the dog back, supposed that had to do with it.

When I arrived at the pressure-ridge, I saw nothing of Akko-molee, but leading down to the water were large drops of blood, and at the floe-edge lay a little deer-skin mitten; it could only have been Kyak-jua’s. The snow was packed as hard as a pavement by the gale, so it was no use to look for tracks on it, but right at the water’s edge, where it was softer and wet, was an odd-looking track, rather as if it had been made by some gigantic bird with webbed feet. The claw-marks did not show, as the toes overlapped the edge of the ice.

What did the blood mean? How came little Kyak-jua’s mitten to be there? I felt sick at heart as I quickly thought it over. A tragedy had happened, I was sure. I ran back to where I had left the seals, about sixty yards from the water’s edge; hastily buried one in the snow to keep it thawed, cutting a hole with my sheath-knife for the purpose; threw the other on my shoulder—they were both small seals—and ran towards the igloo. The tell-tale drops of blood stopped about three hundred yards from the floe-edge.

At the igloo I found Now-yea pacing back and forth before the door, shouting ‘spirit-talk,’ and nearly crazy; Anno-rito, the boy’s mother, inside unconscious; and In-noya gray-faced and crying quietly, but faithfully tending Panne-lou as I had told her. My arrival upset her for a moment, however, as she cried out, ‘I thought you had gone too.’ I shut up Now-yea by cuffing him, and sent him into the igloo, where he sat and shivered.

In-noya told me the story succinctly. Kyak-jua had left his mother’s igloo to come and see In-noya, for they were great friends. Now-yea was inside, warming himself, at the time; by-and-by Anno-rito called out, and In-noya replied the boy was not there. The poor mother rushed out shrieking for the boy, and on entering our igloo fell unconscious. In-noya did not dare to leave Panne-lou, who was very restless—Sal-pinna was useless—but she made Now-yea go out and look about. The tears streamed down her face, for she loved the little lad dearly. ‘It is no good to look,’ she sobbed; ‘the Torn-ga have taken him.’ Akko-molee’s dog had returned, and In-noya said she feared for poor little Kyak-jua’s father. ‘I am going to fetch Akko-molee,’ I declared; ‘he is not far away.’

As I left the igloo I realised what had happened. Something had been lying hidden behind the pressure-ridge, and had crept close to the igloo. It had swiftly and silently seized Kyak-jua, and as swiftly and silently departed. The dogs, all asleep inside the porch, had given no alarm, the lad himself had not made a sound. What manner of beast was this to do such a daring deed? It explained those drops of blood near the water. I, at least, knew where the boy had gone, and a fierce anger surged over me when I thought of his merry face, and the happy smile with which he would bring me a ptarmigan, saying, ‘For you, kabloona [white man].’

I thought of all this as I ran along the pressure-ridge through the fog, when suddenly I nearly fell over Akko-molee’s body. He was lying on his face, dead, with a hole in the back of his skull, from which the brain was oosing. He had evidently been sitting at a seal-hole, and his assailant had crept up behind him. His right sleeve was torn open, and the artery under the arm had been ripped up, but there was no blood on the snow from it.

I felt sick when I realised what this ghoulish murderer had done; he had sucked the blood from the artery till it was dry. The sealing-spear, harpoon, seal-line, and lance were gone, but the rifle rested against a block of snow where Akko-molee had placed it. I left him lying there on the snow; my business was with the living.

I returned to the igloo, to find Anno-rito had been persuaded by In-noya to turn in under her blanket, which she had done, native fashion, with nothing on. She looked up when I took off my mitts and kouletang, and said dully, ‘Akko-molee is dead. I have seen him. Is it not so?’

Then I did a fool thing, but I was overstrung and rattled. I nodded ‘Yes,’ and said, ‘He is dead.’ There was a silence while you might have counted ten; then, without any warning, Anno-rito sprang up, dived under the low exit of the igloo, and fled shrieking, ‘Oo-wonga ky-it; oo-wonga ky-it’ (‘I come; I come’).

I was into my kouletang in a few seconds, grabbed my rifle (without which I would not have gone ten yards), and was after her, but, stripped naked as she was, she could keep her lead. She ran along the pressure-ridge, where I had gone in the morning, and I shouted when I realised a few minutes would take her to the water’s edge. I was near enough to see her fling up her arms and spring into the water, and her despairing cry, ‘Oo-wonga ky-it’ was borne faintly back to me through the fog. Unhappy Anno-rito had joined her boy and her man.

It was now about four o’clock, and, live or die, Panne-lou must be moved in the morning. I would have left at once, but it was impossible to travel in the fog after dark. If it did not lift, I would try a compass course, uncertain as it was, in the morning, or steer by the breeze, if there was one, away from the open water. If the fog lifted, I would steer by the stars that night.

Meantime the dogs might as well be fed, and, with this in my mind, I pulled out the seal I had left in the snow. The fog was for a moment thinner than it had been, and I had just done this when I saw another seal in the water on the far side of the pressure-ridge. Running to the floe-edge, I sat down beside an up-ended piece of ice about ten yards from the water to wait for him to come up again. After a few minutes I leaned forward to look along the floe-edge, peering round the piece of ice. About sixty or seventy yards from me, standing on the ice, close to the water, and looking intently at the seal lying near the pressure-ridge, I saw a man—or, rather, a two-footed beast in a man’s shape.

He was but that moment out of the water, for it was dripping off him, and even as I looked his body began to turn white, as if the drops had been frozen on him in glistening little nodules. His head was thrown back and he was sniffing the air, as if using his scenting-powers. Suddenly he ran—rather clumsily, I thought, but swiftly and with unusually long strides—towards the dead seal. My brain started working again, and I knew I had him; I was between him and the water.

As he stopped and picked up the seal, throwing it over his shoulder very easily, I sprang out from behind the slab of ice, and he saw me. Without a second’s hesitation, and before the seal fell from his shoulder on to the ice with a thud, he was running swiftly and silently at me, a short throwing-lance poised in his right hand. I covered him without haste, and pulled the trigger, but the cartridge missed fire. I jerked in another cartridge, and as I threw my rifle to my shoulder his arm shot forward like a piston-stroke, and I dropped quickly on one knee. As I did so, the hood of my kouletang was thrown back from my head and—it seemed to me at the same instant—I fired.

I suppose the lance, which had struck my hood, threw my aim off, for the shot went high, and broke my assailant’s left shoulder, causing him to drop a second lance he held in his hand. But it did not stop him, and before I could jerk in another cartridge he was on me. Dodging the muzzle of my rifle, he seized my left arm above the elbow with incredible strength, for I felt the nails or claws sink deeply into my flesh through my thick deer-skin clothes. At the same time he pulled me towards him and tried to get at my throat with his teeth. I seized his neck with my free hand, and for some seconds we swayed back and forward thus, the blood from his wound drenching me. Flecks of bloody foam ran down from his mouth, and as we tussled he made a snarling growl, as a dog does when at grips with his foe. This was the only sound I heard from him.

We were unpleasantly near the water, so I bent my energies on working back from it, and was able to make some yards farther in on the ice. I soon found it quite beyond my strength to squeeze his windpipe and choke him, the neck being very strong and thick; and although I had the advantage of at least five inches in height, and am over the average of my size in strength, it was all I could do to hold him off me. Had his other arm been whole, he would have torn my throat out with his claws.

We twisted and turned, struggling desperately, when suddenly he relinquished his grasp of my left arm, I suppose for a hold at my throat. As I felt him do so, I pushed him violently away and sprang back. He came at me again like a wild-cat, snarling savagely; but I was readier now, and beating down his outstretched hand with my left fist, I landed him on the point of the jaw with all the weight and strength I could put into an upper-cut. It lifted him clean off his feet, and he fell backwards. As he dazedly and unsteadily recovered his feet again, I snatched up the lance he had dropped—for we had reached the place in our struggle—and rushing on him, drove it with both hands and all my might at his heart. He fell dead at my feet.

For a few minutes I sat down, feeling sick and giddy. I was blood from head to foot, and I saw for the first time some of it was my own, for my arm was bleeding freely enough for it to run down inside my sleeve over my hand. The indescribable horror of the Thing’s appearance, the smell of his breath, and the ferocity and courage of his attack, badly wounded as he was, all affected me strongly. More and more I realised that I could have done nothing against him had he been unwounded.

Pulling myself together, I turned the Torn-ga over—so I call him, from this date, in my log, and the name will serve. Sticking out under his left shoulder-blade was a harpoon-head, lashed to the point of an ivory lance with sinew. I set my foot on the body and drew the lance out at his back, and, after cleaning it in the snow, examined it. The harpoon-head was Akko-molee’s! I knew it instantly, for I had seen him filing it a few days before. I felt better, somehow, when I had seen this, and turned to examine more fully the body of my grim foe.

He was perhaps an inch over five feet in height, and was covered, except the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, with short, fine seal-hair of a grayish-brown colour. The eyes were enormous, with no eyelashes, very like a seal’s, the hips tremendously developed, and the legs disproportionately long; the instep was very broad and flat, and both the toes and the fingers very long, webbed, and ending in thick nails like claws. It struck me he would have been a truly formidable antagonist in the water. The face was hideous; it had a wide receding jaw, with very prominent eyebrows overhanging the huge eyes, a low forehead, and small furry ears. I noticed, too, the teeth were sharp, the dog-teeth much developed, and the front-teeth of the lower jaw noticeably longer than the others. He had died with his lips drawn back in a savage snarl. Jets of very dark blood were flowing from his breast. The limbs and the body had a smooth roundness that could mean only one thing, but to satisfy myself I drew my knife and cut a gash in the thigh. As I expected, there was over an inch of blubber under the skin, exactly as a seal has.

Behind where I had knelt and fired, an ivory lance was sticking deeply in the hard snow. I looked at my hood—the lance had torn the top off it.

Acting on some impulse, I dragged the body to the floe-edge, and shot it into the water. It floated buoyantly, but the strong tide soon swept it out of sight under the ice; and as its blood-smeared, snarling face disappeared, I thought of little Kyak-jua, and felt glad that some, at least, of the account was paid.

Throwing the seal on my shoulder, I returned to the igloo. There was no one now to take counsel with but In-noya, for the other two only sat huddled up and moaning. Calling her outside, I assured her I was not hurt—she was horrified at the mess I was in—and related what I had done, and how I planned to leave the moment the fog permitted.

A N. Baffin Land Group.

These Eskimo know more about this mystery than they will tell, because In-noya shook her head, saying, ‘Many will come to-night and kill us, kabloona.’ She told me she had put my revolver beside her, adding very quietly she wanted it to shoot Panne-lou and herself with if the Torn-ga broke into the igloo. ‘They suck your blood when you are alive,’ she said calmly. I had not mentioned what I had seen on Akko-molee’s body. How did she know this was their ghoulish habit?

I patted the plucky girl on the back, and told her we should come through the night all right as I had a plan. Fortunately, there was a spare kouletang in my kit-bag. Before I went inside the igloo I took off my blood-soaked garment and threw it away behind the pressure-ridge, explaining to the others that the blood on my foot-gear and deer-skin outer trousers was from the seal. These garments I took off, and started Sal-pinna thawing and cleaning them. My armed pained me, and was still bleeding. Examining it in the unoccupied igloo, I found five claw-like incisions, which had cut deeply into the flesh. I washed them with antiseptic, and In-noya bound them up.

I then shook up Now-yea, made him come out and feed the two seals—saving a meal for ourselves—to the dogs, and carefully ice the sled-runners and get all the harness ready. The dogs would need five or six hours after feeding, but I hoped that by midnight we should have the stars to steer by, and could make a start.

I thawed ten pounds of dynamite, wrapped it up in several pieces of deer-skin, and as soon as it was dusk laid it the full length of my wires along the pressure-ridge, making a track for the wires, and carefully covering it all over with snow. I brought the wires into the igloo through the wall, and connected them up with the battery. Then, shutting the dogs into the porch, I ran a reel of strong thread I happened to have with me round the igloo and porch about ten paces away, setting up blocks of snow some two and a half feet high, and driving into them bits of stick, to which I fastened the thread. As I was short of sticks, I used one of the two lances I had brought from the scene of the fight; the other I put away in a dunnage-bag. Midway between each of the blocks, I ran pieces of thread fastened to the thread circling us, and led them into the igloo through paper tubes, to keep them from freezing to the wall. I then pulled them gently taut, and fastened them to small strips of wood, so that when they were struck into the igloo wall they were bent by the pull of the line; there were five of them. In-noya helped me deftly and intelligently, asking no questions, except what I wanted done. When back in the igloo, I insisted on their finishing the seal meal, and we made a brew of strong tea. Panne-lou was now conscious and free from fever, but utterly prostrated.

It was a nerve-racking watch. I am not sure if I would come through another like it. I had seen now what we were waiting for, and if—as In-noya said they would—many came, if indeed only a few attacked us, I knew now we should have no chance at all, penned up inside the igloo. Yet we should be worse off freezing outside in the gray fog and darkness. I had seen their swiftness and savage determination. How many could we account for before the end came?

Suddenly I remembered there would be a young moon up about one o’clock, and I decided to start then and steer by it, if the weather was clear enough to locate it.

The hours dragged on till nearly midnight. Now-yea and Sal-pinna dozed fitfully, and awoke shivering. Panne-lou slept; In-noya sat beside him, gray-faced and self-possessed, occasionally trimming the native lamp, but with my revolver ever ready at her hand. We whispered once or twice, and listened, straining our ears for some sound outside, till every minute seemed an hour, watching the little bent sticks, and waiting.

I kept my hand on the battery-handle, and my rifle across my knees. Suddenly a stick straightened with a faint click, and I nodded to In-noya, who touched the other two natives. I lifted the handle and pressed it down smartly. The roar of the explosion tore the silence of the night. The ice shook, threatening to demolish the igloo, and snow fell down on us inside. The dogs yelped with fear once or twice; then came silence. Presently an inarticulate, eerie, wailing cry rang out, distinct and very high-pitched; then silence once more, and we listened, listened. And then I knew how it is men go mad with the strain of waiting for some unseen danger to strike them.

At one o’clock we had some more tea, and I crept outside to see the weather. The fog was thinning fast, and I could see the young moon faintly, low down towards the open water. I knew it rose in the north-east, and gave the word to hitch up the dogs and start. It seemed certain I was giving Panne-lou his death-sentence, but there was probably a more terrible death for him, and all of us, if we delayed. Now-yea worked feverishly; the dogs were divided between two sleds; Panne-lou was rolled like a mummy in deer-skin blankets and lashed on; and we started.

With a match I hastily examined the snow outside the circle of thread, where I had purposely scraped it soft, and could see that only one track had been made. The lance to which the thread had been fastened was gone. The last thing I took out of the igloo was a deer-skin parcel containing the rest of the dynamite, thawed and ready for the fuse and cap, and the six drill-steels and the hammer-head. I put the dynamite between Panne-lou’s blankets to keep it thawed. The fuse was marked in half-minutes. Panne-lou knew everything we were doing, and whispered to me, ‘The land, kabloona; get the land. Torn-ga will not come there.’

Now-yea drove one sled with Sal-pinna on it. She walked with great pain, the cut on her foot being a deep one. Till daylight I led with the other sled, which In-noya drove. Now-yea had nine and I had eight dogs, but three on my sled were very weak from the poison they had eaten a few days before, and four of Now-yea’s were puppies. In-noya handled the mixed team of dogs with wonderful skill.

By three o’clock it was light, and at half-past four the blessed sun rose, dispersing the last of the fog—never did I welcome him more—and there to the south-east of us was the bold coast-line of North Somerset, some twenty-five miles or so away. Behind us lay the north-east end of Spirit Island, and near it, extending far to the eastward, a curtain of mist rose in the still, cold air from the floe-edge, a dark patch of water-sky behind it denoting a large hole of water. Our igloos were not visible, but they must have been very close to the north-eastern end of Spirit Island.

With the bright morning sun shining in our faces, our hearts rose to cheerfulness, and the horrors of a few hours before seemed like some bad dream, till I thought of merry little Kyak-jua, and how I had left his father lying out there on the ice. That was no dream, but a grim reality.

I told Now-yea to take the lead, warning him I would shoot him if he did not stick to his sled, but tried to run away. In-noya also shouted out the message to him, and added on her own account, ‘And you know the kabloona does not often miss.’ We walked and trotted alongside the sleds, not sparing the whip. In-noya handled it and its twenty-seven-foot lash as skilfully as any native I have ever seen.

Soon after sunrise we came to rather rough ice, which, though not bad enough to delay us seriously, quickly took the ice-shoeing off the runners of the sleds, so that they pulled heavily. The walking was hard and good, and by skilful handling the sleds were steered clear of any large rough hummocks; but this all helped to retard our progress.

By half-past six we were apparently fifteen or sixteen miles from the land and making a good five miles an hour, but some of our dogs were flagging, and presently one lay down, and had to be taken out of the team. Soon after this two of Now-yea’s puppies were turned loose, but they followed on, and eventually made the land, unlike our dog, who did not rise again.

At seven o’clock I climbed a piece of ice and had a look back with the telescope. I speedily made out a number of black dots coming in an irregular line along our track; they were about five or six miles away. I ran after the sled and told In-noya quietly—it was no use frightening the others yet. She only glanced at the revolver lying in its case under the lashing, and applied herself to the sled and team. She was the bravest person (man or woman) I have ever met. We halted for two or three minutes to clear the traces, and while this was being done I took the dynamite parcel out, rolled it and the drill-steels and hammer-head into one parcel with deer-skin, and adjusted the cap and fuse, slipping it all under the lashing, ready instantly to be taken out.

As we drew nearer the land I saw the cliffs ran sheerly down to the ice, and thought for a minute or two we were going to be trapped, for the only man who had known the coast was dead—Akko-molee. After a while, however, I picked up a little bay with my telescope, perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide and rather deeper, from the head of which the land sloped steeply back, so I ran forward and pointed out to Now-yea where to steer for. He seemed to have his nerves under better control now, for he answered ‘All right’ quite cheerfully. Perhaps he thought he could make a race for it, and reach the land alone, if the pinch came, though I may be doing him an injustice. The fact that the natives had dared to come to this region at all, knowing what they did, lent some colour to their reiterated assertion that we should be safe on the land. My reason rebelled, nevertheless, at the seeming absurdity of the idea. If our pursuers could travel on the snow of the ice, of course they could do the same on the land. Yet, somehow, among them the natives had imbued me with a quite unreasonable but firm faith in our salvation could we win terra firma.

At half-past eight the Torn-ga were about a mile away, and coming up on us fast. They were spread in an irregular line extending across our track, but I was glad to see a number of them were straggling badly. The pace was telling on them, for we must have had a long start. There seemed to be at least a hundred of them.

An Arctic Village.

Presently we came to a small pressure-ridge, and as soon as we had passed it I took the time very carefully; to when the first of our pursuers appeared on our side, it was exactly six and a half minutes. I cut the fuse and lighted it, and laid the smoking parcel down on the ice, running on with my watch in my hand. Ten seconds or so before the charge was due to explode, I stopped and looked back with the telescope. The nearest Torn-ga had reached the parcel and were standing round it, more coming up every second. Those on the flanks had also stopped, and they all seemed to be waiting for one of their number, as they were looking back. Even as I took this scene in, a Torn-ga, fully a head taller than the rest, burst through the knot standing irresolutely about, and gesticulated violently in our direction. As he did so the charge exploded.

When the snow and smoke cleared, I counted six bodies prone on the snow, and saw several more limping away or sitting down, evidently badly hurt. I turned and raced after the sled.

When I told In-noya what I had seen, she pressed her lips grimly together, saying, ‘It pays a little of the debt for Kyak-jua and Akko-molee.’ I inquired if she had looked at Panne-lou lately. I had not thought about him for some time, and it occurred to me that, if he were dead, we would cut the lashings and leave him. She nodded, saying, ‘He sleeps,’ then went to urging the dogs forward. I noticed the revolver was now taken out of its case and ready for instant action. We pushed steadily on for some time, improving our pace, as the dogs began to smell the land, and when next I looked back I saw about twenty of the Torn-ga five hundred yards or so in advance of the rest.

The dynamite had answered its purpose, and if it came to a fight close in on the land, I at first hoped we could handle these, for I knew I could depend on In-noya. But they drew up on us so steadily I saw this hope was vain, and, with a sinking feeling at my heart, thought of the savage determination the day before of only one of them—and he badly wounded.

Something must be done, however, and thinking it rapidly over, I decided to let the sled go on, and make a stand at a suitable hummock, with my magazine-rifle and the revolver, when they were about three hundred yards away. It sounds self-sacrificing, and all that sort of nonsense, but as a matter of fact it was only plain common-sense; it would be absurd to lose the advantage the firearms gave me by letting them get to close quarters before turning at bay. I should not have mentioned it, however, but for the part In-noya played. I told her my intention, whereon she said, ‘Yes, kabloona, but we will take all the rifles, and I will stay and reload for you. The dogs see the land now, and will not stop.’ I refused to allow this; but she was quietly obstinate, pointing out that she could do some shooting on her own account, and then reload my rifle while I used the others.

She took the revolver up and put the cord over her head, saying calmly, ‘It is settled. Do not speak any more about it. I will take two rifles off the sled when you say the word; do you take the others and the cartridge-bag.’ Suddenly she cried quickly, ‘Where is the thing which smokes [the fuse]? It will delay them a little.’ Fool! I had not thought of it. In half-a-minute I had wrapped the rest of the coil in deer-skin, lighted it at both ends to make more smoke—there was plenty of it—and laid it on the snow. It was quite harmless, but the bluff might go.

The nearest Torn-ga were about four hundred yards away from us, and when they saw the smoking parcel they halted a few seconds, and then made a wide detour on either side of it, allowing us to increase our lead considerably. About this time another of our dogs staggered and fell, but In-noya had been watching him, and whipping a knife from the sled, severed his trace without stopping the others.

Then Now-yea, who was about one hundred yards ahead, called out something, and In-noya said, ‘He says he can see the snow in the bay has been flooded—by the late spring-tide, of course—and it is all smooth ice.’ She cast a glance back. ‘We shall make the land, kabloona,’ she said quietly. ‘Koya-nimik’ (‘I am glad’). Glad! Blown as I was, I shouted for joy. ‘Hurrah! Hurrah, In-noya!’ I said; but she only smiled back, and plied her skilful whip, and cheered on the weary dogs. We were running on either side of our sleds now, even lame Sal-pinna holding on to a lashing and limping gamely along.

I looked back, and could plainly see in the frosty air the smoking breath of the nearest Torn-ga, and got a glimpse of his savage face. He was obviously tired, and, I noticed, ran ‘flat-footedly’ and ungracefully, but with long jumping strides, which took him over the ground at a great pace. Some of his companions were lame.

When Now-yea reached the smooth ice he ran ahead of his dogs to encourage them—for a moment I thought he was deserting his sled—and they, knowing the land meant rest for them, broke into a tired gallop. Sal-pinna was able to ride on the sled.

Just before we reached the ice I took a snap-shot at the crowd, and by a fluke hit one in the leg, and he sprawled over. The others did not stop or take the slightest notice of him, but came doggedly on. In-noya called on the team with voice and whip, and once on the smooth, almost ‘glare’ ice—save for a few frost-crystals which gave the dogs footing—they wearily galloped, and we could sit on the sled without slowing it down, so easily did it run.

