Chapter-6
Half way down the long low snow passage or tunnel that led to the inner door of the house you could hear snappings and yelpings, as the dogs of his sleigh-team, released from the day’s work, scuffled for warm places.
When the yelping grew too loud Kotuko lazily rolled off the sleeping-bench and picked up a whip with an eighteen-inch handle of springy whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy plaited thong. He dived into the passage, where it sounded as though all the dogs were eating him alive; but that was no more than their regular grace before meals. When he crawled out at the far end, half a dozen furry heads followed him with their eyes as he went to a sort of gallows of whale jawbones, from which the dog’s meat was hung; split off the frozen stuff in big lumps with a broad-headed spear; and waited, his whip in one hand and the meat in the other. Each beast was called by name—the weakest first, and woe betide any dog that moved out of his turn, for the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning and flick away an inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast simply growled, snapped once, choked over his portion, and hurried back to the passage, while the boy stood up on the snow under the blazing Northern Lights and dealt out justice. The last to be served was the big black leader of the team, who kept order when the dogs were harnessed, and to him Kotuko gave a double allowance of meat as well as an extra crack of the whip.
‘Ah!’ said Kotuko, coiling up the lash, ‘I have a little one over the lamp that will make a great many howlings. Sarpok! Get in!’ He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted the dry snow from his furs with the whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door, tapped the skin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles that might have fallen from the dome of snow above, and curled up on the bench. The dogs in the passage snored and whined in their sleep, the boy-baby in Amoraq’s deep fur hood kicked and choked and gurgled, and the mother of the newly-named puppy lay at Kotuko’s side, her eyes fixed on the bundle of sealskin, warm and safe above the broad yellow flame of the lamp.
And all this happened far away to the north, beyond Labrador; beyond Hudson’s Strait where the great tides throw the ice about north of Melville Peninsula—north even of the narrow Fury and Hecla Straits—on the north shore of Baffin Land where Bylot’s Island stands above the ice of Lancaster Sound like a pudding bowl wrong side up. North of Lancaster Sound there is little we know anything about, except North Devon and Ellesmere Land; but even there live a few scattered people, next door, as it were, to the very Pole.
Kadlu was an Inuit—what you call an Esquimau—and his tribe, some thirty persons, all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut—‘the country lying at the back of something’. On the maps that desolate coast is written Navy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name is best because that country lies at the very back of everything in the world. For nine months of the year there is only ice and snow and gale after gale; with a cold no one can realize who has never seen the thermometer go down even to zero. For six months of those nine it is dark, and that is what makes it so horrible. In the three months of summer it only freezes every other day and every night, and then the snow begins to weep away from the southerly slopes, and a few ground-willows put out their woolly buds, a tiny stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom; beaches of fine gravel and rounded stones run down to the open sea, and polished boulders and streaked rocks lift up above the granulated snow.
But all that goes in a few weeks, and the wild winter locks down again on the land; while at sea the ice tears up and down the offing, jamming and ramming, and splitting and hitting, and pounding and grounding till it all freezes together, ten feet thick, from the shore outward to deep water.
In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to the edge of this landice and spear them as they came up to breathe at their blow holes. The seal must have open sea-water to live and catch fish in, and the ice would sometimes run eighty miles without a break from the nearest land. In the spring he and his people retreated from the thawing ice to the rocky mainland, where they put up tents of skins and snared the sea-birds, or speared the young seal basking on the beaches.
Later, they would go south into Baffin Land after the reindeer and to