We looked at each other; the hoods and breasts of our kouletangs were white with our frosted breath, and the perspiration was streaming off us. I was pretty well ‘all in,’ for I had not ridden on the sled since starting; In-noya, whom during the whole journey I saw on the sled only for a moment occasionally when looking at Panne-lou, seemed active and tireless yet. She woke Panne-lou, and told him we should win the land, and the poor fellow’s thin face lit up as he said, ‘That is good.’ I did not know till later how fully he realised our race from death—and what a death for him!

For the last mile over the smooth ice, which was also slippery going for our pursuers, we almost held our own, though at the ground-ice the nearest Torn-ga was not more than two hundred yards away. Those behind him had stopped and were looking at us! A wave of thankfulness swept over me, for I realised now the truth of the Eskimo’s assertion: they would not come on the land.

We were too busy steadying and guiding the sled through the ground-ice to bother about the nearest Torn-ga then, but at the shore, as he still urged doggedly on, I took my rifle and turned. He was only fifty or sixty yards away, and I couldn’t miss him. He pitched forward on his face—the same sort of savage, snarling face I had seen at the floe-edge—and lay still. As I live, his waiting companions turned, and trotted leisurely back the way we had come!

As soon as the panting, worn-out dogs had been urged over the shore and a few hundred yards up the rising ground, I stopped and looked back. Every Torn-ga in sight was lying prone. Those on the snow beyond the smooth ice were eating mouthfuls of it, as a dog does when thirsty in winter. A little cloud of steam rose in the air from their bodies. I called out, and both sleds stopped, the dogs flinging themselves down in utter exhaustion.

One more amazing incident occurred before we saw the last of the Torn-ga. As we started across the bay, a large bear came ambling round the southern point and headed for the opposite one. Instantly every Torn-ga was lying motionless, except that they raised their heads occasionally, and looked about as a seal does when out on the ice in spring for sleep. I could not have told the nearest of them from a seal without a telescope. A light land-breeze was quartering from the bear to the Torn-ga, and when he saw the—to him—welcome and, so early in the year, unusual sight, he evidently thought the supposed seals would soon wind him, so charged down at the nearest group, hoping to flurry one and catch him before he slipped down his hole through the ice.

Ten paces away from the bear the nearest Torn-ga sprang to his feet, and the next instant a dozen of them were at him, hurling their short ivory lances at his side, and leaping back with amazing activity. Each lance brought forth a roar of pain and anger. One of the Torn-ga, who slipped as he sprang away, came within reach of the bear’s mighty paws, and was instantly killed by a blow which tore his head half off. This did not check the others in the least, and in three minutes it was all over. One of them ripped the bear up from throat to tail with a knife, whether of flint, ivory, or steel I could not see, but the next second they were tearing the smoking flesh with their teeth and drinking the blood. I could plainly see with the telescope their fierce blood-stained faces, like a pack of human wolves; it was a sickening sight.

I might have made some long-range practice on them with the rifle, but, to tell the truth, I had had enough of them; I only wanted to get away. They did not take the least interest in our movements now, though they had chased us relentlessly for forty miles or so. I can offer no conjecture why, but they dared not come on the land. Repulsive travesties of human beings though they were, they possessed courage of a very high order; some mysterious law of their being ordained they must live and murder only on the salt sea.

Turning my attention to the sleds, I found In-noya giving Panne-lou some weak brandy-and-water we had placed in a flask in his blankets. She was self-possessed enough, but a few tears stole down her cheeks as she replaced the revolver in its case and fastened the strap. That she would have turned it on herself at the last, when all chance was gone, I have not the slightest doubt. Lion-hearted In-noya, may you get a mate more worthy of you, and some day be the mother of many children filled with your own heroic courage, and cool, resourceful mind; it will be a great thing for your tribe and race.

We pushed on up the rise of the tableland, travelled over it for an hour, built an igloo, and turned in. We were foodless, exhausted, and our eyes bloodshot and red-lidded for want of sleep—but we were safe.

My narrative has already extended in length far beyond my anticipation, and to detail our return is unnecessary. We found deer plentiful, nursed Panne-lou back to life, and reached Leopold Island on 15th April. I might have gone on to the depot, short as we were of dogs, but Sal-pinna’s foot required constant dressing, for the stitches had all burst, and neither she nor, of course, Panne-lou could walk. My arm, too, had become badly swollen, and gave me some trouble, the slight wounds I received in the fight at the floe-edge festering and causing me a lot of pain. It was fortunate I had attended to them promptly, as they were undoubtedly very poisonous.

I therefore decided to wait at Leopold Island for my ship. The kayak—In-noya’s suggestion, by-the-bye—was most useful, and we were not short of food during our nearly four months’ detention there. Personally, I felt I had had enough of the floe-edge, and hunted deer on the mainland; but the natives were unafraid, asserting positively that nothing was ever seen of the Torn-ga east of North Somerset.

Maternal Cares.

It was almost impossible to get the natives to talk about them at all, but during my stay at Leopold Island I dragged a little information out of Panne-lou.

The Torn-ga have been seen lying on the rocks off-shore, but never on the land. He said they bred on Spirit Island, which was ‘their land,’ but was very vague about it, and stated that no natives had ever come from there who had seen them ashore.

‘Have any ever gone there?’ I asked.

‘Ar-my’ (‘I don’t know’), he replied evasively, adding that they (the Torn-ga) were ‘all the same as seals, and lived in the water.’

‘Why don’t they come here, or to Ponds Bay, if they live in the water?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘No one knows about them but the Spirits of the Dead, and it is not good to talk about them at all, lest evil befall you.’

This was all I could get out of him, and I found it just as unsatisfactory an explanation of the mystery as, no doubt, the reader will; but it is all I have to offer from the natives.

On 2nd August my ship hove in sight, and I heard that the Great War had been raging for a year. A few days later we were back at the depot. It was sad news I brought for the Eskimos gathered to welcome their friends home. I do not know if Panne-lou told them the true story. I mentioned it to no one, white man or Eskimo.

I have tried to write this narrative as plainly and as straightforwardly as I could, always remembering it will be read by people most of whom are unfamiliar with Arctic conditions, and the mode of life and travel there. This must be my excuse for often being prolix. I might have added some more pages of details of my journey, but these had nothing to do with the main object—namely, making public the existence of a hitherto unheard and undreamt of animal in the Far North.

A scientific friend of mine returned me the MS. of this narrative with the following pithy comment: ‘Liven it up a bit; it’s dull enough to be true.’ Had I the gift of imagination, and some literary skill, I have no doubt I could improve the story and ‘liven it up a bit’ with some touches of thrilling incidents to make it far more sensational and exciting—and far less truthful.

Later the same friend commenced to demonstrate to me the absurdity of the idea that the human organism could exist in the water as its habitat. I do not claim the Torn-ga are human, and I know nothing of their organism. Æons ago, before life existed on the land of this planet, it was, we now know, in full swing in its waters, and the lineal descendants of the animals of those unknown ages are the seals, walruses, and whales, which in countless numbers make their home in the icy waters of the Arctic Seas.

I once read in some magazine an account of a fossil skeleton found in Java which was neither ape nor man. Pithecanthropus, they called him. Why may not the seas, where life first began, have some yet undiscovered secrets of primeval life hidden in these lonely Arctic waters, teeming as they are with warm-blooded life? Why! . . . Pah! what’s the use? I am no scientist. I cannot prove my assertion with long words; but I know what I have seen, and fought, and killed. I know what gave me the five odd-looking little scars I carry on my left arm, and where I got the small ivory lance of narwhal horn which hangs on my wall. These are enough for me. And I know, too, what the terror of the hunted animal is when Death is following swiftly on its trail.

Let some naturalist winter where I have been, and bring home his specimens—dead or alive. But he will not get an Eskimo from Hudson Bay to Lancaster Sound to stay there with him; and for me—well! there is not enough money in America and Europe together to tempt me to visit Spirit Island again.

Nan-nook, nineteen years old, the adopted son of Ak-shadu, stood motionless at a seal breathing-hole awaiting its return. He had stood thus these three hours or more, but his thoughts were far from the business on hand. That morning Ak-shadu had told Kang-oh, In-noto’s boy, he would give him slim, pretty Oo-lai-you for his wife after they returned from the bear hunt, and Nan-nook’s vague dreams concerning her future had been rudely shattered. Oo-lai-you, quick with her needle, good-tempered, good to look at, slender, straight as a lance, and sixteen years old, had been the boy’s playfellow and constant companion; he had looked on her as his future wife, albeit he had flirted and dallied with half-a-dozen others with similar possibilities in view. Nan-nook knew the motive at the back of old Ak-shadu’s promise: Kang-oh and his young wife would come to them and build their igloo near by, and hunt and trap for the old man for a year or two, for In-noto, his father, had other sons and married daughters. To Ak-shadu, Oo-lai-you’s attractions were just their value in the marriage market, and he naturally reasoned he had Nan-nook anyway, and that another active worker would be so much to the good for him. Of Nan-nook’s or Oo-lai-you’s feelings in the matter he gave not a thought, and the girl would not dream of disobeying his wish; parents nearly always arrange their children’s matrimonial affairs for them in the Far North—at least amongst the Baffin Land folk.

It surprised Nan-nook to find how much the morning’s news had disturbed him. It had never occurred to him before that Oo-lai-you was more important to him than other girls, and his pre-occupation was so deep he failed to notice the faint gurgle of water in the hole as the seal approached, and consequently struck too late when it blew, thereby missing it, an altogether unpardonable piece of carelessness for anyone priding himself, as Nan-nook did, on being a good seal-hunter.

As he walked back to the igloo he thought it all over. After all, there were plenty of other girls besides Oo-lai-you: there were Koo-lee-tay and Killo-bar, old Ayou’s girls, and Eva-lou, Panne-lou’s daughter; if he got one of them he would have to work for her father for a year certainly, but this would be no worse than working for Ak-shadu. Nan-nook did not think that Oo-lai-you cared; when they had all lived in the Young People’s House last spring, she had pressed noses and dallied with Kang-oh and Panig-pah and the others, just as he had with Eva-lou and Killo-bar and Koo-lee-tay. When he arrived at the igloo, however, he at once saw Oo-lai-you had been weeping, and asked her, in the old woman’s absence, what it was about. She looked curiously at him, and the tears came afresh. ‘I don’t want Kang-oh for my man; I want you,’ she sobbed. Eskimo maidens are quite frank about such matters, but the entry of the old woman put a stop to any further confidences. It was the nearest Oo-lai-you dared go to rebellion. Then all Nan-nook’s sensible reflections melted away, and he suddenly felt he had never wanted anything so badly in his whole life as he wanted Oo-lai-you now, and a vague sense of some great injustice swept over him. Had he been a civilised man, Nan-nook would have confessed himself in love; as it was, he found himself amazed at this profound disturbance, and speculated vaguely as to the reason why such a matter should spoil his appetite, a very disquieting event for a healthy Eskimo lad. He puzzled over the problem, thinking of the other girls, and wondering why he did not seem to want one of them at all, till he fell asleep.

So Kang-oh joined Ak-shadu’s party, bringing a small sled and four dogs, and they all went off together for the bear hunt, it being understood he was to have Oo-lai-you for his wife when they returned. Ak-shadu carefully stipulated that Kang-oh must stay a year with him, and turn in all his catch of fur during that time. ‘That’s all he cares about you,’ confided Nan-nook to Oo-lai-you bitterly—‘just a few fox-skins and a bear or so.’

What happened to the party for two or three weeks may be passed over, till we come to the day they followed three bear-tracks far out on the ice as they were shifting camp, and finally came upon them and got them within sight of the moving pack in Davis Straits. They built an igloo, skinned their kill, fed the dogs, and after a prodigious gorge of succulent young bear meat, turned in and slept heavily.

Next morning they found the ice on which they were camped had parted from the landfast ice during the night and joined the moving pack, a lane of water half a mile wide being between them and safety. Many bold hunters are lost in this way in the Far North.

For the time they were safe enough, the pack of heavy northern ice being all held together in one compact mass many miles wide; but they knew that sooner or later winds and tides might drive it apart, making room for a sea to get up, which would speedily compass their destruction.

Kang-oh did not come out particularly well in the perilous straits in which the party now found themselves, for he sulked in the igloo most of the time. Nan-nook, on the other hand, was indefatigable, travelling far over the terribly rough ice of the pack for seals, and getting a bear on one occasion. On his efforts the party lived for three weeks, moving camp and building fresh igloos as the ice began to threaten to go abroad. Though younger than Kang-oh, Nan-nook took the lead in all the work, consulting with old Ak-shadu as with an equal. The old man took a gloomy view of their chances, and believed they would never see the land again. He began, too, to form a very poor opinion of his future son-in-law, telling his old wife so in private. However, his word was given, and probably they would all die now anyway.

Nan-nook and Oo-lai-you were thus much thrown together, for the two would go away on the dog-sled for long days after seal, and many love passages, with much pressing together of noses, occurred when the igloo was out of sight. ‘You shall be my wife,’ Nan-nook would declare; ‘in a year or two I will have my own dog team, and then I will steal you from Kang-oh, and we will go to the Iglu-liut country together far away.’ And she, now despising and hating Kang-oh, would agree to this desperate measure.

A day came when the ice-pack started to go abroad, and the party sought refuge on the largest piece of ice likely to hold together, but old Ak-shadu knew only too well that whenever there was room for a sea to get up the end would not be far off.

Dog-Team Adrift on an Ice Pan.

Wider and wider apart became the ice floes, till the party found themselves huddled on a heavy pan of ice and driving south in a snow-storm, the sea increasing every hour in violence, till they were awash. In the few dark hours of the following night, just as the old man had said, ‘It is the end; good-bye, wife,’ Nan-nook shouted, and there loomed ahead the outline of a gigantic berg with a slow spit, against which their pan of ice brought up with a violent jerk that threw them all off their feet. A wild rush was made for the berg, and the sleds—to which the dogs had been kept harnessed for such a contingency—and the whole party were hastily transferred without loss. As Nan-nook, the last to leave, scrambled into safety the floe slowly up-ended, and the next second broke into pieces with the combined pressure of wind, wave, and tide.

At daybreak they saw the berg they had found refuge on was the outer one of a line of stately giants which reached in towards the low land of Kater Head, some twenty-five miles to the westward, where they knew some of their tribe were wintering. The berg was aground—as were the rest—on the Isabella Bank, a well-known whaling bank for the ships late in the season. Their refuge was a very high berg, except for the low spit on to which they had scrambled, and dangerous as soon as the high spring-tides should come, for it might then turn over and drown or crush them amongst the broken fragments, unless they could leave before the catastrophe happened. They saw, too, that had they been fifty feet more to the seaward they would have missed the spit, and in another three hundred feet have brought up against the ‘fast’ land-ice—and safety; but now between them and it was the black water, with the swirling tide or current running most of the time from the berg to the land-ice. To the north, about half a mile away, were two huge bergs aground, which they had passed unseen in the night, and, as if to shut off all hope of escape, a large field of ice, some miles in extent, had driven against them and brought up, thereby hindering any stray pans of ice from coming down on which they might raft to safety.

Nor was this the worst; with the rise of the tide they felt distinct tremors in the berg on which they were lodged, and the full moon and high March spring-tides were only a few days off. Old Ak-shadu shook his head and said it looked bad.

A small igloo was built, into which they crowded, and the footwear was dried over the blubber lamps.

By the second morning Nan-nook had made up his mind what he would do. Calling Ak-shadu to one side, he unfolded his plan. He would reach the fast ice by rafting on the two sleds, which he thought would float him if he sat astride. Once there he would get a pan of ice under the two sleds, lash them in place, and in this way the party could raft, one by one, to safety, for with the aid of the seal-lines, sled lash-lines, dog-traces, and whip-lashes—all of strong bearded-seal line—the raft could be hauled back and forth. Fortunately they had four spare lash-lines of very strong bearded seal.

Old Ak-shadu nodded. ‘It might be done,’ he agreed, ‘if the sleds will float you and you do not freeze; but you will be in the water to your armpits, and it is very cold.’

‘If I try,’ said Nan-nook suddenly, ‘will you give me Oo-lai-you for my wife? Let the first offer be made to Kang-oh; if he will not go, I will. I do not want Oo-lai-you,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘if I freeze my feet and cannot hunt any more.’

Kang-oh was called and the proposal made to him, but he would have none of it, promptly agreeing to give up his claim to Oo-lai-you if Nan-nook would attempt the perilous voyage. ‘There are other girls,’ said Kang-oh philosophically. He was not of the stuff heroes are made of.

The sleds were lashed side by side, the seal-lines made into two long lines, and a rude paddle contrived. Taking a pair of dry deer-skin trousers and a deer-skin shirt, and tying them, with a change of footwear and mitts, to his head, and with two of the seal-lines coiled round his neck, Nan-nook essayed the journey. The raft was slipped into the water, Nan-nook sitting on it, with his legs hanging down between the outer runners. The raft sank under Nan-nook’s weight till Oo-lai-you cried out; but when his shoulders were just out of the water he found it carried him, and he was pushed off. To keep the submerged raft from turning over took all the boy’s care and skill, and it was evident that it would be impossible to raft the women over thus, for only with infinite caution could Nan-nook keep his seat. It was perhaps zero weather. Allowing the tide to take him down, Nan-nook used his paddle as a balancing pole, and by the time he reached the fast ice he was all but frozen.

His first act was to strip naked, hastily dry himself with an old shirt he had brought for the purpose, and don his dry deer-skin clothes. Two toes, he saw, were frozen, but he left these to luck, and raced up and down for a few minutes till his blood once more began to move. Even then the most painful work had to be done—the getting of the largest pan of ice he could work along the floe-edge, and lashing the sleds securely on it. Again and again he froze his fingers working in the icy water, but he stuck manfully to his task, and at last announced to the anxious watchers all was finished. Having secured the spare line to the raft, he gave the signal to haul in, and paid out his line as they did so.

First came the old woman and one child, the woman sitting on the sled with her blanket tied to her shoulders and their few kettles and the child on her knees; it was the utmost the frail raft would carry.

Safely landed, Nan-nook bade her hurry towards the shore, and shouted for Ak-shadu and the other child to come next, which they did. The old man would have stayed to help, but Nan-nook said ‘No.’ It would be a race for them at the end, he urged, for the great berg was visibly shaking, pieces now and then dropping into the water and causing much commotion. It would certainly shift or turn over on this flood tide—not quite, by the marks on the berg, yet at its height.

As the raft was hauled back for the third time, Nan-nook noticed that the ice-field to the north had broken, and a vast mass of ice was coming swiftly down towards the berg, on which still remained Oo-lai-you and Kang-oh. Self-preservation is the first law of life, and Kang-oh—as has been said—was no hero. The raft would hold only one of them, and to Nan-nook’s helpless rage Kang-oh sprang on to it and pushed it off, leaving the girl standing alone. Nan-nook could do nothing but pull it as swiftly to him as possible. Had he had his rifle he would have shot Kang-oh and told the girl to throw him into the water.

The raft reached the ice and the coward stepped off. Nan-nook, without paying the least attention to him, shouted to Oo-lai-you to haul back quickly. She had placed her own and Nan-nook’s blanket and rifle at her feet. The great ice-sheet was near now, and it was plain the huge weight and momentum of the impact against the iceberg would convert its unstable equilibrium into a cataclysmal overturn. ‘Jump for the raft—jump,’ shouted Nan-nook; ‘never mind the blankets.’ But as the raft approached Oo-lai-you seized a blanket in one hand and the rifle and ammunition-bag in the other and sprang lightly on to it, followed by two of the dogs.

Nan-nook hauled the raft towards him as rapidly as he dared, the water, in his haste, washing over the sleds and wetting the kneeling girl. The tide had been increasing in speed, yet the raft seemed to come more slowly than on any previous journey. If the great berg toppled on the first impact of the ice so swiftly approaching it, and now but a few yards away, Nan-nook knew both he and the girl would meet that most dreaded of all deaths to an Eskimo, drowning, broken-limbed and crushed by the masses of heaving ice amongst which they must inevitably be thrown. Yet it never occurred to him to save himself and let the girl take her chance.

As the raft touched the firm ice, slim Oo-lai-you, pale, but cool and active as a fox, stepped quickly off, and the after-end, dipping from the loss of her weight and unchecked by any line from the berg, up-ended and disappeared under the ice on which they stood.

‘Run, run,’ cried Nan-nook, seizing the precious rifle and ammunition and clasping Oo-lai-you’s little hand. At the same instant the ice-sheet ground with a crash against the berg as the two sped like deer from the coming cataclysm. The ice-sheet instantly overran the low spit with a loud grinding noise, covering it with fantastic masses of moving ice cakes; the next moment, with a roar like a salvo of heavy guns, the great berg toppled, leant, and fell with a deafening crash, churning the water into seething foam and throwing the heavy land-ice along its edge into the air in huge fragments as the wave reached it.

The youngsters raced on, hand-in-hand, and through both their minds flashed the thought they were yet too close, and doomed to a cruel death. Then they were flung on their faces by the upheaval as the wave passed, the thick ice breaking and surging beneath them like an earthquake. For about one hundred yards from the water the ice was shattered and crashing together in wild confusion—but the two were beyond the zone which would have meant swift death. Where they were the ice was only broken into large pans, over the rocking surfaces of which they sped lightly to safety.

‘I left my blanket behind,’ said Oo-lai-you tearfully, now the danger was over. ‘You shouted to me to jump, and I hadn’t time to pick it up; it is yours I saved.’

‘Never mind,’ said Nan-nook masterfully, ‘it doesn’t matter now. I made a bargain with Ak-shadu and Kang-oh before I tried the raft. From now you and I will only want one blanket between us, and mine was the larger one anyway.’ Thus was the winning of Oo-lai-you accomplished by Nan-nook; and, as if to demonstrate his right of possession and her glad acquiescence, as they reached the old people, who had been anxiously watching them, they paused and gravely pressed noses together several times as a token of happiness.

Spring-Time. Moving to the Deer Grounds.

A blizzard had been raging all day, and none of the Eskimos had ventured to go off sealing; so, putting a plug of tobacco in my pocket, I made my way through the smother of drifting snow to old Ay-you’s igloo.

Ay-you had three grown and married sons living in their own igloos near by, all fine hunters and hard workers, and three married daughters elsewhere. The old man and his wife were well provided for; all the sons contributed to look after them, and were evidently very much attached to their parents.

Ay-you was cracking deer-bones and extracting the marrow with much relish when I entered. He sat stripped to the waist in the warm, lined igloo, his wife sewing beside him. The igloo lining was the summer sealskin tent, and hung from the snow-roof by sinew threads tied to a little stick thrust through the igloo and laid cross-wise, and a smaller piece fastened in the same manner through the lining, so that there was an air-space of about a foot clear between the lining and the snow all round. This is done only when a permanent camp is made, and lasts, with proper usage, for months, or until the igloo starts to thaw with the spring sun.

‘Yes,’ said old Ay-you, in reply to a query, ‘once I have seen a great herd of cariboo. They were like the salmon which you have seen leaving the lake for the salt water. Yes, as many as that’—for I had expressed incredulity—‘or more, I think.—Shall I tell him, wife?’

Ne-ve-etia raised her eyebrows—the sign of assent. ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she said; ‘it is long, long ago.’

‘I was a boy of about so many summers old’—Ay-you indicated sixteen on his fingers—‘and we had been camped at what you white men call the river Clyde on Baffin Land. It was the year of the great winter. The ice had not left the coast the previous summer, nor this year of which I speak. Only once have I known this to happen for two summers. There were no trading-stations then, but the Scottish whalers used to come out every year, and we would trade with them when they came down the coast from the north. When they saw the ice was not going to leave, some of the Innuits went north to the Too-noo-ne-muit people—Ponds Inlet—but two tents of us remained, my father’s and another Innuit’s. My mother had died a year or two before this, and my step-mother was a hard, evil-tongued woman who did not like me or her’—indicating his wife—‘my foster-sister. My mother had adopted her as a baby, to be my wife later, and we had always been good friends—eh, wife?’ The old man chuckled, and his wife said slowly, ‘Yes, oo-man [husband], you have yet to give me my first beating. We have not quarrelled much, you and I.’

‘The other Innuit’s wife was sister to my step-mother, and their old mother lived sometimes with her, sometimes with us. There were two young children, one my step-mother’s, one her sister’s. Ah, what a winter that was! It began in September, and gale after gale blew the whole winter through, with the great cold always with it.’ I nodded, for I knew the ‘great cold’ meant anything from twenty to fifty degrees below zero.

‘We were foolish to stay there,’ old Ay-you continued, ‘but my father thought there should be more seals in the bay later, and probably some cariboo would also come down when the sun began to show again [that is, February]. In those days we had only muzzle-loading, small-bore, round-bullet rifles, and we used our bow and arrow very often for deer; but seals were then, as now, our principal food. I had a rifle and a fair amount of ammunition left yet, for we had seen very few deer during the summer, though I had gone a long way inland to look for them.’

The old man paused and filled his pipe, looking thoughtfully at the bright flame of the native lamp. ‘Yes,’ he said, as if reminded by it, ‘and we had no blubber that winter either. In the Dark Month [December] the evil days came to us. We could get no seals, for there were none along the coast that winter, and we were hungry all the time. Then the other Innuit took sick and died, and his wife moved into our igloo. I and my father were away day after day, but we could get nothing, and our dogs died one by one, and we ate them. Then my father said he would take the rest of the dogs, except two, and go far out on the ice to try to find a bear, and he would be away two sleeps; but he had not come back in ten sleeps—it was the middle of the month of the New Sun [February].

‘And then I heard the women talking; they thought I was asleep. My step-mother said Ne-ve-etia must die, as she was the fattest and strongest, and she told how she would kill her the next night with the little axe, as she slept. Oh yes, women will do that sometimes when they are hungry, and when their hearts are hard and cruel. The two little children had both died a month before, and—well, I guessed things it is not good to speak of even now, for the three old women often went to the rocks where they had been buried.

‘The old woman—they are always the worst—agreed, and the three of them talked about it as if it were no more than killing a dog for food. Presently the old woman said, “What use is he? He gets nothing, and only eats the sealskin we should have;” and my step-mother said, “By-and-by. Wait a little, and we will make an end of him too. He is no use, as you say.” Then I knew they meant to kill me, too, when I slept. I thought it all over that night as I lay there, as the others thought, sleeping, and I said to myself Ne-ve-etia and I would not die so; if die we must, it would not be that way. We had been little children together, slept, and played, and grown big together, and shared our food together in times of plenty and of hunger; nor do I ever remember when we quarrelled, as some do. Yes! she was good to look at then; straight like a lance, bright-eyed, and quick with her fingers; not old and wrinkled like you see her now—eh, wife?’ The old man slipped his hand in Ne-ve-etia’s as he spoke. They were very fond of each other, this old couple.

I bade Ne-ve-etia fill her pipe, and Ay-you continued.

‘She was fifteen then, big and strong for her age, and she generally came with me when I went sealing, though of late, owing to the cold and no seals, she had stayed in the igloo. I have said we had two dogs left, and we had not eaten them because we thought a bear might come, and then they would warn us and keep him busy till I could shoot him. One of them was named Tar-tarloo. As you can tell from his name, he was black, without a white hair on him; he was Ne-ve-etia’s dog.

‘Next day I said to my step-mother I would go up the coast for one sleep, and try to find a seal-hole, and I said Ne-ve-etia had better come to walk about and drive the seal to the hole, if I found one. My step-mother said no, she should not go; so then I got sulky, and refused to go out of the igloo at all; and presently my step-mother said Ne-ve-etia should go, but if I stayed more than one sleep she must come back with the dog. (We took the dog to smell out the seal-holes, of course.) I knew my step-mother’s thoughts when she spoke those words.

‘I got Ne-ve-etia outside and told her to get a few needles, her ooloo [a half-round knife used by all Eskimo women], and her scraping-knife, but not to let the others see she was taking them. I put on the little hand-sled my deer-skin blanket and a dried deer-skin to lie on; my seal-spear, harpoon, and seal-line; my bow and arrows, and a small iron o-koosh-ing [kettle], which were in the store igloo outside, and which they did not see me take. I had my rifle, all my ammunition and caps, and my snow-knife and skinning-knife and my little axe. The women did not see that I had taken all my ammunition, or they would have asked why. So we started, Ne-ve-etia and I and Tar-tarloo; and presently I told her what I heard the old women saying, and she said yes, she had heard too, for she had not been asleep.—Eh, wife! you gave me a surprise then; yes, you did;’ and the old man chuckled.

I remarked that Ne-ve-etia must have had plenty of courage, and Ay-you agreed. ‘She was always a cool, brave girl,’ he said. ‘And I have never seen her afraid yet,’ he added, smiling at her as he spoke.

‘Now I had made up my mind my father was dead, lost probably on the moving pack-ice with the dog-team, and I had also made up my mind that our only chance was to try for deer far in on the land, for I knew the deer must be somewhere, and there were no seals to be got. How this was to be done with the three old women I did not know, but here was a chance at least for Ne-ve-etia and me, and I decided to take it. She would be dead if she stayed another night in the igloo, and she might as well die out in the open, struggling on for food, as by a coward’s blow from an axe. Besides, she was still strong, and able to walk far. Tar-tarloo was only skin and bone, but he could travel for a while at least. If I got meat, I would return to the igloo; if not—well, we should be no better off than the old women. My step-mother refused to give me even a piece of sealskin tent to chew when I left, and I knew the oldest woman had some scraps of frozen, rotten meat hidden away under her sleeping-place—besides some other food of which I will not speak.

‘We went along the ground-ice till we were out of sight of the igloo, and then turned up the fjord and the river at its head, which we made that night. Ah! I tell you, Kabloona [white man], a man’s heart is not very brave when his belly is empty, and, for all I knew, we might travel for a whole moon on the land without seeing any game. We two youngsters could not go more than four or five days at the most now without some food. If we failed then—well, we would lie down in the igloo together and die. Just that.

‘At the river that night I shot two ptarmigan, and, raw and warm, they put new life into us, those two little birds. We gave the skins to the dog, and he ate them to the last feather. We walked up the river for nineteen days, and Death stalked at our heels all the time. Once I got a fox in a hole in a snow-bank—the dog smelt him out; and once I shot two hares and three ptarmigan, and we two and the dog lived on these for those nineteen days. I had gone too far to return, and unless we found deer, nothing could save us now. We had finished the last morsel of our food on the seventeenth day, and two, or at the most three, more days would see the end, unless we ate the skeleton of a thing which once was Tar-tarloo—and then it would only prolong life for another day.

Ay-you’s Wife.

‘It was cold and generally blowing, but the river led south-west, and the wind was on our backs; we could not have faced it. At night I built a very small igloo to sleep in. I remember on the last of those nineteen days she and I walked as I have seen men on the whalers walk when they have had too much rum; but we still kept on. I don’t think we talked much, but we would lie down together under the blanket with the dog at our feet, and keep from freezing thus. I don’t know why we didn’t freeze as it was; when you are starving, the cold is always worse.

‘On the twentieth morning we started—I thought for the last journey then—and by-and-by Tar-tarloo whined and ran ahead of us, and suddenly turned off to the side of the valley, facing north. I knew instantly he had winded a bear and we were saved, though I had never known a bear to winter so far in on the land. He came from the Iglu-liut country, perhaps, to the west. No! it never entered my mind I should not kill him, although my rifle was only a small-bore, single muzzle-loader. For a minute the dog lost the scent and I was able to catch him, and put a line on him, and then he led me straight to the place. I could see the steam rising out of the little hole at the top—all the rest being unbroken and covered over with snow-drift. I took my lance, put Ne-ve-etia and the dog behind me, and drove it into the hole. There was a roar, and a cry which told me a young one was in there, and the old bear thrust her head out of the snow bank, blinking savagely about, but not able to see very well. (Bears are like this just at first when they have been laid up all the winter.) I put the muzzle of my rifle within six inches of her skull, and fired, and she sank back into the hole without a sound.

‘Ah, Kabloona, think of it! Here was meat and blubber, and presently fire, for I had my flint and steel and tinder with me, and could make a lamp out of a flat stone. But, best of all, here was food. You do not know what it is to go day after day, sleeping or waking, with that gnawing pain down there which cries out all the time for food. I hope you never may. I knocked the two cubs on the head, and built an igloo. Tar-tarloo was shaped like that kettle when he lay down that night. It was he who saved us, after all—and, just think of it! but for Ne-ve-etia, I should have killed him the day before for food.

‘I went to the river, and found a place in the bank where I could dig out a flat stone with the ice-chisel on the end of my spear-handle. It was a little hollow on one side, and I put small stones round the deepest end, and stuck them there with some clay I had to thaw in my mouth, mixing it with clotted blood and blubber from the bear. Soon Ne-ve-etia had a fire in this lamp, and we could at last thaw ice and get a real drink of water. Yes, that was good to get, for our lips were cracked and black with sucking ice as we had walked. Then we boiled some meat, and I took all the blubber off the skin, and scraped a part of it at the neck where it is heaviest, to use for soles later; and we made a framework of the ribs to put over the lamp and dry our mitts and footwear.

‘That night came the great storm. It blew—even like it is blowing outside now—for seventeen days, and the wind was from the north, and the snow-drift was so thick we never left the igloo all that time. I had built a porch on to it, and everything we had was inside, even the little sled; and all the meat was in the igloo. But we had a fire and food, and we were warm and happy. What did we do all that time?’ The old man looked at Ne-ve-etia and smiled. ‘We slept and ate, and ate and slept. There is much food for two people and one dog on a big bear and two little cubs, Kabloona,’ he said simply.

‘When the storm ended, and I cut my way out of the igloo with my snow-knife, I knew it was no good to go back with what was left of the meat to the old women. It was more than a moon now since I had left them, and it would take me more than ten sleeps to get back. If my father had not arrived with meat, they would all be dead. Also, there was not much more bear-meat left now than we two could eat in ten days, and it was no good to go back with only a few days’ food for all, of which Ne-ve-etia and I would get nothing, if they still, by some miracle, were alive. We were not far from the head of the river, and on the high, rolling land, which the heart of this land [Baffin Land] all is.

‘The morning I killed the bear I had seen some very old cariboo signs, and the first day’s travel we made after the great storm I again saw some old tracks, all travelling west; there must be deer somewhere, if I could only find them. So I made harness from the bear-skin for Tar-tarloo and myself, and we loaded the little sled, and I and Ne-ve-etia took also a load on our backs, and we pushed on, but turned from the river at a place where it went to the north-westward, and travelled south-west over the land. Again I saw the old tracks of a big herd of deer going westward. The snow was hard and good, but not deep, for the winds had swept it all into the valleys, and the brown grass showed through it everywhere. We travelled thus for eight sleeps, but we could not go far or fast in a day. When one has starved long and then eaten plentifully, for a time one is weak and tired easily.

‘Then we saw the Great Herd. It was a bright morning in the Young Seal month [April], and looking westward from a little hill, I saw cariboo as far north and south as I could see, all travelling slowly southwards. They were not much scattered, and they looked like a great, dark river flowing over the white snow. They fed as they walked, pawing the snow and snatching a few mouthfuls of grass, to walk a little way and then do the same again. Here and there the line seemed thinner, but even at its thinnest place there were more cariboo than I had ever seen in one herd.’

The old man paused to fill his pipe, and my mind flew back a score of years to a similar sight I had seen far to the west on the mainland, on the barren grounds north of Great Slave Lake—La Foule [The Herd], as the French half-breeds called it, was passing, and I was in its midst. Thousands upon tens of thousands of cariboo, as far as the eye could reach, were moving south in a seemingly endless procession. Across the lake down which my canoe was travelling, a dark line of cariboo was entering the water at one side, swimming across it, a forest of horns in the water, and emerging to disappear over the hill on the other side. Day and night for a week I was never out of the sound of their feet, click-clicking over the rocks. They invaded our camps at night, to stampede wildly on winding us. They dotted every hill and all the skyline like some vast flock of sheep feeding on the high moorlands. In places I ran into great packed herds of them, and their very numbers seemed to give them confidence, for only those very close would try to rush away in alarm. A little way off they looked like a thicket of moving branches, every deer, male and female, having horns in the velvet. It was a sight never to be forgotten, and I was not surprised that the old man’s eyes grew brighter as he spoke of it. It was the Paradise of the Eskimo he was describing.

Puffing at his pipe for a few minutes, and passing it to Ne-ve-etia to finish, Ay-you resumed.

‘As far to the southward as we could travel in a journey of two moons or more lived the Tinnit-juak-buit tribe, the people of the Great Tides. The whalers used often to winter there. This was where we would go. We turned south and built an igloo while the sun was yet high, with the Great Herd in sight over to the westward. Next morning I went over to where they were still passing along, shot two, and returned with a load of meat and one of the skins to lie on in the igloo. They were not poor, for, as I have said, the snow was light on the high land, and food was easy for them to get.

‘Ah, Kabloona, that was truly the Great Herd! I did not know all the land held so many cariboo as I saw day by day. For nearly a month I and Ne-ve-etia and Tar-tarloo, the dog, travelled south, always with cariboo, sometimes close to us, sometimes farther away to the west, for it was to the east side of the Great Herd we travelled, as the wind generally blew from them to us. When there were many close together, they looked like the pictures I have seen of the countries where the wood grows in sticks everywhere, for all their horns were coming on, and yet in the skin [in velvet]. Never were so many cariboo seen together before or since, and besides food, they gave us fire for the lamp, for I could pick out the fattest ones.

‘All the land was strange to me, for neither I nor my father, nor his father before him had ever been so far in on the land; nor did any Innuit ever before go in there where Ne-ve-etia and I went—and remember she was only so many summers [fifteen], though a woman already, and strong and tall, and I was but so many’—showing sixteen fingers.

‘At last we came to the great lake Nechilling, and here the Great Herd began to separate and wander apart in smaller herds. We journeyed on and on, only killing a few cariboo for food, until we came to the big bays and islands at the east of the lake, and I knew we were near the trail the Innuits come up from the sea to hunt deer for clothing. It was the beginning of the Duck-Egg month, or, as some call it, the month of the Young Deer [June]. We kept the deer-skins then, and soon Ne-ve-etia had enough to make a toupik [tent], but for a pole we had to put up a pile of flat stones high enough to hold the tent up over us. Our footwear was worn out. We walked almost on our bare feet until we could camp and Ne-ve-etia had time to dress some heavy deer-skin for soles.—Ah, wife! that was a busy summer for you, eh?’ And old Ay-you’s eyes again twinkled, as if at some hidden joke.

‘People of the Tinnit-juak-buit tribe came up for deer, and found us, and took us down to Kerketen on the sea, after we had all got deer-skins for our winter clothing. This was in the month when the winter skins are good [September]. There we wintered, she and I, with the tribe; and the next year a whaling-ship came in, and we went north with her to the Too-noo-ne-muits—my own people—at the place you call Ponds Bay, far to the north.

‘Yes,’ said Ay-you, after a pause of thoughtful reflection, accepting my offered plug of tobacco as he spoke, ‘we were young then, she and I, and she was so good to look at. Others wanted her for wife amongst my people, but she said no, she was my wife and wanted no other man; and we have always been together ever since.’ Again he slipped his hand in the old woman’s, and I saw a tiny tear roll down her wrinkled cheek as he did so.

‘How about Tar-tarloo, the dog?’ I asked, fully expecting the reply that he had died in three or four years, worn out, as most of them are by the sled-work.

A Summer Tent.

Ay-you looked at his wife and laughed. ‘Innuits are not as kabloonas are about dogs,’ he said; ‘they use them till they are finished, and then throw them away; you have seen yourself. But Ne-ve-etia would not have it so with Tar-tarloo. When he began to get old, she would not let me work him hard, and she always fed him, even when food was scarce for the others. She said he saved our lives; perhaps truly. He lived many summers, and died of old age. She cried when he died, too. Women are queer sometimes about such things, which are only nonsense really.’

‘And your father?’ I asked.

Ay-you shook his head white-man fashion. ‘He never came back to the igloo,’ he said. ‘It was as I had feared. The Innuits found the bones of the others there, but not his. Two of them had been killed, for their skulls were broken. The other one was the skull of a very old woman.’

Panig-Pah, the best hunter of the Ivul-ik Innuits, the swiftest runner who had ever run down and killed a bear single-handed, lay on the deer-skins in the igloo, sick and weak as a boy. For two months he had been like this, and his young wife, Sud-lu, whom he had but lately taken, sat looking sadly at him and thinking of a year ago, when she had been the proudest girl in the tribe because the great hunter had asked her to come to his igloo. Her mother was dead, and her father had taken a woman who hated Sud-lu and had made life a hell for her. Then there was Ak-kaan, a Portuguese half-breed. He, too, had coveted pretty little Sud-lu, and wanted her for his second wife, for polygamy is common among the Ivul-iks. But Panig-pah’s first wife had died last winter, on the Wager Inlet, and he had instantly set out for Repulse Bay, and asked for and taken Sud-lu.

The Eskimo woman, especially if young and friendless, has little voice in her matrimonial affairs; these are usually settled by the parents when the children are young, even as babies. Sud-lu’s allotted husband, a boy a year older than herself, had been drowned the previous summer, and so Panig-pah knew she was free. Though only seventeen, she was a quick, clever needlewoman, a good maker of boots and clothes, and a bright, capable housewife.

Poor, pretty little Sud-lu, her dark eyes were red with weeping and her rosy cheeks sallow and shrunken, for it had been a starving winter on Repulse Bay, and her man had been long sick. When hunger is stalking through the camps, the sick fare badly. Her father, Ak-shadu, a rather stupid, middle-aged man, took no trouble of Sud-lu’s on his shoulders; he had many young mouths to feed, which kept him long hours at the seal-holes in the bitter cold, and seals were scarce; he could not feed his own igloo sometimes. The new year was but just begun; the days dragged on; one by one the dogs disappeared—some from starvation, some for food. Of Panig-pah’s fine team not a dog remained. Their owner lay sick, unable either to use or to feed them; and he knew, too, that Sud-lu’s baby was only one moon from being born.

Then one day Ak-kaan arrived; arrived with a little deer-meat, a well-fed team, and the glad news that deer were plentiful six days inland. Soon all was bustle and preparation for the journey. Ak-kaan made no remark when he heard Panig-pah had taken Sud-lu for wife, but talked in friendly manner to the sick man, and suggested to him that she should leave on his sled with the others—for dogs were very few and starving, and there were many children to take—riding thus, as her time was so near. At the second sleep they would make he had left plenty of meat, and from there he would return light, and bring the sick man on in one long day’s travel.

Sud-lu vehemently refused to leave her man; but the idea seemed a good one to Panig-pah, for he knew the girl was hungry; so he ordered her to go, and, unwillingly and weeping bitterly, she left her big, good-looking, but sorely wasted husband. Little Sud-lu surely had some premonition of coming evil, and lightly as infidelities lie on any Innuit woman’s mind, she had had eyes for no one but her man since he took her.

Some deer-meat, his rifle and ammunition, sealing-spear and harpoon, and deer-skin blankets were left with the sick man, and the party started. Two days’ travel and they came to the meat cache, and camped; and the next day Ak-kaan went back for Panig-pah. He was away four days, and the rest of the party, according to arrangement, had moved slowly forward, leaving Sud-lu alone, when Ak-kaan arrived with the news that Panig-pah had become worse, and had died the second day after he reached him.

Little Sud-lu was broken-hearted, and when Ak-kaan told her his own wife was dead and he would take her, she instantly suspected foul-play. But she was helpless and alone; nor, when they caught up the others, could she prevail on any one to listen to her suspicions. Ak-shadu was stupid, and his children were hungry, and whatever the others thought, they would not interfere; it was none of their business, and if Ak-kaan said Panig-pah was dead, there was an end to it. So, when Ak-kaan claimed Sud-lu, her father consented—and what could she do, poor child? Do not forget he was a Portuguese half-breed—crafty, scheming, and cruel.

But Panig-pah did not die. Ak-kaan had not been near him. He was too superstitious to murder his rival with a bullet, but as there were no other natives at Repulse Bay, or likely to go near there, it was, he knew, only a matter of a week or two, and his victim must starve to death.

A week passed, and Panig-pah, lying in his deer-skin blankets, realised that he was mending slowly; realised, too, why Ak-kaan had left him to starve.

Suddenly one evening he heard voices, and, on his crying out, three men crawled into the igloo. They were Nechillings from King William Land, far to the west. Having been slowly following, and living on a herd of cariboo for half the winter, they found themselves near Repulse Bay, and came on to see if any Ivul-iks were about. The two tribes met only occasionally, and knew little of each other.

Panig-pah instantly made up his story. There had been a fall of snow since the others had left, and all signs of recent sleds were obliterated. They had been a small party, he said, and the others had gone a month ago to Wager Inlet to try for seal, as food was scarce; they were to have returned for him in two weeks, but none had come, and he thought they had all been lost on the ice by the treacherous tides of that dangerous place. His wife was dead, he added.

The good-natured Nechillings accepted his story, and offered to take him back with them to where their women were camped. Deer were plentiful, they said. Hospitality such as this is part and parcel of an Innuit’s life when the cooking-pots are full. No man knows when his turn may come to be found helpless and perhaps starving; accidents are many where Nature shows her most savage moods.

So Panig-pah went west with the Nechillings, while little Sud-lu wept in Ak-kaan’s igloo. Long before the first signs of spring began to show on the illimitable snow wastes, her baby was born, the while Panig-pah, now fast becoming a strong, active man, was steadily and methodically planning revenge. His marriage with Sud-lu—if the Eskimos’ matrimonial affairs may be dignified by the name—was as nearly a love-match as they are capable of. He had known and liked her from a child, but had never been one of those frequently found natives who exchange their wives as they do their sled-dogs; nor would Panig-pah have two wives in his igloo. He had no children by his first wife, and had looked eagerly forward to Sud-lu’s coming motherhood, for, like all his race, he was passionately fond of children.

Summer found Panig-pah far to the south, at Chesterfield Inlet, amongst the Kini-pitu Eskimo. There was no Hudson Bay Post there then, and this tribe, being mainly an inland one, from the head of the inlet, mixed but little with the Ivul-iks. Panig-pah had got some dogs together, and even a few fox-skins, but he avoided the whalers at Marble Island off the mouth of the inlet, and went south with a few Innuits who were hunting deer for clothing.

When autumn came he parted with these new friends, though they would gladly have kept him with them, for many maidens’ bright eyes, both Nechilling and Kini-pitu, had looked longingly at him; but he wanted no wife yet, he told the men laughingly. His plans were already taking shape in his mind. Far to the northward of Repulse Bay was the country of the Iglu-liut Innuits, a people whom the Ivul-iks sometimes met. Could he but get some swift, powerful dogs together, he would find Sud-lu, settle his score with Ak-kaan, and go through to the Iglu-liut country. From there he would travel round the head of Fox Channel, and then south till he reached the great river which flows from Lake Nechilling, in the heart of Baffin Land, to its western shores. If he could keep his route from the knowledge of the Iglu-liut Innuits—which would be easy, as every one goes his own way for the summer, meeting again in autumn—the Portuguese half-breed and his brothers would seek him in vain.

Once, in his grandfather’s time, two whale-boats full of Innuits had come from Cumberland Gulf, crossed the big lake, descended the river, and scattered amongst the Ivul-ik and Iglu-liut tribes. The record of the migration was well known to him, for he was descended from one of these bold voyagers on his mother’s side. He could summer on the eastern shore of Lake Nechilling, where deer were plentiful, and when the ice made again travel to the sea at Cumberland Gulf, and join the Tinnit-juak-buit tribe (‘the people of the Great Tides’) at Kekerten. Here, it was said, seals were so plentiful that the people never knew what starvation was. It was far away from the Ivul-ik country, and he had that to do which would make it no place for him to live in peace in, since Ak-kaan had brothers. Once he had seen a chart of the Arctic, and the mate of the ship had pointed out to him the different places; it was printed clearly in his tenacious memory, for, next to pictures of animals, an Eskimo loves to look at a map of his own Arctic land.

A Winter Hut.

Panig-pah was now about two hundred and seventy miles from Fort Churchill, a journey along the flat, limitless-looking shores of Hudson Bay. There only, he knew, could he get the dogs he needed for his great journey. From Fort Churchill north to Repulse Bay was over five hundred miles, and thence to Iglu-liut some two hundred and fifty more. Panig-pah could not think or count in hundreds, but he knew that it was many months of travel—many, many long days’ journeying, with only his rifle and the chance of finding game between him and starvation—and that he must get enough to feed his dogs too. Also, there were ammunition and knives and a new rifle to get, as well as sled-dogs, and foxes were often scarce and hard to catch. Yet Panig-pah never faltered from his purpose, and leaving his Kini-pitu friends, he went on steadily southward.

Then fate, which had so far dealt hardly with him, sent him Luck, who took him into her care with open arms. All along the coast of Hudson Bay that year deer were plentiful, and the white foxes followed in their wake. For a week he would set his traps and kill cariboo, caching the meat at intervals of one or two days’ travel for the return journey; then he would go on south and do the same, Luck staying faithfully by him. Late in February he was within forty miles of Fort Churchill, and on his last visit to his traps he took a splendid silver-fox—the great trapper’s prize of the North, and rarely seen north of this Post. With his silver-fox, and one hundred and thirty white foxes, he went on, and the trader at Fort Churchill gave him a hearty welcome.

His trading was very practical, for neither the usual gaudy watches and attractive gramophones, nor the luxuries of flour or biscuit or sugar, interested him. He secured instead a new rifle, five hundred cartridges, powder, lead, caps for two years, the best spy-glass in the store, a small tent, wood for a strong but light dog-sled, an axe, knives, five pounds of tea and three boxes of tobacco, matches, needles, screws for the bone-shoeing, a brace and some bits, a small saw, and other small tools, and a few enamel-ware cooking-pots. One luxury he indulged in—a small oil-stove and five gallons of paraffin, the stove being especially for the far-north trade, for there are no seals on the west shore of the bay to give blubber for the lamps, and he knew that when his work was done at Repulse Bay or elsewhere he could not tarry to kill seals, but must travel far and fast.

All this left him with a balance still in hand, and every evening saw him sizing up the many dogs about the Post. Some women’s stuff he got, such as beads, men’s underclothes for summer wear (greatly valued by the women), thimbles, two small silver finger-rings, braid, and some brilliant-coloured cloth; and then he told the trader he wanted to buy a dog-team, and produced for the first time his silver-fox.

Now the trader had eight splendid young dogs in a team belonging to the Post, all from a strain of the famous Labrador blood, powerful and enduring beyond any other breed known in the north. These Panig-pah boldly asked for, offering his silver-fox in payment. Much as the trader valued the dogs, he soon found that unless he let them go he would lose the pelt (and it was worth fifty dogs to the Post—nor were they short of dogs that season), for Panig-pah was smiling but obstinate. ‘All the team or no trade,’ he said. In truth, the trader liked this bold, upstanding, smiling stranger, who knew what he wanted, never cavilled at the price, and had trusted him the night he arrived with his bags of fox-pelts.

So Panig-pah shod his sled with bone, bade farewell to the trader, and started on his long journey northwards, the first lap of which to Repulse Bay was five hundred miles as the crow flies. It was the month of the Young Sun [March], more than a year since he had lain in the igloo at Repulse Bay, a sick man left there to starve to death. Of his old team he had kept three, and the eleven dogs and lightly-loaded sled made the dry, powdery snow fly, and the miles slipped swiftly by when they reached the treeless shores and sped over the hard, smooth ground-ice of Hudson Bay. The long, flat beach, which floods and freezes daily with the tides in the autumn, soon becomes too high for the water to overrun, and a smooth, unbroken level road lies before the traveller for some hundreds of miles.

At Neville Bay, one hundred and seventy miles from the Post, the shore was left, and he travelled through a labyrinth of islands to Ranken Bay and Chesterfield Inlet. There had been food left under the stones at different points along the shore, and the dogs gambolled and played as they swung on and forward, for the weather was cold and calm—ideal travelling conditions in the Arctic. Some days of gales there were, when Panig-pah had to lie up in the igloo, the world beyond its inner circle being a blinding, smothering fog of flying snow; the dogs, sheltered in the snow-porch, curled up and resting. No low temperatures daunt an Eskimo, no matter how far below zero they may be, provided there is no wind, or at least no head-wind, to accompany them.

The man killed only one bear on the journey to Chesterfield Inlet, and this for the sake of the fresh, warm meat for the dogs. Four more bears he saw, and could easily have run down with his powerful dog-team and killed, but he left them unharmed, though the whale-ships at Marble Island would have eagerly traded for them. Green bear-skins are heavy, yet it speaks volumes for his stern tenacity of purpose that he, a hunter to the core in every instinct, now held his hand from the Arctic’s noblest game animal.

Near Chesterfield Inlet he had gradually loaded his sled with the previously killed and frozen meat for the journey overland, and avoiding Marble Island and the whale-ships there, he steered like a homing pigeon for Wager Inlet. Once on the well-known route between the two places—as yet, he observed, untravelled that winter—he urged his team to their utmost from daylight till dark, and advanced as if in an enemy’s country, his rifle handy, and his keen eyes looking forward from every rise in the land he was crossing. If he met Ak-kaan or his brothers, he must kill or be killed.

Once more Luck gave him her generous hand. But one sleep from Wager Inlet he killed a large bear, and camped to feed and rest his dogs. Towards evening he saw a sled coming south, and his spy-glass soon told him it was old Kar-gun and his wife, two of the party at last winter’s starving camp. Great was their astonishment to see Panig-pah, who, before asking any questions, told them of his journey to the Nechilling land, and later to Fort Churchill. Then Kar-gun spoke, and told how the Portuguese half-breed had taken Sud-lu to wife, watching his listener narrowly the while; but the man’s face betrayed no sign, for he had expected this. He heard how the party were camped on Wager Inlet, and that there had been no starvation; but when Kar-gun said that Ak-kaan had gone with his wife alone to Repulse Bay, Panig-pah stooped down to cut some meat, lest the joy might show in his face.

Kar-gun left next morning, generously supplied with bear-meat, and Panig-pah gave him the two bear-skins to trade, so he said, though he knew he would never see the trade now. ‘Wife,’ said the old man thoughtfully when they were under way, ‘all the whale-ships at Marble Island have not enough trade goods to make me change places with Ak-kaan.’ For Kar-gun knew the law of the North—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

Panig-pah swung westward when the other sled was out of sight, and crossed Wager Inlet far above where the party were camped; then he headed swiftly for Repulse Bay.

Little Sud-lu sat weeping silently in the igloo, her baby, now over a year old, playing naked on the deer-skins beside her. This morning Ak-kaan had again beaten her, and her back was livid with bruises from the heavy whip-handle, but she had made no sound at the time. Long ago she had sworn secretly to herself she would bear no child to Ak-kaan, and now he began to make this another excuse for ill-using her. The smiling, pretty girl of a year and a half ago had vanished, and in her place sat a thin-faced, sorrowful-looking little woman, a world of grief in her dark eyes. The man had gone to fetch in some deer-meat killed the day before, and would not be back for some hours. Suddenly she heard the little wooden door of the snow-porch open and shut, and she wondered dully what Ak-kaan had forgotten, and if he would beat her again for it. She looked down at the low entrance to the igloo, and saw the face of Panig-pah!

Always at the back of little Sud-lu’s mind had been the dim hope that Panig-pah was not dead; his spirit had come to her so often in her dreams, had so often held her in his arms and smiled at their boy and called her by the old endearing name ‘Anana-ka’ [little mother], this unspoken, secret hope had never left her. To see the dead in sleep presages evil and terrifies an Eskimo; but she had never felt any terror, so she faintly hoped he might be alive, after all. It was but a slender reed to lean on, and sometimes she wondered, in her simple heathen way, if she and her boy were going to die, so that their spirits might join Panig-pah’s in some happy hunting-ground, if he were in truth dead. Of late she had hoped this would be so.

The baby looked up from the deer-skin rugs and held out its little arms with joy, crying ‘Adada, adada,’ that world-wide word for fatherhood which the very young give to all men. And the next second little Sud-lu was in Panig-pah’s arms, and he was pressing his nose to hers—the Innuit kiss—again and again, holding her close to him in a passion of love and joy.

Presently she outlined simply and briefly all that had taken place. The man took off her deer-skin garment, and saw the blue livid bruises, and his eyes narrowed as he gazed. ‘And the baby?’ he asked abruptly.

‘No, no,’ she replied; ‘he was good always to him; or I think I should have killed him while he slept.’

The man looked at her figure keenly a moment, but she wrinkled her nose—the negative sign—instantly. ‘I told him there would never be one of his; it is for that he beat me to-day,’ she said simply.

‘Come,’ he said, ‘put on your warmest deer-skins, and bring your own things and the baby—our boy. We have far to go presently.’

Baby-Hood.

They walked to the ridge behind which Panig-pah had built an igloo, and that morning had fed his dogs generously to keep them quiet. His only fear had been lest the wind should betray his presence to the other’s dogs, for he had been watching the igloo through the spy-glass since daylight, till he saw the man leave and pass west out of sight. All had come about as he had planned, and the rest was easy. He had brought blubber from the other igloo, and he told Sud-lu to light the blubber-lamp and wait there till he came back. Then he tethered his dogs securely. He cut the long dog-whip lash of bearded sealskin about two feet from the handle, where to its lashing it was thick, double, and plaited together—a more terrible instrument than the Russian knout. With this in his hand, and his rifle on his arm, he returned to the empty igloo on the shore.

Ak-kaan came back before sundown in a better temper; he had shot more deer and seen a large herd, and plenty of food on hand and in prospect always spells happiness to an Eskimo; also, he had taken four foxes in his traps, and this meant tobacco and other trade luxuries later, when the bag of fox-skins should be full. He called to Sud-lu to come out and unharness the dogs, and getting no reply, again called, but no one answered. Ak-kaan looked up, and saw the faint wreath of steam rising through the ventilation-hole of the igloo, and knew the blubber-lamp was alight and she must be inside. His face darkened, and with a scowl he reached for his heavy-handled dog-whip and entered the porch. He would teach her to come when he called, he said to himself, and dropping on his knees, crawled into the igloo. A sinewy arm closed round his neck, and he was flung on the sleeping-bench, choked, and tied hand and foot with stout sealskin thongs before he realised who his big assailant was. Then he saw Panig-pah’s face looking into his.

The Portuguese half-breed was no coward, but he was helpless, and he knew the law of the North, and instantly divined that justice would be meted out to him. ‘The knife is there,’ he indicated sullenly, and threw back his head defiantly for the blow to drive at his heart. But the other shook his head. ‘Not thus shall I do it,’ he said gravely, and reaching for the whip, he ripped open the back of the man’s deer-skin clothes as he spoke. Then, handling him as easily as a child, in spite of his desperate struggles, Panig-pah began to flog his enemy with the thick plaited lash. Soon livid wheals rose on the bare flesh and the blood spurted, but he continued methodically and without haste, branding the half-breed’s back with marks which time would never efface, till at last his victim fainted. Then he ceased, and turning him over on his back, slit the lobes of his nose as an indelible and disgraceful mark, cut his thongs, and waited for him to recover consciousness.

Presently the wretched man sat up, and before he spoke Panig-pah stitched the ripped deer-skin garments together over the blood-stained back. Then, taking a deer-skin blanket and some deer-skins, his rifle and the knives in the igloo, he curtly told the half-breed to follow him. Outside the igloo he smashed Ak-kaan’s rifle and bent the barrel; broke his seal-spear, spy-glass, and everything which might be of use to him, except his sled; lashed on some deer-meat and the blanket-skins and a snow-knife, and pointed south. ‘Had you treated my child as you have treated Sud-lu,’ he said slowly, ‘I would have broken your arms and legs and left you here to freeze to death; but you have been kind to the boy. Only for this have I spared you. Go back to Wager Inlet and tell the Innuits Panig-pah has dealt out the Law to you—but more mercifully than you deserve.’

The Portuguese half-breed turned his blood-smeared face towards him. ‘You are a fool,’ he said thickly. ‘I and my brothers will come and hunt you down to a dog’s death.’

Panig-pah laughed—an idea suddenly struck him as humorous. Perhaps he could send these half-breed murderers on a fool’s trip. ‘Pah!’ he said; ‘what do you know of the Nechilling country and the land where the sun goes down? Come out there and the foxes will pick your bones. Now, get you gone, lest I change my mind.’ And Panig-pah stood watching as the other’s sled slowly disappeared to the south.

Little Sud-lu asked no questions when her man rejoined her, but she was trembling when he took her into his strong arms. She had obediently waited in the igloo, unable to eat all day, for suddenly the idea had seized her it was only a dream after all. ‘Think no more of him; the past is only a dream,’ said Panig-pah, divining her unspoken thought; and then, with her hand in his, he told her in part where he would go. ‘It will be amongst strange Innuits and over far lands. Are you afraid, little mother?’

She blushed quickly at the old endearing name, and then wrinkled her little nose as a negative. ‘I am afraid of nothing now,’ she answered softly. ‘You are my man; where you go I will go too, and we will make those Innuits our Innuits.’

Thus, divided by the centuries and the great seas, once spoke Ruth to Naomi in far-off Palestine.

At daybreak Panig-pah loaded his sled, taking all the deer-meat he could carry. He showed Sud-lu his oil-stove—a wonderful contrivance to her—and his paraffin. They need not trouble about blubber, and the heavy stone lamp could be left behind. It would be a week before any one came from the south, and even if they found his trail, he did not fear pursuit: there was no dog-team in the country equal to his. Spring was on the way, and in another moon the land would be poor travelling. Once across it, between Repulse Bay and Fox Channel, the sea-ice northwards would be smooth and good going. So they drove steadily north, getting a few cariboo on the way, though often the dogs were hungry; but by the time they reached Cape Penrhyn, on Fox Channel, half the journey to Iglu-liut was over, and little Sud-lu’s rosy cheeks and merry smiles were returning fast.

On the sea-ice at Cape Penrhyn seals were now basking in the sun, and, with food in plenty from day to day, the well-fed dogs made the miles spin quickly by, with the lightened sled behind them. When Panig-pah arrived at Iglu-liut, the travellers received a warm welcome from the Innuits, many of whom he knew; but after a few days’ rest, he found a party going to summer at the north of Fox Channel, and joined them. Not even to Sud-lu had Panig-pah told his final destination, and when they arrived at Murray Maxwell Inlet, on the north side of Fox Channel, he parted from the other Innuits, going east along the coast, with Sud-lu and the baby on his dog-sled. As a blind, he had asked many questions as to the route to Ponds Inlet, four hundred miles farther north; if he did not go to Iglu-liut, he would go there, he said. In a bay in the north-east corner of Fox Channel he pitched his tent for the summer, and with a kayak which he had traded from his friends, he soon had seals in plenty for footwear and summer clothing, finding plenty of cariboo a day inland to provide winter wear for use later.

‘Hi-ya, hi, hi, hi-ya, hi, hi-ya hi, hi, ho, ho, ho,’ sang little Sud-lu, as she sat in the sun before the tent: a plaintive-sounding song, although the singer was singing from pure happiness. Sud-lu was perhaps the happiest Innuit girl in the wide Arctic. She gave not a thought to the long journey her man now told her was ahead of her, down the unknown coast; still less did she care that, save for her man and her boy, there was not a human being within a hundred miles of her. The sun shone brightly and the snow-buntings piped their loudest. A seal would put up his head in the smooth, shining water of the bay, look unblinkingly at the white tent, and suddenly dive with a splash. White whales were blowing off-shore, and overhead red-throated divers passed back and forth with fish in their bills for the young nestlings in the little lakes near by. Burgomaster gulls sailed past in stately flight, and terns and kittiwakes screamed and wheeled and dived to the water for feed for their little speckled chickens hiding amongst the pebbles along the shore.

Little Sud-lu sang on, watching her boy rolling about at her feet, and the fat, lazy dogs stretched out round about her. Her man would be back to-night with some deer-meat and a load of skins for winter wear and blankets. All was well with Sud-lu’s world that bright August day, as she worked on at the sealskin soon to be made into footwear. Little beads of sweat stood out on her forehead and her sturdy back, for she was stripped to the waist, her brown face and neck contrasting oddly with the paler skin below. The spare rifle stood at the tent door, and she could use it well enough if a loafing bear came along to see what he could pick up. Little Sud-lu was of the stuff to breed brave men; she did not know what fear—for herself—was. As to the journey ahead—pah! was not her man a king of hunters? All would be well with them wherever they went.

Presently Panig-pah came over the rise behind the tent, five dogs with pack-loads of meat and the man with a load of deer-skins on his back. These were laid, hair down, in the sun, with stones on them to keep them from curling or blowing over, and the family then went inside the warm tent, where soon all three were sitting naked and as unashamed as our first parents in the Garden—the adults eating raw tit-bits of cariboo-meat and cracking the bones for the marrow; the baby toddling and tumbling about on the deer-skins; Sud-lu laughing and chattering like the happy child she in truth was.

Sud-lu was blossoming before her man’s very eyes, so it seemed, growing rosier and plumper and more desirable every day, and a tiny chill of fear crossed his mind lest his luck, which had for so long and so wonderfully befriended him, might some day desert him again on the long journey ahead.

Came autumn and the big winds from the north, and as soon as the ice along the shore had set they started, the dogs in good fettle, with a big load of meat on the sled. In February they reached the big river by easy stages, Panig-pah and the dogs lean and hard, little Sud-lu rosy and happy. Here they camped for a month, getting seals and resting the dogs; and twice Sud-lu was left alone with the old rifle and two dogs to guard against a prowling bear, while Panig-pah made long journeys up the river, placing seal-meat ahead for the final trip to the big lake. When he returned the second time, Sud-lu proudly showed him a large bear-skin, the owner of which she had shot.

The Younger Generation.

The kayak was left behind, and when the days began to lengthen out they started up the river. But the crossing of Lake Nechilling was a hard task. The snow became soft and heavy; five of the faithful dogs died; and though some young puppies helped to take their place, several of them had to be killed for food later, for no deer had been seen since leaving the sea. For the first time since Panig-pah left Fort Churchill his stout heart failed him, and he feared Luck had let go his hand on this, the last lap of the journey. He was in a strange country, of unknown food resources, and the grim phantom of starvation loomed near and terribly real to him; it is the only thing a brave Eskimo knows which he really fears. But little Sud-lu would have none of it; laughed at his fears; laughed at hunger; saved scraps for the baby; and sang as merrily as if it were summer-time and the cooking-pots were full, till the man took courage again from the courage of his indomitable little partner. At last, amid the labyrinth of islands at the eastern side of the lake, they saw from a hill the mainland, and, best of all, a large herd of cariboo quietly grazing there. Sud-lu pressed the baby’s small nose to hers many times, and whispered to it there would be milk in plenty soon, as the man urged the tired, famished dogs forward.

Here Panig-pah, even as he had planned so long ago, spent the summer, for he knew the Innuits from Cumberland Gulf often came there for deer-skins. That night little Sud-lu pinched her man’s ear when they were turned in under the warm deer-skin blanket, and told him that when the birds had gone south there would be another added to their little party—‘a girl,’ she said confidently, ‘and the best hunter of the Innuits shall be her man;’ thus, child-like, lightly leaping the coming years.

Summer came, and with it the Innuits, bringing a whale-boat to use on the lake. They welcomed the big man and his gallant little wife, and in autumn took them down to the sea and over the straits to their settlement.

. . . . . .

Little Sud-lu sat between the thwarts, dressed in her carefully kept, clean summer deer-skin clothes, beaded, fringed with beads and deer-teeth, and decorated with bright scarlet cloth. Peeping out of the brilliantly beaded hood on her back was a tiny baby’s face, and opposite her, gravely watching it, sat her sturdy three-year-old son, with her big, kind-faced husband beside him, pulling at the oar.

. . . . . .

Long afterwards Panig-pah got word from Repulse Bay (by a whaling-ship which had wintered there the previous year, and come now from Ponds Bay) that Ak-kaan’s two brothers had gone to the Nechilling country, and one had died there; and a year later Ak-kaan and his brother, having met some Iglu-liut folk, had started for Ponds Bay. They had reached there, to find the Innuits starving, and in a fracas, originating from their denial of any knowledge of Panig-pah, one of the Portuguese half-breeds had stabbed a man. The Innuits, angry at these strangers’ violence and the loss of a hunter so sorely needed, had killed them both in their igloos, and given their women and children out amongst the tribe.

Oo-tooki-took had come to my house for the usual smoke—being temporarily out of tobacco himself—and, apropos of his neighbour’s very troublesome child, I had given him a crude description of a white child’s training, and the evil results of neglect.

The old man nodded sagely, and remarked it was the same with Innuits, unconsciously quoting the prophet’s dictum about training a child in the way he should go.

‘See O-parto,’ he said; ‘O-kito was his father, and if he had not taught his son when he was very young, both O-parto and Alook-ee, his wife, would have starved to death the winter after their parents were killed.’

‘Tell me the story,’ I demanded, as I pushed my tobacco-box over for him to fill his pipe, and took up my notebook. Oo-tooki-took’s stories were always well told, and the gaps easy to fill in, given the technical knowledge of Innuit life.

O-kito and his wife were a middle-aged couple, who, childless themselves, had always adopted children. Their present family consisted of O-parto, a lad of thirteen, and Alook-ee, a girl of twelve. The children were not related. Alook-ee, as a small baby, had been taken from her dying mother’s hood by O-kito’s wife, as capable a woman as he was a good hunter, and the boy had been adopted when he was about five years old.

With a party of Iglu-liut Eskimo, O-kito had been left at Southampton Island by a whale-ship, and towards spring he had gone with his family to the south-eastern end of the island for seals at the floe-edge, the edge of the landfast ice. It was late in March. O-kito built his igloo off-shore—always considered a safe proceeding till late in May; but a north-west gale of great violence came away at the time of the March spring-tides, and though he had instantly loaded the dog-sled and started for shore, he was too late, and found himself adrift with his family on the floe.

O-kito believed they must certainly perish, for, so far as he knew, they were blowing out into the widest part of Hudson Strait; but the wind suddenly shifted to the north, brought down an immense ice-pack from Fox Channel, and the whole drove on to Salisbury Island, where it was crushed into fantastic ridges and masses before passing on.

The party of four made the land—by some miracle of luck, surely—an island about forty miles long by eighteen wide, uninhabited, and far from the track of whalers. Game, however, there was in plenty—deer and hares, and at seasons many polar bears, and seals and walrus in the bays. Things might have been worse, and although O-kito had only one hundred and twenty rounds of ammunition and some powder, lead, and caps, he had two rifles, and with O-parto was able to explore the island thoroughly before the snow went, leaving a couple of dogs and the spare rifle with his wife and Alook-ee as a protection against a prowling bear.

He found old stone igloos—remains of a now extinct tribe—at the south-east end of the island, and naturally at the best bay for seals; also, he found a large lake, and was sure salmon came there from the sea every autumn. The boy always accompanied O-kito, who, from habit and inclination, explained what he would do under varying conditions—educated the lad, in fact, as he had done from the start.

In late summer they were all camped some six miles inland at the fork of a river, getting deer for winter clothing, and leaving the meat under stones for food later on. O-kito and his wife walked up one of the branches of the river, where the sides were very narrow and precipitous, to fetch down some near-by meat. Fortunately it was so close that he did not take his rifle. As they passed the gulch a slide of rock suddenly descended, killing them both instantly. The children ran out of the tent in time to witness the catastrophe. The boy was then just fourteen, the girl thirteen years old, two small bits of humanity to face the bitter Arctic winter alone.

After the first week of despair and grief, the boy quickly realised that their lives depended solely on his puny strength and resource; he even administered a small beating to Alook-ee—the first and last—to arouse her from her terror-stricken grief. His first thought was the old stone igloos, about ten miles south of their camp, for a safe refuge must be found for his little companion when he was away getting food. So there the children went, taking as heavy loads as their strength permitted, and packing the seven oldest dogs as well. Three journeys they made, returning hand-in-hand, the boy carrying the rifle, the girl the knife and the cartridge-bag. On each journey the dogs carried loads of thirty to fifty pounds apiece, and soon a small store of food had been placed amongst the rocks near the old stone igloos.

The rebuilding taxed O-parto’s strength and resource to the utmost, but, by using the draught-power of the dogs, heavy whale jaw-bones were dragged into position for rafters, and covered closely with flat stones and moist earth, leaving a hole, two feet square, to the south for the ice-window later. The old tunnel entrance, about twenty feet long, had to be re-excavated with a cariboo-horn shovel, and covered with stones and earth. This passage was too small and twisting to admit a bear, and when the roof of the tunnel and the igloo were frozen and snow-covered, both were quite unbreakable, notwithstanding bruin’s gigantic strength.

The stone lamp, the sled, and other camp equipment were brought over; but before returning the children went to the river-mouth, and the boy found, to his delight, that O-kito’s surmise had been correct, for salmon were running up it on every tide. Half a mile up he found a suitable place, and made a salmon-trap by placing two rows of stones across, about one hundred yards apart, at a shallow place, leaving in the lower row a narrow passage for entrance, on both sides of which a pile of stones was placed, to fill the gap in quickly. When all was ready he waited three days, then filled in the gap, thereby imprisoning a couple of hundred good-sized salmon, most of which, after great exertion and wading about in the cold water, he got ashore. He had no salmon-spear, and the task was exhausting for a boy of his age. The fish were all buried under stones, to be fetched in the winter. The children slept on skins of deer the boy had shot during his labours on the salmon-trap, and lived on the—generally uncooked—meat or on fish.

The boy shot his first large bear at this time, returning from a short deer-hunt to find the dogs (which had been left to take care of Alook-ee) baying a great he-bear, while the terrified girl crouched behind a rock. To shoot a bear in the head with a 44.40 rifle under these conditions is not easy, and O-parto was a proud boy that night as he consoled his terrified little companion, but made light of his deed when they turned in under the deer-skins. Best of all, the bear had a good amount of blubber under the fine white skin, and the dogs dragged it and the hide back to the stone igloo. At last they had light inside at night. The meat was cut up and carried away by the dogs, to swell the food-pile for winter. Food for their own comparatively small wants gave the boy no uneasiness, but in winter the dogs required a great deal, he knew, and some of these he must keep alive. Matches he had none, but the primitive method of obtaining fire from two pieces of wood with a twirling bowstring was known to him, and now he was able to dry thoroughly some moss and use O-kito’s flint and steel.

He had twelve dogs, five of which were half-grown puppies. These were more than he could hope to feed later on, so he hung three of the old dogs and two puppies, and skinned them. As soon as the ice-window was able to be cut and frozen in place, the children moved into their new abode, just before the first great storms came howling down from the north. A stone igloo, once snow-covered, and with a blubber-lamp going brightly, is a warm building. On the sleeping-bench immediately opposite the door were spread the deer-skins, and some of the late summer skins O-kito’s wife had already worked clean and soft, and sewn into a blanket.

Thirteen-year-old Alook-ee began to enter on the woman’s work with zest; grief does not last long with the young. As soon as the snow was fit for sleighing, the boy made daily journeys to the fish-cache, and later to where the summer-killed meat was buried, until it was all hauled down to the igloo and buried under the rocks near by. He built a small igloo near the living-place as a storehouse for his dog-harness, seal-lines, and meat for immediate needs. In his absence Alook-ee was enjoined never to leave the igloo, and the wisdom of this precaution was apparent when a bear visited the camp, walked over and pawed at the frozen roof, bending the bone rafters under his great weight, while the poor girl shivered with fear inside. This incident gave her confidence, however, since she found she was quite safe, the tunnel being too small to admit the big visitor.

Blubber and dog-food were the two perplexing problems, for O-parto knew that without dogs a bear would sooner or later get him, stories being common enough of men being charged and killed by a bear they had failed to stop if no dogs were at hand to attack and divert him.

All that has so far been related of the boy’s work may sound simple, but it was really a gigantic task for his strength, carried out, too, against time and the menace of fast approaching winter. When the ice set on the bay, every day the weather was good the boy was away after seals. He would drive the dog-sled till the team winded a seal-hole. These breathing-holes for seals are covered with a thin cap of snow, in which the hunter first makes a very small hole, to see if the water is frozen or not, and thereby tell if it has been lately used. The dog-team lie down a short distance away, and the hunter takes his stand on a small mat, awaiting the faint sound of the seal when it returns to the hole for breath. He must never move his feet when once he has taken his stand, and O-parto, as he had often seen O-kito do, would tie his knees together to keep them from shaking in the bitter cold, if the wait was a long one.

O-parto used the harpoon in preference to the rifle, to save cartridges, for, old beyond his age now, he knew years might elapse before a vessel came to the island, and every cartridge was of importance. If the seal was a large one, he would quickly withdraw the lance—at the end of which is the detachable harpoon—and sticking it into the hard snow at an angle, take a turn round it with the seal-line close to the snow. A grown man can hold a walrus in the same manner. When the seal came at last to the hole again for breath, it was killed with the lance, and the hole enlarged to enable the dogs to haul it out onto the ice at the end of the sled. Then the young hunter raced away for home, to skin and cut up the seal before it froze. It was always a very heavy task for the two of them to drag a large seal through the low tunnel into the igloo to thaw it out.

See, then, our young castaways, sitting in the warm igloo—for blubber happens to be plentiful—on the soft deer-skins; their clothes are stripped off, and the boy’s mitts and footwear are drying on the rack over the stone lamp. A pot of seal-meat is simmering cheerfully, and the igloo looks cosy and home-like when thoughts fly to the howling norther blowing outside. They plunge a bent wire nail, lashed on the end of a stick—their only fork—into the pot, hook out pieces of meat, which are placed between them on the pot-lid, and with a knife and their fingers soon dispose of them. The boy takes a tin cup and dips it full of the savoury soup, which he noisily drinks, passing the cup—their only one—to the girl. Their little naked bodies and faces shine with sweat, and presently the boy says ‘Ta-ba’ (‘I have had enough’), and flings himself back contentedly on the deer-skins with a deep sigh of satisfaction. A primitive life, but from their view-point by no means an unhappy one.

Alook-ee’s first efforts at making the boy’s clothes were crude; her only patterns were his old ones, and her little fingers were not yet deft at cutting out with the half-moon saddlers’ knife used by all Eskimo women. The skins had to be scraped, too—a long, hard job which the boy undertook—till, after repeated efforts, they were soft and white. The children could not use any of their dead foster-parents’ clothes; these must always be thrown away, or trouble will be sure to come from the angry and offended spirits.

The boy’s clothes consisted of two suits of deer-skin, the under one with the hair next the body, the outer and heavier one with the hair out. The lower garment took the form of short knee-trousers, the upper being a sort of jumper, with hood. Round his head he wore a band of neatly-plaited sinew thread, to keep his long hair from his eyes. His footwear consisted of knee-boots, with the leg of deer-skin or of sealskin, according to the season, and inside this seal ‘slippers’ and—next his skin—long stockings of warm deer-skin. Except for slight changes, the girl’s clothes were now the same. When she became a woman she would wear a different upper garment, with a deep hood and a cunning bulge in the back for her own (or some one else’s) baby to rest in, the baby being kept in place by a belt tightly drawn round the waist.

Occasional trips after deer were made, O-parto never firing at one unless he was sure of a hit; but sealing (as being more saving of cartridges) was his main stand-by in his first winter. He also shot five bears, but only those which were molesting the meat-piles, or had come—as twice happened—down on him when sealing. On these occasions he was compelled to cut the dogs loose, to divert the attack till he could shoot to kill. One bear took six cartridges to finish—a very large and savage old he-bear—and came within an ace of getting O-parto in spite of the dogs’ frantic attacks. He knew that if he perished Alook-ee died also, and remembering this, he avoided all but necessary encounters with bear.

They weathered the first winter—the worst of all they spent on the island—sometimes cold and hungry and short of blubber, yet without a quarrel or, on the boy’s side at least, a cross word; life was too serious a business for them to waste it thus. In May the seals were ‘hauling out’ onto the ice and sleeping in the warm sun, and O-parto stalked them assiduously. The dogs now stayed at the igloo, and little Alook-ee—never very far from the entrance—sat outside, and often watched the hunt. O-parto would crawl patiently on his side, on a piece of bear-skin, imitating a seal the moment his quarry looked up, talking ‘seal talk’ to it till it was satisfied this was only another seal come on a visit. When at last within striking distance the harpoon was skilfully thrown, and the hunter dragged his quarry back from the hole over which it had been sleeping, and despatched it. The boy became so expert at this that he only used his rifle to kill the great bearded seal, which weighs four or five hundred pounds, and whose skin is invaluable for boots, traces, whips, and seal-lines.

O-kito had found a bay on the west side of the island, about fifteen miles from the igloo, with some small rocky islands, a few of which could be reached at low-water. O-kito had intended to go there for walrus, which in summer climb out on the rocks and lie for days basking in the sun. O-parto remembered this, and now he skinned four large seals from the mouth, instead of opening them from the head to the hind-flipper. With care the whole hide, flippers and all, was skinned off without a cut, and with strings of strong sinew rove round the mouth to draw it tight, he had thus four large water-tight bags, which would hold a lot of blubber cut up into small strips.

Early summer had arrived, and the two youngsters went over to the walrus bay, packing on two of the dogs the sealskin bags, a piece of skin tenting for a shelter, and deer-skins to lie on and put over them, but leaving the other dogs behind. By evening of the second day they reached the bay, the strong musky smell and the bellowing and roaring of the great brutes telling them the walrus were there, long before they looked down on the bay over the last ridge near the shore. The largest walrus were asleep and heedless, with the smaller continually fighting for possession of some vantage-point on the rocks till bigger walrus ousted them, pushing them into the water with a pandemonium of bellowing protestation on their part. It was a glad and inspiring sight to an Arctic hunter. The dogs were tied up lest they disturbed the walrus, and the situation was carefully reviewed.

At low-tide a large flat rock could be reached, on which four huge walrus were sleeping; to seaward it sloped steeply to the water, but the top was flat. The boy had often seen O-kito kill walrus with the little 44.40, and had been shown exactly where to shoot to find the small brain. Bidding Alook-ee signal when the tide turned, O-parto went warily out. It must have been a strange sight, the little fourteen-year-old lad attacking these great brutes, any one of which weighed over a ton, their long ivory tusks shining in the sun, their breath coming and going in grunting snores. Closer and closer he crept, keeping always down the wind, till he was near enough to touch the nearest two with his rifle. He fired, and one lay motionless, the others raising their massive heads at the report. Again he fired, and little Alook-ee, watching breathless from the shore, shrieked as she saw a great mass push itself quickly on its powerful flippers at the boy, for a walrus is wonderfully active for a short distance for so clumsy and huge an animal. O-parto sprang away beyond reach, and the two survivors presently turned and plunged bellowing into the water, soon churned to foam by a number of others disturbed from their sunny sleep.

A Man-Child.

For four days, between tides, O-parto cut off in strips the skin and blubber together, and floated them ashore on the incoming tide. Alook-ee removed the blubber, cut it up, and filled the sealskin bags, first placing them in suitable spots to cover with stones. The bags full, strips of meat were packed ashore by the boy and the dogs, and put under rock-piles. Last of all the big ivory tusks were chopped out and laid away. By knowledgeable cutting the boy was able to do all this, working stripped to the waist; but both he and the girl were a mess of blood and blubber when the task was finished. A bath in a pool of warm water on the rocks was shared by the youngsters, and they afterwards rolled in the shining sand till their bodies were once more clean and white.

At last O-parto felt that, if the bears left his store in peace, he now had a stock of blubber to enable him to face another winter with equanimity. He found some driftwood in the bay, the flotsam of a broken whale-boat, and this proved a priceless discovery, for there were some nails in it. Arrows, a new spear-handle, framework for the igloo drying-place, repairs to the sled, a fish-spear, and many other useful things were now within reach. O-kito’s bow of deer-horn and his arrows had, of course, been placed beside his resting-place, but the boy made a lighter bow, and now, with plenty of arrows, he could get ptarmigan, duck, and Arctic hare, the last-mentioned of especial value for its warm fur for winter footwear.

Summer came, and the youngsters walked as far as the north end of the island, the dogs with them. They saw several bears, which the dogs soon drove to the water, for the boy would not waste a cartridge on them; they lived entirely on what was shot with the bow and arrow, the eider-duck being nesting and very tame. Several ships were seen this summer far to the south, but their smoke-signals were unheeded; nor did they greatly care, the whole adventure now becoming enjoyable. The grim spectre of starvation, which had haunted O-parto the previous autumn, was no longer feared.

Early September found them deer-hunting for winter clothing, and to Alook-ee’s great joy, the boy killed with his bow and arrow six fawns, which she had greatly coveted for their soft, handsome skins. Woman-like, she wanted to make herself the ornamental grown-up upper garment, with its strips of white hair cunningly sewn between the dark, the hood and the ‘skirt’ fringed with dressed leather cut in narrow strips. True, there was only O-parto to see it, but this was incentive enough. Did Eve in the Garden weave her fig-leaves into patterns? one wonders.

The youngsters went to the salmon-river, and the boy, sturdier than the previous year, and now equipped with a well-made salmon-spear, the curved outer prongs of springy deer-horn, with nails at the lower ends for barbs, was able to get ashore some four or five hundred salmon, and the problem of dog-feed for the coming winter was nearly solved.

The igloo, enlarged inside and more comfortable, was re-roofed, and on the first snow the bags of walrus-blubber were hauled home, and also several loads of now high-smelling but valuable meat for dog-feed. The priceless blubber-bags were put safely into the igloo, through the window-hole, and stowed away in a stone larder which had been added. The meat—salmon and summer-killed deer-flesh—was all hauled to the igloo, and put under stones near by. Thus the young pair commenced their second winter.

I will now bring the story to the fourth winter our castaways spent alone on the island. Let us have a look at them as they sit in the warm, well-lighted igloo.

Father Time seems to have realised their urgent need, and it is a young man and woman we now see. O-parto is stripped naked, working hard at a deer-skin to prepare it for sewing into clothes. Lithe and active, the muscles of his arms and back are rippling and shining with sweat as he works; he has the strength of a man now, and his dark eyes show self-reliance, confidence, and thought. Whatever he does, he puts all his energies into the task, and all his mind onto how it may most efficiently be done. Not a man to scamp his work, this, or half-do it. Presently he finishes, dashes the sweat from his forehead, and flings himself back on the soft deer-skins with his naked arm behind his head and his legs crossed, a fine subject of primitive life for a sculptor, for he is of beautifully balanced proportions, hard, but smooth and graceful. He is going for some deer-meat to-morrow, and Alook-ee asks to come too, but he says ‘No.’ The load will be too heavy, and the sleighing is bad, so it is better he goes alone. She acquiesces contentedly, and continues her sewing. This man is evidently master in his own house, but the collar does not gall.

Alook-ee sits on her feet, which are crossed, with her legs tucked under her—no white man or woman could possibly get into this posture, much less remain so for hours. If the boy has grown, the change in her is even more startling; nothing is left of the weeping, terrified child of four years ago. Like her companion, she is also unclad, for the igloo is warm. Judged by civilised standards she may not be pretty, but her brown eyes are bright and smiling, her cheeks rosy, and her face a happy, contented one as she hums a little song of about three notes in plaintive thirds and fifths while she sews. Her head is covered with a profusion of coal-black, fine hair, and is well-set on her shoulders; and her well-developed, ample breasts give a promise of generous motherhood for the future. Her hands are small and beautifully formed, and she plies her needle skilfully, but very carefully, for the stock of needles is low now, and she cannot afford to break one.

Presently Alook-ee puts her work on one side and unplaits her hair, which is done up in three plaited rolls, one at the back, the others at each side of her head. With a much-worn comb she combs it carefully, kneeling upright to do so, and the fine silky hair falls in a dark cascade over her bare shoulders to below her waist. Replaiting it and tying it up, she slips on her footwear, and steps off the bench to cut up some meat from the pile lying behind the stone lamp. The graceful lines of her young figure are startlingly evident, and with O-parto reclining behind her, the pair would make a noble study in the nude for the sculptor or the painter.

The blubber-lamp is trimmed till the ‘wick’ of moss burns brightly for the whole length of the straight edge of the lamp—which is nothing more than a shallow, hemispherical stone dish; the cooking-pot is hung over the flame, and Alook-ee pulls off her footwear and resumes her seat on the deer-skins.

O-parto now begins some work unfamiliar to civilised folk. He has pulled on his under deer-skin ‘shirt,’ and has a piece of sealskin on his right hand like a sailmaker’s palm; in the other he holds a smooth piece of walrus backbone. With a small lump of flint held in the right hand, he presses the edge of it into the bone with the grain, and as he bears down on it heavily, a piece of flint flies off with a faint click. This process is continued till, in about twenty minutes or less, he has a neat flint arrow-head in his hand, shaped, pointed, and ready to be lashed on the shaft of the arrow. So worked Neolithic man thousands of years ago.

Before the ice became thick on the salmon-lake the two went there for salmon, which they obtained with a spear. A walrus tooth, clean and white, was lowered through a hole and jigged up and down. A salmon would come at once to see what the white object was, and be swiftly speared, the two springy curved outer prongs closing over its back, and the barbs holding it. The two young Eskimos, equally skilful, soon had a load of fine salmon ready for the sled.

Seal had been scarce in the bay the previous winter, and O-parto decided to go over to the west side and try for walrus at the young ice—perhaps the most dangerous hunting in the Arctic. From the shore, for about three miles, the ice was snow-covered and thick; and from there to the open water, four miles away, ran the young ice, wet, black-looking, and dangerous to anyone but an Eskimo. The walrus, feeding sometimes close to, sometimes two or three miles from, the solid ice, would push their heads through the young ice for breath, and after a short rest dive again. O-parto had made a walrus harpoon, the head of walrus ivory filed to the proper shape, the point a bit of old saw sharpened to a keen knife-edge. The great risk in this hunting is a sudden gale, which will break up the young ice so quickly that the hunters are drowned before they can reach the solid ice.

On a clear morning O-parto and Alook-ee drove down from the igloo they had built ashore to the edge of the solid ice. The sled was tied there, and O-parto started for where the walrus were feeding, a mile away. His heaviest seal-line—of bearded seal—to which the harpoon-head was attached, was carefully coiled round his neck, the shaft being a separate affair from which the head came away. In his left hand he carried his rifle. Presently a great black head was thrust through the ice near him, and, with his harpoon now ready fitted and grasped in his right hand, he ran swiftly and silently up, and plunged it into the body behind the shoulder. Laying his rifle down, he slipped the coil of seal-line over his head, drove his lance through the tough young ice, and took two turns round it close to the foot, holding the lance sloped back at an angle with the left hand and the line in his right, and bracing his feet against the lance. For a time the strain taxed all his strength, but gradually the huge brute tired, and as it came slowly up for breath O-parto took in the slack deftly, till presently the fierce-looking head and great tusks emerged from the hole with a loud grunting cough. His rifle ready, he aimed at the fatal spot at the back of the skull, fired, and the big walrus was his.

Signalling to Alook-ee to come, he at once started cutting the walrus in the water, a cold and difficult job on such thin ice, but by skilled work he soon had large pieces of skin, blubber, and meat hauled out, which Alook-ee would drag back to the solid ice, O-parto helping as soon as his work was finished. The blubber was at this season two inches or more thick, and meant light and warmth for a long time. They continued this work for a few days, till the lowering clouds over the hill-top told O-parto wind was coming, and he ran, just in time, for the solid ice, leaving half his last kill on the young ice. Ten minutes after the gale struck the young ice was gone, and the dark waters were being lashed into foaming white caps. The result of this hunting-trip gave the young couple blubber for all winter, and ample dog-feed.

A Happy Mother.

But O-parto’s ammunition was at last running low, although he had used bow and arrow—a strong bow now, like dead O-kito’s—as much as possible. This, their fourth winter, landed a large number of very hungry bears on the island, owing probably to prolonged north-west winds driving the ice-pack down, and O-parto shot thirty-five, but it nearly exhausted his slender stock of ammunition, and very often now he thought of Alook-ee, and gazed longingly over the yet ice-bound straits to the south. He had two hundred and fifty fox-skins stretched, dried, and sewn up in waterproof bags, and also seventy-two prime large bear-skins. All these furs, he knew, meant wealth, if only a ship would come to his smoke-signal. On a warm day of early July, O-parto put up a little skin tent near their larger one, working at it in a state of suppressed excitement for one usually so calm and unemotional. That same day Alook-ee entered it, O-parto passing into her a blubber-lamp, deer-skins, and food, and sitting outside all the twilight night till the sun was again high in the heavens, talking to the spirits, and telling them that no law he knew of had been broken, and now Alook-ee—his well-loved playmate and companion Alook-ee—desperately needed their help.

At last there came from the little tent a small, wailing cry, and O-parto, coming close to the side, said softly and eagerly, ‘Oh, Alook-ee, it’s a boy? Say it’s a boy.’

After the prescribed number of days—tribes vary in this—Alook-ee came out of the little tent, a small baby boy in the hood on her back, and drew him forth, naked, and kicking lustily. O-parto gravely pressed his nose against the baby’s tiny button one, and then against the proud young mother’s. The baby’s name, of course, was O-kito, because, without any doubt, O-kito’s spirit had been reborn in him. The pair duly repaired to the resting-place of their kind foster-parents—as they had done every summer—and told them all about it, and their hopes and expectations for the new arrival, leaving little tit-bits of meat for the spirits’ delectation. Maybe O-kito’s kindly spirit was watching over his sturdy, self-reliant son, and the foster-mother’s over Alook-ee. Who knows these things? It is a pleasant fancy at least.

That summer at last came a vessel, which, seeing the smoke-signal, put off a boat for the castaways. It was bound for Fullerton—the tribe’s headquarters—and O-parto gravely asked the captain for a passage there free, if he traded his fur with the station; but he was careful to say nothing about his long stay and his keen anxiety to get away. From which it would appear that O-parto had the makings of a business man, as well as being a notable hunter.

. . . . . .

I have told the story as simply as Oo-tooki-took told it to me, filling in the gaps here and there to complete the picture. I have had to omit very much he told me, as the tale is already over long. And also I have had to omit many frank, quaint, and highly interesting details because—well, they are too Neolithic for this twentieth-century’s refined taste.

It was Ammaroo (the Wolf) who proposed, planned, and successfully led the raid. ‘Every tribe has its fever, every mountain its wolf,’ says the Russian proverb; Ammaroo was the wolf of the Iglu-liut mountains.

Tradition—which is Eskimo history—does not say if Ammaroo was given his singularly appropriate name as a child, or if he achieved it later in life; if the former, his parents made a brilliant choice, for he was a wolf of the most savage and damnable breed. His appearance corresponded extraordinarily accurately with the homo Neanderthalis of Sollas’s Ancient Hunters, a prehistoric race once inhabiting Europe, ‘Pronouncedly simian features,’ ‘low-browed,’ ‘prominent eye ridges,’ ‘head low set on powerful neck muscles,’ ‘of immense strength and generally brutal aspect, yet large brained and a skilled worker’—the description tallies exactly. If Neanderthal man had the suspicion of cannibalism to add to his other unpleasant traits, Ammaroo had one known wife murder and infanticide to his discredit, though, no doubt, his unpleasant forerunner could have boasted similar feats. They seem to have been only a generation apart, instead of 25,000 or 50,000 years. So faithfully has history dealt with Ammaroo that to this day a whispered ‘Hush! Ammaroo will hear you,’ at once quietens a noisy or crying child amongst the Too-noo-ne-muits.

Ammaroo, Oo-ming, and Kito left the Iglu-liut tribe to which they belonged in February. Their objective was Eclipse Sound, the country of the Too-noo-ne-muit tribe, 400 miles to the northward. Ammaroo, by-the-by, if tradition speaks truly, gave his wife a severe beating and left her senseless in the igloo—presumably lest she should forget him—before starting out.

Both Oo-ming and Kito were wifeless, an epidemic having taken their mates. Ammaroo had considered for a long time that he could do with a second wife, but found an insurmountable unwillingness to oblige him on the part of any parents he approached, which was quite understandable, he being what he was. His effort to provide for his wishes in the future by adopting an orphan child had also failed—accidentally. The piece of driftwood with which he had hit her for some childish fault had unluckily broken her skull.

There was nothing left, then, but a raid, and by dint of persuading, threatening, and probably sheer will-force, Oo-ming and Kito were induced to join in one; also, though this is no apology, their need was great, for a wifeless Eskimo is an unhappy and miserable anomaly in the Arctic. Oo-ming and Kito come so little into this story that it is worth recording that their later life is said to have been blameless, and that they treated their victims’ children as kindly as their own. This, as has been admitted, is not much of an excuse, but it is recorded for what it is worth.

It must be remembered this story deals with the days of bows and arrows, long before the whalers and the missionaries and other white men brought firearms and ‘civilisation’ to the inhabitants of the Arctic. Since those halcyon-days when game was plentiful and sickness rare, the sturdy, indomitable little Arctic folk have dwindled to a remnant in their once well-peopled lands.

Northward the three raiders travelled some 400 miles from Iglu-liut, till they espied, and carefully scouted, three igloos on the eastern shore of Eclipse Sound. This proved to be the winter quarters of a small party of Too-noo-ne-muit Eskimo. The brief survey indicated that there were only two men in the party. For the crime they were about to commit they could have found no better conditions.

Notara—it is with him our story is concerned—owed his life to that not uncommon disorder of civilisation, a stomach ache. A flat stone was kept in the o-koosh-ing [the soap-stone kettle or cooking-pot] as a substitute for the hot-water bag of civilisation; and, to enable Notara to reach it more readily, his mother had given him the woman’s usual place—the inside one next the snow wall—opposite the large stone blubber lamp. A few weeks before, Notara’s father had died, and he was now—as in fact he had been for some time—the meat-winner for the family. He was seventeen or eighteen years old, and a youth of great determination and courage—as the sequel will prove. The other inmates of the igloo were a baby, child of Notara’s mother’s old age, and Kudloo, with whom on this eventful night the baby was sleeping.

Kudloo, about fifteen years old, was the adopted child of Notara’s parents, and his playmate, companion, and partner from his childhood. The specific reason of her adoption was as a wife for Notara, adoption for this purpose being a common practice, ethnologists to the contrary. For some time the two had occupied their appointed places in the igloo, and it was her little fingers which had, perhaps rather clumsily, sewn the boots and clothes he wore. ‘Common fame never lies,’ and tradition has a good deal to say about Kudloo, her good looks and merry smile, her gentleness with children and consideration for the old. ‘As Kudloo once said’ is the commencement of many an Eskimo woman’s tale. Tradition also tells—and this is very unusual, for infidelities are lightly regarded by the Eskimo—of the faithfulness to each other of Notara and Kudloo through a long life. When a young couple are demonstratively affectionate to each other, the older women smile and say, ‘Notara and Kudloo have come back.’

A keen wind, the thermometer (had there been one) certainly far below zero, and drifting snow aided the raiders in their work—also the fact that the dogs had all been well fed that night and were in consequence sleeping soundly in the snow porch into which the igloo opens; wakeful dogs are what the raider, man or bear, dreads the most.

Approaching noiselessly in the small hours of the morning, the raiders each selected an igloo, and on a sign given by Ammaroo, each swiftly cut a circular hole in the igloo, or removed the transparent seal-gut serving for a window, and sped an arrow into the body of the sleeper lying farthest from the wall—that is, towards the centre of the semicircular sleeping quarters, invariably the man’s place.

Two facts are important to note. Firstly, if you are murdering an innocent man with whom under other circumstances you would be on friendly terms, you should, if possible, kill him before he can see you, as then his spirit will not know whom to haunt; this made Ammaroo shoot quickly and then retire out of sight. Secondly, as Ammaroo happened, quite by chance, to make the hole in the igloo immediately over the place where Kudloo was sleeping, the curve of the snow wall sheltered her, and Ammaroo failed to see her; this omission was his undoing later on.

It is easy to picture the uproar which ensued—the shrieks of the women and children, the clamouring of the dogs shut in the porch to protect them from prowling wolves, the groans of the victims. The murderers hastily withdrew to a strategic position to enable them to shoot down any overlooked or slightly wounded male who might attempt a sortie; indiscriminate shooting into the igloo would defeat their purpose; a woman with an arrow in her back or stomach was obviously useless to them. In a short time, first from one, then from the other igloos, arose the wail of the women calling on the departed spirits of their mates to return, and the raiders knew they could go and claim their blood-stained prizes in safety.

Notara and Kudloo had sprung up, to see his mother twitching in death with the shaft of an arrow protruding outside the deer-skin blanket; and Notara instantly realised what had happened and why he had escaped. Glancing at the hole in the igloo over Kudloo’s head, he saw a slender chance of life lay in her not having been seen. It was a ‘wife raid’ the wailing from the other igloos told him, and the women, or the younger ones at least, would be safe. But he also knew his life was not worth a second’s purchase; the raiders would eliminate as far as possible any question of personal revenge by husband, son, or brother.

Snatching up his clothes, he whispered to Kudloo to follow him and replace the snow door of the meat-store, a small place opening off the inside of the porch, into which he would crawl. She must then go back to the igloo, replace the snow door, and sit beside the dead woman in the place where he had been sleeping. ‘They will not harm you,’ he assured her, ‘and surely will I come and fetch you back soon—yes, if I have to kill the whole tribe who have stolen you. Tell them,’ he added, ‘your father has just died, and there are only you three in the igloo.’ This bald statement may make Notara’s actions during the raid appear unheroic and pusillanimous, but I think he took the only possible course open to him then; dead he was no good, alive and his day might come.

Now Kudloo knew her party would have been reconnoitred before the attack, and she and the dead woman have been seen outside during the day. Notara’s life hung on the question whether he had been outside the igloo when the raiders were scouting; and as for thirty hours he had not been out, there was a chance. Terrified and trembling with fear and cold, she sat on Notara’s sleeping-place beside the dead woman, and raised the wailing cry for her spirit to return.

A block of snow fell inside the igloo, and the hole framed Ammaroo’s repulsive face. ‘Who is here?’ he demanded roughly, his bow bent to shoot if any resistance was offered. ‘It is I, Ammaroo the strong, who ask,’ he added boastfully. Kudloo held up the crying baby to him. ‘Only we,’ she wept. ‘See what you have done’—and she pulled the blanket off the dead woman’s body.

Ammaroo sprang into the igloo. ‘Get your clothes on,’ he ordered roughly, and, snatching the baby from her arms, looked at Kudloo’s youthful figure and demanded in surprise, ‘Is this yours?’ Speechless with horror, Kudloo pointed to the dead woman, and Ammaroo promptly knocked the unhappy baby’s brains out against the stone lamp.

Now, Kudloo was evidently no ordinary Eskimo girl. Even in these desperate moments she realised that Notara’s life hung in the balance, and she turned fiercely on Ammaroo. ‘To-day,’ she panted, ‘before sundown, a big party of my people will be here, and they will kill you as you have killed those. Ah! why did I tell you?’ And she flung herself weeping on the deer-skins, though not before she received a blow on the mouth from the brute’s heavy hand. But the resourceful lie effected its purpose. Ammaroo sprang outside the igloo and ran over to his two companions with the news. Speed was their only hope; if a large party caught them red-handed they would be surrounded and shot down as mercilessly as they themselves had murdered.

In an incredibly short time the dogs were harnessed to two of the sleds, and captors and captured—two women, Kudloo, and three children—were speeding over the ice of Eclipse Sound, the dogs urged by voice and whip to their utmost efforts. Kudloo had been able to whisper to the other women what she had said, and also that Notara was alive, and they aided by assuring the men it was true a number of their tribe were expected. Kudloo was told that Ammaroo wanted to kill the three small children, but his companions refused, and even dared to threaten the formidable ruffian if he attempted it.

Kito and Oo-ming now disappear from the story, save for one brief episode, pregnant, however, with results.

Notara crept from his hiding-place as the gray dawn began to break. He had overheard what Kudloo had said, and divined the reason; his heart seemed almost to burst when he heard Ammaroo strike her brutally for her reply. That day he buried under stones the bodies of his murdered people. Then he built another igloo and waited. If Kudloo could untie some of his dogs at night he felt sure they would return to him. It is said he was that rather unusual thing for a native, a dog-lover, and that all dogs would work for him and liked him. Afterwards he found this was exactly what Kudloo did do, getting a severe beating for it from Ammaroo when he suspected her.

A few days later Notara harnessed seven of his dogs to the remaining sled and went north-west to find his people and tell the tale. Ever ringing in his ears was the boastful cry—his only clue to the identity of the raiders—‘It is I, Ammaroo the strong.’

Old Issi-gaito shook his head. ‘I know of Ammaroo,’ he said. ‘The Iglu-liuts are afraid of him, but he is a leader amongst them. If he tells them to fight for him, they will. Also,’ he added practically, ‘we have enough women; if we raid the Iglu-liut people and kill some who have had nothing to do with this they will come and fight us. To keep on killing is no good to either of us.’

This timid advice did not suit Notara, who tried in vain to interest some relatives of the murdered men. They admitted frankly they were afraid of Ammaroo, whose reputation was widespread. So the summer and the following winter found Notara still brooding over his revenge, but apparently helpless.

The following spring he seems to have made up his mind, for he travelled far from party to party till he found one going south to hunt deer towards the neutral ground between the northern tribe and the Iglu-liuts; with these he joined himself. August arrived, and it was announced that the party had reached their southernmost camp; they did not want to interfere with the Iglu-liut hunting-grounds. To their surprise Notara said he was going on. He asked them to leave a cache of deer-meat at the camp, and informed them he was going to find Ammaroo and kill him. His dogs were summering with Issi-gaito, though usually a deer hunter on the land in summer takes a few dogs to pack meat and skins for him. The natives seem to have considered it was none of their business, and regarded Notara as a madman. At all events they left him the cache he asked for, which was very useful later.

Notara was a lad of rare courage, but his quest must have looked pretty hopeless. Eskimo history does not deal with such academic details as plans of campaign, but to me there is something fine and heroic in this youngster just setting out with a fixed, healthy determination to find his enemy, and wherever he found him to kill him as best he might. If tradition has nothing to say as to his plans, it recounts, however, pretty fully his actions and the final settlement.

For five or six days Notara travelled south, living on what he could kill from day to day, occasionally a deer, more often a hare, ptarmigan, or even lemming; then came signs he was near the hunting-grounds of another party, for he stalked and killed a deer with an arrow sticking in its hind-quarter. Next day he saw a native skinning a newly-killed deer.

It would be easy to waste ink on the extraordinary coincidence which follows, to comment on its improbability in that vast and uninhabited upland, or even, were I acquainted with psychic lore, to find something occult in it. I will content myself with the historical story almost as I received it in the picturesque and well-told details from which it is extraordinary.

Exchanging greetings with the hunter, Notara announced he was of the Too-noo-ne-ruch-uit tribe (one far to the west of his own). ‘My name is Kito,’ announced the hunter; ‘I and my brother Oo-ming are with Ammaroo. Perhaps you have heard of him from the Too-noo-ne-muits,’ he added hesitatingly, for the two tribes mentioned were more or less related.

‘No,’ lied Notara steadily. ‘I have seen none of the Too-noo-ne-muits for two years. I have never heard of Ammaroo.’

Kito looked relieved. ‘He is a great hunter,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘but some, many even of my people, do not like him. I do not like him much myself,’ he added naïvely.

‘Why do you hunt with him, then?’ asked the other indifferently.

Kito shifted his foot uneasily, and his gaze wandered across the sunlit plain. ‘He is a great hunter and very strong. He told—he asked me to come,’ he replied lamely.

‘It is I, Ammaroo the strong,’ surged through Notara’s brain, and he stooped over the carcass at his feet, ostensibly to cut a piece of meat, in reality to hide the flush which came over his face as Kito spoke.

Notara rose up. ‘I must go back,’ he said evenly. ‘My companions are far away, perhaps two or three sleeps. May I take some meat with me—I am hungry?’

Kito urged him hospitably to help himself, and as he did so Notara asked casually where Kito’s companions were camped.

‘I and my brother are over there,’ was the reply, indicating a low hill a few miles away; ‘but Ammaroo went yesterday one sleep to a lake to the eastward there’—indicating the direction. ‘If he finds plenty of deer he is to send his young wife back to us, and we will join him.’

‘His young wife!’ Notara suddenly choked, and then vigorously spat out the piece of meat he was chewing. The coughing fit over, he was able to turn laughingly to Kito and remark, ‘I swallowed too fast;’ nor did that simple and unsuspicious murderer see anything unusual in his face.

The Arctic Jumper.

Bidding farewell, and with a substantial piece of meat slung on his back, Notara returned steadily northward, nor did he look back till he was sure the rising ground had hidden him from sight. ‘His young wife!’ Had Notara needed a spur to urge him on, Kito had unwittingly supplied it.

It was late the second day when, after infinite caution lest he be seen, Notara spied Ammaroo’s camp beside a long, narrow lake, and hid himself amongst the rocks on the high ground on the opposite side to watch. Soon after sunrise he saw a man leave the camp, and after studying the wind, walk eastward along the lake shore. Notara, from his watching-place, could see deer feeding beyond the long lake, and as soon as the other had left the lake shore and topped the rising ground he too saw them, and Notara watched him sink quietly down and commence his stalk. Exactly what he would do was obvious to the other, himself a skilful deer hunter, and as soon as the ground hid him, Notara descended to the lake and walked leisurely along its sandy shore. He did not even look at the camp across the shining water; the time had not come for that yet. Turning the end of the lake, and taking a long drink before leaving it, Notara came to Ammaroo’s track, and crawling to some admirable cover amongst a mass of rocks, waited patiently.

‘His young wife!’ Notara frowned and muttered to himself, gazing hungrily over the peaceful landscape where the stalker was approaching the unconscious deer.

After some hours’ waiting there was a sudden commotion amongst a band of deer leisurely feeding down the wind, and doubtless Notara paid a hunter’s tribute to the skill which caused five to run off a short distance and then lie down, obviously badly wounded. The successful bow-and-arrow deer hunter was a highly-skilled workman.

The sun was far to the north-west on its summer-time (and therefore visible) journey when Ammaroo had finished and skinned his deer, made a huge load of meat up into one pack in a deer-skin, placed his deadly bow and arrows in the pack, rolled the other four skins into a second pack, and commenced his journey to the camp. A tump-line was across his broad, ape-like forehead, and across his shoulders and chest the other line divided the weight between his back and his massive neck. He plodded steadily on to the rising ground at the lake foot, laboriously climbed it, passed within twenty-five yards of Notara, lying hidden behind the friendly rocks, and proceeded carefully down the steeper descent to the lake.

Forgive a digression. During the war an elderly sergeant-instructor described to me, when on a railway journey, his special work as bayonet instructor to recruits. The stroke he favoured the most he called the ‘kidney punch,’ and he prodded me with a stubby forefinger—hurting me considerably—to show me the exact place, above the hip line and slightly to the rear. ‘Jes’ so far,’ he said, indicating about two inches on his finger, ‘it comes hout easy as easy, but the ’Un is down and hout.’

Notara sprang to his feet, ran noiselessly towards his unsuspecting enemy, and, when five yards from him, planted an arrow drawn to its head in the bow exactly in the spot indicated by my military acquaintance. It was the deadly ‘kidney punch.’

Ammaroo gasped and pitched forward, his pack flinging over his head and rolling to the bottom of the slope. He tried vainly to rise, and suddenly Notara stood before him, bow in hand. Ammaroo gazed at him with bloodshot eyes.

‘I am Notara,’ said he slowly, ‘the son of the woman you killed last year. That arrow in your vitals is for her. What says Ammaroo the strong now?’ Ammaroo made a desperate effort to rise, but the blood gushed from his mouth and he fell back, the sweat pouring from his forehead. ‘That,’ said Notara, ‘is for my mother whom you killed, and for the baby, my brother, whose brains you beat out in my igloo.’ He carefully fitted another arrow in his bow and drew it at his enemy’s heart. ‘This,’ he said slowly, ‘is for Kudloo, and for any hurt or harm or pain you may have given her.’ The bow twanged sharply, and the writhing figure at Notara’s feet lay still.

Notara took up the heavy load of meat, leaving the body where it lay with the arrows still in it, and walked up the sandy lake shore to the camp.

Inside the small deer-skin tent two women sat dully waiting the hunter’s return. Both bore marks of ill-usage, the elder one a black eye, the younger a livid bruise on her cheek. Kudloo was taller and thinner than when she had left Eclipse Sound, nearly two years ago, and a pathetic droop to her mouth effaced the merry smile of a year before.

A step sounded outside, the thud of a load thrown down, and a voice called gently, ‘Kudloo, Kudloo.’ She started to tremble violently, and her eyes filled with tears. The other woman looked up, startled by the strange voice. ‘He is dead,’ whispered Kudloo. ‘It is Notara’s voice, and his spirit is calling me.’ She lifted her head with a gallant gesture and smiled through her tears. ‘Soon now I shall die,’ she said confidently, ‘and I shall be with his spirit, as my dreams have said;’ and she arose and stepped outside the tent and into Notara’s outstretched arms.

It was a rather breathless explanation, for Kudloo, having realised that Ammaroo was dead and Notara was no spirit, but a very real man, could not keep her arms from round his neck, pressing her little nose against his and crying and laughing at the same time. . . . It was Kudloo, his Kudloo; taller, thinner, bruised and tired-looking, but his same playmate and companion still, clear-eyed and courageous as of old.

For a time Notara hardly noticed the other woman, a shrinking, fear-wrought thing, constantly reiterating the question, ‘But are you sure he is dead?’ as if Ammaroo were an immortal.

‘Come,’ said Notara presently. ‘Pack the dogs with all the meat they can carry. It is many days’ walk to our country, and by-and-by Kito will come after us, and I suppose I shall have to kill him too.’

Kudloo negatived this vehemently. ‘Kito hates Ammaroo,’ she said confidently, ‘but he is afraid of him, and so is Oo-ming. They will be glad he is dead. She is glad too,’ Kudloo continued, pointing to the other woman. ‘She will come with us. I shall find her a husband amongst my people who will never beat her, and she is the best worker with a needle of all the Iglu-liuts. Ah!’ she said, smiling at her friend, ‘she has always been good to me when . . . but I have forgotten those bad days already;’ and Notara saw the old smile he knew so well return once more.

‘Yes,’ continued Kudloo demurely, though with a twinkle in her eyes, ‘I too am old enough to be married now, and I want a husband very much’—Notara, dull fellow, started as if he were stung—‘I can sew and dress skins and make a toupik very well indeed now.’ She looked at Notara, then suddenly flung her arms shamelessly round his neck and nestled closely up to him. ‘My man, my man,’ she crooned softly, pressing her tear-stained face to his, ‘forgive my foolish talk—I was only teasing you. Many times I have thought I would kill myself, but always you came to me in my dreams and said you were coming for me, soon coming for me to take me to your igloo amongst our people. . . . So I waited. She knows how I have waited, for I have told her often. Come, oo-man [husband], come; we will start on our journey there now.’

‘So you have been egg-gathering,’ said old Ay-you to me one fine July evening, as I sat in the warm sun beside my trading store on the south side of Bylot Island, Baffin Bay. As he made the remark, the old man produced his pipe, and suggestively knocked out the ashes on the palm of his hand to show it was empty. I passed him my pouch, and he seated himself contentedly beside me.

It was a rare and wonderful Arctic summer evening, the air indescribably clear and still, warm and exhilarating.

Half-naked children romped and raced happily round the near-by toupiks [tents], the fat, stretched-out dogs too lazy to move out of their way. A few white and fleecy clouds hung like delicate skeins of wool in the intensely blue sky, and the brilliant sun, high in the west at this hour (as it would be in the north at midnight), gleamed on the white glaciers and snow-covered mountains of Northern Baffin Land across the inlet, and the yet frozen sea in the foreground.

On the ice, numerous black objects here and there denoted seals basking in the warm sunshine. From the rocky ledge behind the house snow-buntings rose, on their short, lark-like flight, trilling a musical little song to their mates nesting under a boulder or in a cranny below.

The distant report of a rifle far out on the ice sent the keen-eyed children scampering to a vantage-point to see if it announced the return of a sled and hunter from the floe-edge, five miles away. Soon a rosy-cheeked little lass, five or six years of age, appeared half-shyly round the corner of the house, wearing nothing but her knee-high native kanicks [footwear] and an engaging smile, and uttered in Eskimo the word ‘telescope’—knowing I kept an old one for such uses—wrinkling her small nose (the negative sign) at her grandfather’s joking cry of ‘Shame, shame, little one!’ as she accepted the loan. ‘I am not afraid of the white man,’ she called over her shoulder, as she ran back to the shouting group on the hill, for she knew she was by way of being a favourite of mine, children being the only favourites a wise trader in the Arctic will make, to avoid jealousies.

It was the all too brief summer’s day of the Arctic, the Eskimo’s happiest time.

‘Did you climb up to the nesting-places?’ asked Ay-you, with the air of expecting a negative reply.

I admitted I had been foolish enough to do so, and added emphatically, ‘Never again;’ at which Ay-you chuckled.

‘It is a bad place,’ he said thoughtfully; ‘once there was a man——’ and he re-lit his pipe carefully. I knew a story was due.

In truth it was a very bad place to climb. Known on the chart as Cape Graham Moore, its native and (translated) whaler’s name is Loom Head, and tens of thousands of these excellent sea-birds have their nesting-ground there. The bold headland rises from the water over a thousand feet to its summit, the last hundred feet being perpendicular rock. Approaching the headland over the ice or by water, one may climb it at one place by a difficult and dangerous route, the first six hundred feet of which necessitates a fly-like clinging to the rough rock face; a false step after the first hundred feet would mean certain and unpleasant death. At about six hundred feet up, after squeezing through a narrow cleft, a ‘shoulder’ of rocky ground less steep gives better foothold; some three hundred feet of this brings the climber to the perpendicular cliff. The shoulder, cut by a gully sheer to the water, is about a thousand feet long; here on every ledge and jutting rock a few inches wide, and flat enough to hold one, eggs lie in thousands. There are a few depressions along the shoulder where a man could lie down in safety, and one place where a little pool of melted snow-water, thoroughly fouled by the nesting-birds around it, offers a most uninviting drink. The ‘nesting’ arrangements seem to be one bird one egg, the latter laid on the rock without any nest whatever, and how the birds know their own egg amongst the other thousands everywhere about is an ornithological mystery; perhaps they don’t trouble, but are bird communists. The eggs are oval, mottled black and green, and as large as a duck’s egg; both eggs and birds are excellent eating. When disturbed by the egg-gatherer the birds leave the cliff with a noise like thunder, darkening the sun as they pass outwards; they—or others, for there always seem more birds than eggs—return in flocks of twenty to one hundred every few minutes, and settle on the ledges, sometimes within reach if the climber is quick enough.

‘Let’s have the story, Ay-you,’ I said.

‘It was in my father’s time, before there was much white man’s stuff amongst the Innuits, such as rifles, whale-boats, or tobacco. The Innuits were camped at Kar-soon (a hunting spot about fifteen miles from Loom Head), and they were egg hungry. The ice had left the coast very early that year, so the only way to get to the nesting-rocks without a whale-boat or oo-miak [native boat] was from the top. There a strong man could let himself down on an og-juke line [a very strong seal-line] to the shoulder, and another man at the top haul up the eggs in a sealskin bag. Ag-pah (“The Loom”) was a famous climber from boyhood, and one fine day, such as this is, he and another young man named Issi-gaito left to gather eggs. If they were successful, other Innuits were to come the following day and help to bring back the loads to Kar-soon.

‘Climbing to the hill-top, Ag-pah slipped, and in falling said he had hurt his foot and could not go down over the cliff-face on the og-juke line, so Issi-gaito, himself an active climber, took his place. I do not think Ag-pah really hurt himself when he fell; he had no wife, but Issi-gaito had a pretty little wife he had taken less than six months before. Without always meaning to, women sometimes cause many bad things to be done by men, especially when they are young and good to look at.

‘Down the cliff went Issi-gaito on the og-juke line, using his feet to steady himself and keep off the rock face. He soon had a bag full of eggs, but when he climbed with it back to where the line hung, it was lying in a heap at the bottom of the cliff where he stood, and he found the top end had been frayed through with a sharp stone.

‘He saw at once it was Ag-pah’s work, for he had been very careful to lower himself easily and gently down, and a sealskin had been placed under the line where it touched the rock. Instantly Issi-gaito knew why Ag-pah had done this evil thing: it was to steal from him his little wife. He guessed the tale Ag-pah would take back to the camp; how, with the broken line as proof, he would say he had heard Issi-gaito’s body fall, and then roll down into the deep gully you saw there and splash into the sea, for the landing-place from the hill-top—owing to a convenient rock to tie to—was at the head of the gully, and there was only standing-room just there. No one would come near the place for perhaps a year or two, because they would be afraid Issi-gaito’s spirit would be there and harm them.’ Old Ay-you laughed quietly. ‘It was a wicked and a clever way to get rid of a man,’ he remarked; ‘and Issi-gaito had guessed the truth.’

‘Why didn’t Ag-pah cut the line when Issi-gaito was half-way down and kill him at once?’ I asked.

‘That would have been murder,’ replied Ay-you gravely, ‘and Issi-gaito’s spirit would have haunted him.’

Well! some of our theological sophistries are just as thin. I thought of the Spanish Inquisitors, and their requests that the heretics should be killed ‘without the shedding of blood,’ to accomplish which they burned the unfortunates slowly at the stake.

‘Go on,’ I said, after the pipe had been refilled and the interlude of tobacco smoke over.

‘Issi-gaito “took stock.” Six hundred feet below him the ocean swell surged gently against the cliff, and he knew that for a mile on either side the water was a hundred feet deep to the sheer rock foot. It would be four months before the ice made again to permit escape by that road; four or perhaps five months, and by then the winter would be at its coldest time.’ The old man shivered suggestively. ‘I should have cut my wrist here’ (he indicated the vein) ‘and died, but Issi-gaito was a braver man.’

Knowing old Ay-you as I did, I doubted this.

‘The first thing he did was to stretch the og-juke line taut and split it with a small knife; he then made nooses on each line, and started to snare the looms as they returned to the nesting-rocks. One place he left undisturbed, and from here he made a store of fresh eggs daily, for the loom will lay many eggs if they are removed. In a few weeks Issi-gaito had hundreds of loom bodies carefully skinned and stored under some loose stones, and over them, to keep off the sun, he placed the strong, well-feathered skins. Others he split and sun-dried the meat, but it was the skins he needed most; three looms a day would keep him alive, but his greatest risk was freezing to death on those cold, exposed rocks. With a needle of bird bone and the strong leg sinew for thread he made two kouletang [jumpers] with hoods, and two kod-ling [trousers], one of each to be worn with the feathers next the skin. He made stockings, mitts, and three blankets. Other skins were taken off from the bodies without being split up, and were laid down as a sleeping-place in a hollow in the rocks.’

‘And for water?’ I asked.

‘You saw it,’ replied Ay-you. ‘It is still there, the little pool in the rocks. Yes, it was very dirty and smelt, but it was wet,’ and he smiled at his simple joke.

‘When the great autumn storms came Issi-gaito had hard work sometimes not to be blown away, and to keep his meat-store and his bird skins. Long before this all the birds had flown, and he was the only living thing on that lonely cliff face. Then, at last, late in the Dark Month [December], the ice set at the cliff foot, and Issi-gaito was able to leave.

‘Do you remember the little cleft in the rock up which you went before reaching the nesting-places?’

I nodded.

‘In Issi-gaito’s time there was a large rock at the top of that little cleft. When you climbed up it was gone, and you put your arms on each side of the cleft and raised yourself to the top. When the rock was there the climbers would pull themselves up by holding on to a niche on the under side. Issi-gaito moved this heavy rock a little nearer the edge, and put small stones under the hinder side, until it would easily come away if pulled from the niche.

‘It was fifty miles for Issi-gaito to walk before he found any igloos of his people; they say even his own dogs attacked him when he arrived in his bird-skin clothes, so strange did he look.’

I waited while the old man re-lit his pipe, and after a reasonable pause asked, ‘Was there a fight?’

‘No; Issi-gaito went to Ag-pah’s igloo, and greeted him, and all the Innuits came, and there was great rejoicing, and Issi-gaito learnt (as he had foreseen) how Ag-pah heard his body fall down into the water.

‘ “It was a stone,” he explained, “which I fell onto when the line broke.”

‘ “Why did not you shout?” asked someone.

‘ “My breath was all knocked out,” lied Issi-gaito, “and I lay a long time before I could move.” For many hours he told his adventure; how he caught the birds with a noose, how he made his clothing and blankets, and of the terror lest the great gales should blow him bodily into the seething waters dashing against the cliffs below—to die by drowning is the worst of all deaths to an Innuit. He spoke of the bitterly cold winter nights under his small bird-skin blankets, when the powdery snow-drift would find its way inside in spite of all he could do, and how he had no food except the half-rotten bird-meat, and only the snow to eat for drink. An Innuit understands all these things as few white men can do.

‘None of the listeners exclaimed more interestedly than Ag-pah, no one was more sympathetic, and when he gave his place beside the little wife to Issi-gaito, and moved to another igloo, the others thought he did so gladly—except Issi-gaito.

‘Presently the Innuits left them, and when underneath the deer-skin blanket I think Issi-gaito must have looked contentedly round the warm stone igloo hung with deer and seal skins, and watched his little wife as she deftly trimmed the kood-lil [stone lamp] with a small stick, till the flame was steady and clear and shone brightly on her soft, bare shoulders and ruddy cheeks. And the Loom cliff must have seemed a bad dream.

‘He was told, with many nose-pressings and a few happy tears, how glad, how very glad, she was he had returned, and how she liked him much, much better than Ag-pah—all of which he, boy-like, believed, hearing it thus from her own red lips. And Issi-gaito laughed happily, and presently told the little wife—with more nose-pressings—how he liked this warm nest, and the little mate now in his arms far, far better than the loom’s nest away yonder, where—and a lot more such foolishness, for he was very young and very fond of his little wife, and glad to be alive thus after all he had gone through.’

Ay-you sighed sentimentally; he was a born storyteller.

Gossiping.

‘And Ag-pah?’ I asked presently; ‘didn’t Issi-gaito——’

‘No,’ replied Ay-you; ‘Innuits are not like white men. Sometimes they will forgive a great wrong, sometimes they will only seem to do so, waiting chance; Issi-gaito was like this last. Ag-pah? Well, he had nowhere to go to, and I suppose he thought, poor fool, Issi-gaito had forgiven. Listen.’

‘Next spring Issi-gaito and Ag-pah and some more Innuits went on the ice to the nesting-rocks at Loom Head. Issi-gaito was going to climb up for eggs, but the little wife suddenly began crying and clinging to him and begging him not to go up the cliff, and he laughed at her, but gave in to her at once. Then Ag-pah laughed contemptuously and said, ‘See me! No woman shall make me afraid to go up the egg rocks. I will go and gather them; let Issi-gaito stay below;’ and he began to climb up.

‘Issi-gaito took his little wife out a short distance on the ice, not seeming to mind Ag-pah’s contemptuous words, and began to point out to her his old sleeping-place far up on the cliff side, and she called the other people who were standing near the cliff to come and see; and Ag-pah climbed carefully and slowly on, shouting down to them how easy it was. And he put his hand in the niche under the big stone, and it came away, hitting him in the belly, and he cried out very badly, and fell down onto the ice far below, and died at once. And the big stone fell without hurting anyone, for, as I told you, the little wife had called the others out onto the ice before it fell.’

‘Issi-gaito must have told her?’ I ventured.

‘Yes. He was afraid Ag-pah would suspect if he was asked to go up, so Issi-gaito planned it she should make a fuss; and he knew Ag-pah would be afraid to climb up with him, lest an accident should happen, so he pretended to be afraid himself.

‘I think the little wife must have really liked Issi-gaito the best, as she told him she did, or she would have warned Ag-pah, but you cannot tell; in these matters women are not to be trusted.’

I laughed at the old cynic, the story of his married life indicating one of the happiest matings I have ever known. ‘You old humbug,’ I said.

‘Oo-man, oo-man,’ came a shrill cry from the toupiks, and the old man rose. ‘It is my old wife,’ he explained apologetically. ‘Young women think of nothing but love-making at this season, and old women of nothing but food-making. Aie! Aie! and I am an old man now—ah well! It is you whom she will scold if I am keeping her waiting,’ he added, as he pocketed the plug of tobacco I offered.

‘Why not you?’ I jeered.

Ay-you laughed softly. ‘Have you ever heard her scold me?’ he asked; ‘or have you ever heard any Innuit tell you she has been scolding me?’

And when I thought it over, as I watched him depart, I found I never had.

Old Pud-lu came into my place one night with an air of mystery, and asked me to lock the door—my method of announcing ‘Not at home’—as he had something to tell me. I had known the old man a long time, and liked him, even if many years of trading with the whale-ships and intercourse with white men had made him somewhat greedy and cunning. I did as he requested, and asked him what he wanted.

Untying the upper part of his kamik, or long boot, he produced a small parcel carefully tied in sealskin, and opening it, placed before me a piece of quartz as big as a hen’s egg, literally peppered with small nuggets of gold the size of buck-shot. The sample had obviously been broken off, and showed no sign of water action. ‘Is that worth much?’ he queried.

I explained to him that as it was I should give him nothing for it, but if there was plenty more to be found, it might be worth a great deal, and I would pay him well to show me the place. ‘Who else has seen this or knows where you found it?’ I asked.

Old Pud-lu shook his head and laughed. ‘No other Innuit or white man has ever seen this or the place I found it,’ he said, ‘and I know it is that for which white men will give a great trade and will go far to seek; and if they find it, they will come with big ships and much coal and great machinery, and build many houses, and dig it up, and break it so’—he shook the ashes of his pipe into his hand (as a hint that it was empty)—‘and get all the yellow metal away. And it is for this they get a great trade.’

‘Who told you all this?’ I asked, rather astonished.

‘An-goil-len-nu, who died long before you came, spoke of it,’ he said, ‘and he knew the white man’s country, and was wise beyond any Innuit who ever lived.’

‘Well,’ I inquired indifferently, ‘what do you want to do? I will give you nothing for that stone, but if you will show me where you found it I will give you a good trade.’

‘What will you give?’ said the old man.

I thought it over a minute. It might be from a boulder or in place; probably the old rascal would fail to convince me he had ever found it; and equally probably, if he succeeded, it would be in some remote place and impossible to mine, even for ore as rich as this looked. ‘How long will it take us to go there?’ I asked.

‘Ten sleeps,’ was the reply; ‘but we can see it only when the snow has gone and the rivers are running, in the Young Bird month [July] or later. You will have to walk five days on the land.’

‘Can you show me more like this?’ I demanded.

The old man made an expressive gesture of assent. ‘Much more—very, very much more,’ he replied.

It was idle to ask any further questions. Pud-lu would not know whether it was a mining proposition or not, and would not give me any clue as to its whereabouts unless I made a bargain with him. ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

The old man’s eyes gleamed covetously, and he glibly enumerated a long list of things, from a new rifle to an enamel-ware cup, together with plenty of biscuit, coffee, molasses, and tobacco. I knew he had given the matter most careful thought, but, after all, a ten-pound note or so would cover his demands, and the sample as a specimen was worth almost that.

After an hour’s bargaining and a few changes, more for the sake of appearances than for any difference it made to me, we agreed. Pud-lu stipulated nothing should be said to any of the other natives, and he promised to start as soon as the season was far enough advanced. It was well known to the natives that I was prospecting, and there was nothing unusual in my leaving for such a trip down the Baffin Land coast, where I had already made many others. Lest I should incite a gold stampede, I shall name no localities.

We started along the coast in June, and, as Pud-lu had said, it took us ten days’ travel before the sled arrived at the place where we were to leave the coast and journey inland for five sleeps. We had no trouble in feeding the dog-team, seals being in plenty on the ice at this season, and easy to obtain.

Our party consisted of Pud-lu, his old wife, his eighteen-year-old daughter Im-mak-kee, and myself. I wanted to leave the girl behind, but she was a good seal-hunter and sled-driver, and Pud-lu said she must come and take care of the camp in our absence.

An Eskimo has no conception of money. He cannot conceive how or why a certain number of pieces of circular metal should secure a wife or a box of tobacco, and his general conception of white men’s methods is that they obtain all their trade goods for nothing, and then demand in exchange a lot of fur or of ivory (in itself of no value to the Eskimo, by the way). This, perhaps, applies only to the more primitive folk I was amongst, and not to the Eskimo of Hudson Bay or the Labrador coast.

The snow was off the ice, and we found it pleasant travelling in the late June and early July days, pitching our tent on a hummock where the snow was still hard, and making long journeys in the constant daylight, the sled swinging along behind the well-fed dogs over the smooth ice at six or seven miles an hour; Im-mak-kee chattering happily, and cheering the dogs on as they sighted a distant seal, and broke into a gallop, in the vain hope of catching him before he slid down the hole over which he had been sleeping.

It was arranged that the women should remain at the coast, with all but four of the dogs and a spare rifle, when Pud-lu and I made our inland journey. The four dogs were enough for our requirements, and the old man said we should find plenty of deer on the way.

About three miles from the entrance of a fjord we went ashore, and leaving the sled—as the snow was now off the land—we pitched our camp one easy day’s travel inland, Im-mak-kee surprising me by the cheerful ease with which she took a 120-lb. pack on her sturdy back.

We came to the fjord at a point, about fifteen miles from its mouth, where a small river entered. The fjord was clear of ice, this being caused, Pud-lu explained, by a very large river which came in at the head, cutting away the ice early in the summer. With seventy-five feet of net we had brought, we took, at the little river’s mouth on two high-tides, enough salmon to feed us and the dogs for a week. Then, leaving the women well supplied, Pud-lu and I started our trip inland.

It took us a day to reach the head of the fjord, and here a large and turbulent river, from its colour evidently of glacial origin, foamed over the boulders into the sea. For the next two days we walked up a fine valley, its southern slopes green with young grass and dotted with little scarlet, blue, and yellow flowers of brilliant hue. Small herds of deer were feeding along the valley, and with the large patches of white snow in the gullies and the foaming river below, the whole scene was a gay and animated one in the bright sunshine, the high snow-capped mountains making a noble background.

Our pack-dogs felt the heat intensely, panting after us with lolling tongues, and eagerly lapping the water at the many rills running down the hillside. The third day we left the river—to cut a corner, Pud-lu explained—and once on the high tableland, I saw, about forty miles to the north, two fine twin peaks fully five thousand feet high, snow-clad, and gleaming in the sun. Between them was a very large glacier, evidently the source of the river we had followed. It was to this glacier we were going.

Next day we came on the river, tumbling and foaming through a rocky gorge three hundred feet below us; and on the fifth day we camped about ten miles from the glacier, and I obtained my first good view of it. It was fully two miles wide by six or eight deep, and evidently comprised an enormous mass of ice, for it more than half-filled the great valley between the twin peaks. But the foot of the glacier instantly riveted my attention. In its very centre was what looked, from where I stood, like a vast black cavern. This, my binoculars told me, was the face of a cliff, about two hundred feet high by seven hundred to one thousand feet wide. On both sides it disappeared into the glacier, and at its centre a cataract of smoking water proclaimed that here the river had its source. The glacier faced due south, so I at once understood why the river always reached the sea and cut away the ice in the fjord earlier, as Pud-lu had said, than any other.

At the cliff’s base were a few recently fallen enormous masses of ice, and Pud-lu informed me that till last summer this cliff had always been covered by the glacier. He said he and some friends were deer-hunting in the big valley, when they heard a great noise, and later the river had suddenly almost dried up, then came down with a mighty rush, which nearly caught some of the party, and actually swept away a herd of deer feeding near the banks. The other natives had been frightened, and had returned to the fjord; but he was curious to see what had caused this phenomenon, and came up, to find the glacier had broken off from the edge of the cliff, filling the torrent with an immense mass of broken-up ice, and exposing for the first time the cliff, of the existence of which they had never known, though a few bolder natives had been to the foot of the glacier. I forgot to say that Pud-lu explained to me that the glacier had a bad reputation for spirits, owing to the strange noises heard there—the thunder of the hidden waterfall, no doubt—though he did not believe such foolish nonsense; he was a man, and not a child to be frightened by spirit talk. It was in the face of the cliff, Pud-lu said, that he had found the gold.

I could see instantly that as a mining proposition it would be enormously expensive, if possible at all. To work a vein in the cliff would entail the driving of an adit-tunnel at least a thousand feet from the glacier, which was obviously a very active one. The provision of a compressor and other machinery, fuel, supplies, and skilled labour would run into hundreds of thousands before anything could be prospected to justify a stamp-mill.

We pushed on to see the gold, which I was yet sceptical of finding, for I knew the old man was often a yarn-spinner. The foot of the glacier was about five hundred feet beyond the cliff-face, and over the foot fell a cascade of water into the smoking cauldron below. A huge moraine was already formed before the resistless force of the advancing ice; over this we scrambled till we reached the broken end of the glacier-foot, where the steeply sloping rock was free from boulders. Over the edge of the cliff, pendulous and threatening, hung a vast mass of blue ice, curved downwards, with an icy stream dispersing into fine mist running from its outer edge, twenty or thirty feet away from the cliff-face. The noise of the cascade and the torrent made talking impossible, but Pud-lu pointed to the cliff-face to the right, and at the same time indicated the dangerous overhanging ice and the fallen masses, shaking his head.

There, sure enough, across the cliff-face and at a sharp angle, ran an immense vein of quartz, averaging fully twenty feet in width from its foot to where it disappeared under the overhanging ice. In spite of the old man’s gestures of dissent and the warning of the recently fallen masses of ice, I ran through the curtain of mist caused by the dripping ice-edge overhead, and examined the vein closely.

Never, I believe, did miner’s or prospector’s eyes behold such an accumulation of wealth as I saw indicated. In places there seemed literally to be as much gold as quartz, and as far as the eye could follow it above and down to my feet, the yellow specks of metal gleamed and glistened in the wet white quartz—a veritable El Dorado, a miner’s dream of riches uncountable.

And it was as useless to me, from a miner’s point of view, as it was beautiful! In another year, probably less, the mighty glacier would take it again into its safe-keeping, and the centuries might roll by till the Utopian age arrived when gold was no longer a thing to desire, much less to strive, and fight, and starve, and suffer to obtain.

The wonderful vein must once have stood out like a band of gold and white marble across the black cliff-face, a miner’s dream-vein of magic wealth, but how many years ago, before the glacier enveloped it, I could not guess. Twice before in my life I had been very near to great wealth when following the elusive will-o’-the-wisp called prospecting: once in the Klondike and once in the Porcupine (Ontario) districts. On those occasions I well remembered my vain regrets; in this case, in the presence of the mighty forces of Nature jealously guarding her own, I felt none. The very idea of man with his puny weapons entering the lists against this vast, silent, irresistible glacier seemed absurd.

We moved away from the cliff-face, where we had been deafened with the roar of the torrent, and exposed to danger from a fall of ice at any moment. A quarter of a mile away, where I could take in the whole panorama, I sat down and looked back. The snowy twin peaks gleamed like spear-points in the sunlight and dark crevasses across the great glacier appeared like inky lines on an immense and spotlessly white sheet of paper. The black cliff-face in its snowy setting might well be the entrance to some Aladdin’s cave of untold wealth, guarded by the great glacier frowning on its brink, against which the hammer of Thor or the thunderbolts of mighty Jove might beat in vain. A rainbow from the mist of the cascade showed in soft colours against the dazzling white background, and the right-hand arch came down directly over the great treasure-house, to show which Nature had for a moment drawn the curtain aside. I thought of the legend of gold being where the rainbow ends; here at least was no legend, but sober truth.

If the great vein ran only a few hundred feet into the cliff—and its uniformity and well-defined walls gave every indication that such was the case—here were many many millions of gold awaiting Nature’s great stamp-battery, the mighty glacier, to grind it to dust and scatter it in a rich alluvial stream of gold in the bed of the torrent. I thought of the great stamp-batteries of the Rand, their noise and never-ceasing activity; compared with the forces of Nature soon to operate on this great vein, they were like a child’s rattle. Even if it were feasible to drive an adit to reach the vein under the advancing glacier, some hundreds of thousands would have to be spent to do so. What mining-house would dream of this vast outlay to reach a vein of unknown depth, extent, or value, on the unsupported word of one prospector? Men would do mad things for gold, but nothing so mad as this. That the glacier would completely cover the cliff in another year was evident from the rate of its advance shown by the overhanging ice-face.

I was awakened from my reverie by old Pud-lu’s voice. ‘Will the white men come and get the yellow stuff, and bring many machines and men?’ he asked anxiously.

‘No,’ I replied; ‘it is not possible for the white men to take that away.’

Old Pud-lu nodded sagaciously. ‘I thought so,’ he said.

‘If you thought so,’ I retorted, ‘why did you not tell me before we left?’

‘Ah,’ answered the old man, with an innocence belied by the twinkle in his eyes, ‘had I done so, you would perhaps not have come here to see it, and I should not get the rifle and tea and biscuit and all the things you promised, and have put on one side for me at your house.’

I laughed at the old fellow’s naïve cunning. It was well worth the price to have seen such a vein. ‘Why did you think it would be impossible to work it?’ I queried.

‘An-goil-len-nu once spoke to me of how white men dig into the earth, and I did not think they could dig under that;’ and he waved his hand towards the great glacier. ‘I am glad,’ he added, ‘for An-goil-len-nu said if the yellow stuff was found many white men would come, and the Innuits would soon die off from sickness and rum and other things. I am glad no one will want to come here and dig. Come, come, we must go; my old wife will be getting afraid for us, and Im-mak-kee, whose eyes, you told her, were bright like stars, will have them red with foolish tears for us.’

I turned and waved my hat to the wonderful gold-vein. ‘Farewell, El Dorado of the Arctic!’ I cried. ‘No white man will ever look on your gorgeous setting and inestimable riches again. Farewell!’

Even as I finished speaking, and as if in derisive answer to my words, a vast mass of ice fell with a roar which reverberated in thundering echoes from the surrounding heights; the smooth, sloping rock from the cliffs base to the outer edge of the glacier, where but a brief half-hour before we had been standing, was buried under vast masses of shattered ice; while the torrent below became a seething, churning rush of broken ice and raging water.

‘Come, Kabloona [white man], come,’ said old Pud-lu, plucking my arm nervously as he spoke. ‘We have been very near to death, you and I, to-day; let us not tempt the anger of the spirits further.’

Which seemed to indicate that, after all, the old man was not quite such a sceptic as he had professed to be.

He was born in the last days of January, far in on the land, on the slope of a hill facing to the north, in a hole his mother had scraped out of a snow bank when she had gone to den up there in November. He and his sister were two absurdly small, pink, hairless little things when they first saw the dim light through the snow roof of their home, more like the offspring of some large dog than what they really were.

It was late March before the mother moved from her den, and she travelled only at night, choosing her time of departure when there was no moon. She travelled slowly on account of the little ones, who would have loitered still more on the way but for her insistent urging. The only two things a polar bear mother fears when with her young are the old and hungry males of her kind, and—above all—man. This party of three, however, reached the sea-ice in safety, and the old bear hurried her young ones on a bee-line for the distant floe-edge—that is, the edge of the ice fast to the land; nor was she satisfied until she had pushed them into the water, slid in herself, and swum out to the moving ice floes, the young ones holding on to her fur with their teeth to get a tow.

She stayed on the moving pack-ice till the middle of April, getting a few seals in the water by lying in watch at the edge of a floe piece and diving onto her prey when one came up within reach. Then she returned to the fast floe for young seals. These—the white coats—are born under the snow in a chamber (either excavated or natural) adjoining the breathing-hole, and are very easily smelt out and taken, for they will not go to the water.

The young bears grew apace, and would lie obediently behind a hummock while the mother was away foraging, on her return resuming their gambols and rough play. But when the snow was off the ice, and the seals hauled out and sleeping in the sun, they would follow their mother till she commenced to stalk a seal. Thereupon they would lie still and watch her. If she failed to crawl on to a seal and kill him before he went down the hole—as she often did—they would rejoin her without any call from her. Later, when the seal-holes had become sufficiently enlarged by the rush of the melted snow down them from the surface, the old bear would always be successful, for she would crawl slowly towards a sleeping seal—which only takes twenty or thirty-second naps as a rule before raising its head and looking round—and make for a seal-hole she had marked. Into this she would noiselessly slip, submerge, and then walk, or rather trot, head down, under the ice, as a fly does on the ceiling, steering a straight line for the victim’s hole and suddenly coming up under the nose of the astonished and speedily despatched seal, who, finding his line of retreat blocked by his enemy’s bulky body, was helpless.

Our young bear stayed with his mother and sister up to the end of his second summer—bears give birth to young only every other year—when they all finally parted. He was then a fine, healthy two-year-old, measuring nearly five feet from his nose to the tip of his very abbreviated tail.

His first winter was an easy one. He had wandered on to a bay where seals were plentiful and there was no competition, and by November he retired to the land with nearly two inches of blubber all over him under his skin, and taking out a hole in a snow bank on the north face of a hill, slept soundly till April the following year, when he climbed out and made hastily for the sea—and food. This came near to being his last journey, for an Eskimo and dog-team crossed his track, and followed in swift pursuit. They came up to him close to the floe-edge; and though some of the dogs, which had been cut loose from the sled, gave him a severe biting in his hind-quarters, the water was close, and instinct told him it was better to get there, even under circumstances of such indignity and pain as he was suffering. He caught one over-bold dog which failed to let go his hold, dragged him into the water, and bit his head nearly off. Then he dived, and swam off as fast as he possibly could.

The summer our bear spent out on the middle pack in Davis Strait, where food is plentiful and there were no enemies he need fear. Sometimes he would chum up with another young bear, at other times hunt alone, and if he met an old bear he would lie down on his back and grovel at his feet, just as a puppy would do to a senior he fears. A common method of obtaining food was to mark a seal sleeping close to the edge of a floe of ice, get to leeward of him, then swim along the edge of the ice with only the tip of his nose out of the water. When opposite the seal he would suddenly show himself, and his victim would literally jump into his mouth in a frantic effort to reach the water and safety. Sometimes he would dive (if the ice-edge did not offer concealment), and occasionally misjudge his distance, and the seal would escape; for a bear, though he can swim onto and catch in the water a seal which does not know of his presence, cannot catch one actually in flight and diving to depths unattainable by a bear.

This winter our bear did not den up, though he had several naps of a week or two at a time out on the pack. His best efforts at getting food were on the young ice off-shore, where he would stand at a seal-hole, and when the seal came up to blow, smash the ice with his head, and at the same time stun the seal, and then pull him out with his teeth. He hurt his head a good deal at this, however, and the scars always remained there.

The fifth summer came and went, and our bear, now come to his full growth, was truly a formidable-looking animal. He measured twelve feet and a half from nose to tail-tip, a veritable king amongst the kings of the Arctic. His discovery, in his third and fourth years, of sundry casks of blubber (left by a whaling-station whose vessel was overfull perhaps) helped him; and the fact that they were one-ton casks did not trouble him in the least. He picked them up and dashed them down end-on to the rocks with ease, staving in the head, and getting many gorges of his favourite food, blubber.

Now, too, he could sometimes kill walrus, an animal even heavier and bigger than himself. If the walrus was in a favourable position for his attack—that is to say, if there was a hummock of ice near by onto which he could climb (or, if on the land, an adjacent rock)—he would stalk the great animal warily, carrying either a piece of ice or a rock in his paws, and walking on his hind-legs, dropping down and flattening himself to the ice if the walrus awoke and looked about him. When within striking distance on higher ground, he would either hurl the ice or the rock at the walrus’s head with one hand—so to speak, in an overhand bowler’s action at cricket—or more often use his weapon as a hammer and smash the walrus’s skull. A huge feast of meat and blubber was the reward.

Many fights had our bear with his kind, and more than once he left his enemy dead on the field of battle, these encounters always taking place when a rival came on the scene during the time he was courting one of the opposite sex.

At last, one winter night, he ran across the scent of an igloo and cautiously crept near it from leeward till within striking distance. Then, with a spring and a roar, he jumped, smashing in the roof instantly and killing one of the inmates.

Emboldened, perhaps, by this success, he next attacked a toupik, or skin tent, killed the woman and child it sheltered, partially ate them, and went on his way; but, meeting the unfortunate husband, he promptly charged him, and was brought to book for his misdeeds by a bullet in the brain.

Tragedies sometimes happen amongst the laughing, forgetful denizens of the Arctic, and sometimes murders are committed, which are none the less murders because they are unproven and unprovable. But all these things are soon forgotten by the Eskimo, unless a boy comes to manhood and has been taught how and by whom his mother was done to death. Perhaps he does not care. Perhaps, on the other hand, he exacts the full blood penalty; but if so, stealthily, quietly, and alone—the others may suspect, but they say nothing.

‘Tabow-eetay’ (‘good-bye’), said the trader, as the whale-boat pushed off from the landing; ‘and remember, I want to get fox-skins for those rifles, the ammunition, tobacco, and supplies; foxes and plenty of them, or there will be trouble.’

Old Koik-shadu nodded. ‘We will try,’ he said; ‘we will try very hard.’

The trader turned and walked thoughtfully back to the little house; he was an American, who had had many winters’ experience amongst the Eskimo of Roes Welcome and Repulse Bay. ‘Old Koik-shadu is straight enough,’ he said to himself, ‘and he’ll probably keep the other two in line, though they are both bad scoundrels; but I think I was a fool to give them so much debt, all the same.’

Captain Munn’s Farewell—‘Tabow-eetay’ (Good-bye).

Sail was hoisted, and the Eskimo were soon under way on the forty-five mile crossing of Roes Welcome, from Point Fullerton to Southampton Island. Old Koik-shadu, the leader of the party, was at the helm. The other men were one-eyed Oo-look-see, who tended the sheet, a scowling, shifty-looking rascal, his appearance accentuated by his missing eye; and Shook-aloo, who sat forward the mast, a good-looking Portuguese half-breed, the adopted son of Koik-shadu, and half-brother to Oo-look-see, also a Portuguese half-breed.

Amidships were the women, the children, and the dogs. Man-ee-to, the wife of Koik-shadu, was a middle-aged woman, with two young children, and said to be the worst scold and most evil-tongued Eskimo on the coast. Beside her sat old In-ny-to, her mother, second only to the daughter in vituperation, a withered, hideous old beldame. On the next thwart sat Nat-ka, Man-ee-to’s daughter, a woman about twenty-five years of age, quiet and sad looking, for reasons to be set forth later; on her knee sat her boy, a lad of five or six years old. These sat aft the mast, women and children huddled together. Between the next thwarts sat Oog-na-lan, now Shook-aloo’s wife, a big, ugly woman, with a forceful will; and with her were Ar-tee-targ, Oo-look-see’s wife, her two children, and her wrinkled old mother, Oyar-arg-lan.

Twenty dogs, four tents, some sleds, deer-skins, supplies, cooking-utensils, and camp gear completed the cargo of the overcrowded boat.

Nat-ka had reason to look sad. Till lately she had been Shook-aloo’s wife; but he had tired of her and given her back to her mother with her boy, taking Oog-na-lan as wife in her place. It was said that Oog-na-lan was the one who had effected the change by putting a charm on Shook-aloo, and she was certainly far too jealous of the younger woman to allow him to keep her as his second wife, even if he wanted to.

The cross between Portuguese and Eskimo is a common one to meet on the coast of Roes Welcome, for the American whalers frequented these waters in the ’seventies and ’eighties with their nondescript and often shanghaied crews. There are plenty of Portuguese sailing out of New Bedford yet to the southern whaling waters. The mixture of blood is a bad one; the callous cruelty, violent temper, and faithlessness of the Portuguese, added to the fickle, easily-swayed character of the Eskimo, makes the most undesirable and unreliable half-breed in the Arctic.

The journey commenced badly. A gale of wind came away as they neared the Southampton shore, and in beaching the boat it was badly stove—some of the gear was washed away and more damaged. It was mid-October, a stormy month in these latitudes; the ground was already covered with a light snow-fall and frozen hard. Here it was old Koik-shadu made his fatal mistake.

Finding no cariboo on the flat land which comprises the southern part of the island, he decided to keep north along the coast and depend on the few seal they could get, till the snow was hard enough for the dog-sleds. Had he but started across to the eastern side of the island, packing the dogs and taking as little as possible beyond food and ammunition, all would have been well, for the wet swampy lands and small lakes were frozen, and the snow was but light. It was 120 miles to the east side, where they knew other Eskimo, their relatives of the same tribe, would be found, and but 80 or 90 miles to a small trading-station, established the previous year, at which were some natives and a white man. But to the north old Koik-shadu thought he would find deer yet lingering on the low-lands, and if there were no other Eskimo trapping there this would be the place to take foxes; so northwards they travelled, by very short stages, getting an occasional deer or seal, but with hunger ever dogging their footsteps.

A month passed and the outlook was bad. They were about forty miles inland now, at the foot of the range of hills which form the northern and eastern sides of Southampton Island, but many dogs had died of starvation, and some had been killed for food. When an Eskimo kills a dog for food, he is very hungry, for on the dogs depends most often the possibility of obtaining cariboo. The children wailed incessantly for food, and Man-ee-to and old In-ny-to kept up a ceaseless railing, abusing Koik-shadu day and night, till the toupik, and later the igloo, became unbearable, and the old man would wander about outside, preferring the cold and darkness to their bitter tongues.

The younger men got a few deer occasionally, far back in the hills, but it is doubtful if they were dividing them fairly with the rest, their own wives and children and Ar-tee-targ’s old mother getting the larger share. Perhaps Shook-aloo might have wanted to give more to Nat-ka and her boy; possibly he did not care—some are like that, especially Portuguese half-breeds.

Old Koik-shadu was at his wits’ end; his wits indeed were leaving him under the lash of the two older women’s merciless tongues. One morning he harnessed five skeleton-like dogs to a small sled, and started back to the boat, where some blubber had been cached. It was said he did not enter the igloo the previous night, but talked to himself and the spirits, outside in the bitter cold. The kindly, gentle old man never came back, for the railing tongues and crying children had done their work. Maybe he drove out on the moving pack to what a sane man must know would be certain death, in the mad hope of getting across to the station for food and help—God knows! Neither he nor his dogs were ever seen again.

The young men spent a few days looking for Koik-shadu in vain, and then returned to the igloo. What talk passed between them that night only they ever can tell: but that Oo-look-see and Oog-na-lan’s voices cast the die against the rest, there is little doubt. The man hated the old women in the other igloo for their evil tongues, and he was, be it remembered, a Portuguese half-breed. The woman hated her younger rival; she too was determined, callous, and ruthless for her children, as only a savage can be.

Next day it blew a blizzard, but stealthy preparations went forward in the larger igloo. A discarded wife rarely speaks to her late husband and never to her rival, nor will she enter their igloo, but Nat-ka seems to have divined their thoughts. Perhaps her mother-love helped her.

The following morning Oo-look-see and Shook-aloo came into the old women’s igloo. It was Oo-look-see who spoke: ‘We are going back into the hills for deer,’ he said. ‘You must stay here, for we cannot all move together with so few dogs, but we will return with meat as soon as we kill any. We leave you an old rifle, in case a bear should come here. We shall not be away long.’

The old women were silent. They had been told—they knew well—it was their doing that the old man had been driven away, and now they were afraid, and perhaps a little ashamed. Only Nat-ka spoke. Kissing her boy, she gave him to Shook-aloo, saying, ‘Take him with you; he is small and will not make much difference, and he cannot wait for food much longer. Ar-tee-targ will keep him if—if Oog-na-lan does not want him. Ah! you must take him. Is he not your son, too?’

Shook-aloo nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said unsteadily, ‘I will take him; it is better for him to come with us.’

Nat-ka stood outside her igloo when the party started. She did not speak to Oog-na-lan, but she called Shook-aloo to come to her, a very unusual thing, as has been shown, for a deserted wife to do. Looking him in the eyes, she said tensely, ‘If my boy—our boy—dies, my spirit will never leave you in peace till you are dead too. It is your life as well as his you have to guard. You will not return. Let me finish,’ she said quickly, for he would have denied the terrible accusation. ‘Oo-look-see and Oog-na-lan settled it last night, though Ar-tee-targ tried to stop them. See, she is crying over there now. I know I speak the truth—it does not matter.’ Shook-aloo’s weak, handsome face was working convulsively. ‘Go!’ she said quietly; ‘but remember the words I have spoken to you, if you wish to see many more summers.’

Nat-ka watched them move off. God knows what her thoughts were; she was discarded, deserted, left to starve in this snowy waste, yet she asked nothing for herself. She knew what her life was fated to be in the igloo with Oog-na-lan’s venomous hate and stronger arm if she joined the party. Her boy was safe, or at least had a chance of life, for Shook-aloo believed her words implicitly and would look after him. Some day he would grow big and Ar-tee-targ would tell him, because Nat-ka was her friend. Then let Oo-look-see have a care when he was on a lonely hunt in the hills, or if he and the boy met in their kayaks far out on the bay, where none might see the Law of the North dealt out. Hating the older women for their venomous tongues, and too cowardly to kill them mercifully with a bullet, Oo-look-see had persuaded his weaker brother to leave them to starve, and with characteristic heedlessness of life and callous cruelty, left the unoffending younger woman and the two children to perish with them.

Nat-ka watched as they trailed slowly away, and on a rise of the land she saw them halt.

After a minute’s eager talk Shook-aloo ran back a few yards and beckoned her violently to come and join them. She stood like a statue watching him, and when, after a last effort, Shook-aloo turned and slowly joined the now moving party, she too turned with a choking sob to the igloo and crept inside.

Within one sleep—two days’ travel—of the igloos the party camped, and for four months did not make their presence known to their friends to the eastward, or to the white trader and his Eskimos but two sleeps away. When they knew the deed was done, and the dead could tell no tales, the party came down to the trading-station, with a story—varied in detail from day to day—of their great starvation, which was ugly to hear, but was considerably belied by their appearance.

. . . . . .

And what was the story of the igloos when at length they were visited? Man-ee-to had died the last, and the gnawed bones told the usual ghastly tale of a starvation camp; but one skull had a bullet hole in it, which could only have been self-inflicted—a shot through the roof of the mouth. It was Nat-ka’s!

The Carver.

Blow! Blo-ow! . . . It is some ten years or more since this once familiar cry rang out from the crow’s nest of a Davis Strait whaler and the boats were swiftly and silently lowered away in pursuit of the Greenland whale (Balæna mysticitus), once to be seen in great numbers in these waters. It seems probable the great fall in the price of whalebone—a fall from nearly £3000 per ton to £500—saved these great cetaceans from extermination, for they are no longer hunted yearly and systematically by any vessels in the Arctic waters.

The most modern method of killing the Greenland whale was by ‘fastening’ with a large harpoon fired from a harpoon-gun in the bows of the whale-boat, and then, either simultaneously, or after the whale had sounded and risen again to the surface, a hand-harpoon—known as a ‘darting-gun’—was thrown, which planted a bomb about a foot long and an inch in diameter, and generally brought the whale to book after a struggle depending on the damage done. I have heard of a whale taking out a mile or more of whale-line and towing the ‘fast’ boat some miles before the coup de grâce could be given, and of four bombs being required to do this. I know of another case when a whale took out four miles of whale-line—boat after boat changing as their line became exhausted—till the harpoon drew with the great weight of rope, and the whale escaped. There are many tales of the tenacity with which a whale sometimes clings to life if not mortally wounded, which makes the following incident the more remarkable.

Off Bylot Island, at the north end of Baffin Land, the ice generally remains fast to the land till the end of July; this is known as the land-floe, and its edge at the open water as the floe-edge. My Eskimo hunters at this season go out to the floe-edge frequently for a week at a time, hunting the narwhal—a small species of whale—for its ivory horn and its skin and blubber.

As the ice begins to decay, long cracks form in the land-floe from its outer edge right in to the land. In July the wolf of the sea, the deadly killer whale (Orcus gladiator), following the white whale, narwhal, and Greenland whale northwards, makes great havoc amongst them when they are found in the open water. Now the killer whale, which hunts generally in herds of from four to eight or ten, fortunately possesses a curious dorsal fin recurved backwards, often as much as six feet in length, and evidently very sensitive. The sole refuge of a whale pursued by the killer is either—in the case of the white whale—to keep very close inshore in shallow water, or to get into close pack-ice, or up one of the cracks in the land-floe, where the killer dare not follow them. I believe that, but for their dorsal fin, killers would almost exterminate the other cetaceans of the Arctic, for they kill for the love of killing, and not for food only, as has been often proved. Killers will attack a Greenland whale, and after exhausting it by tearing great lumps of flesh and blubber from its sides, force its mouth open and tear out its tongue, then leave it to die; this has been recorded by Frank Bullen, an eye-witness of the deed.

In July 1922 the floe-edge was some five or six miles from the land, and several Greenland whales were seen disporting in the water. One day a herd of killer appeared, and the whales took refuge in a crack in the land-ice. It seems certain the whale can hear the killer at some distance, and the natives assert that the dorsal fin makes a loud humming when submerged.

Far up the crack, and within a few hundred yards of the rocky shore, a large Greenland whale lay on the surface, almost filling the space of water from side to side. An Eskimo hunter, armed with an ordinary service ·303 rifle, approached to within a few feet of the whale, and, tempted by his knowledge that the water was comparatively shallow—perhaps not more than thirty to forty feet—fired a pointed ‘war’ bullet in behind the fore-flipper. The whale scarcely moved, but within thirty seconds blew a vast jet of blood far out on the ice on each side. Some twenty more bullets were fired, and in less than fifteen minutes the whale turned on its side dead. My native is of the opinion that the first bullet would have effected the same result. There is no doubt the whale, knowing it was in shallow water, dared not ‘sound’ or plunge headlong downwards, and apparently dread of the killers at the floe-edge prevented its attempting flight seawards.

Some idea of the terror the killer inspires may be gathered from the fact that four other whales lay in the same crack, and yet, despite the natives’ shouting and running up to assist in the cutting-up of the whale killed, these timid cetaceans did not move. To the Eskimos’ credit, be it recorded, they were content with their kill, and did not molest the other whales, though they remained for several days while the work of removing the whalebone and blubber was being conducted.

The whale yielded nearly a ton of whalebone and over sixteen tons of blubber. I believe this is the first time on record a large Greenland whale has been killed with a ·303 rifle only.

THE END

Edinburgh: Printed by W. & R. Chambers, Limited.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

[The end of Tales of the Eskimo by Henry Toke Munn]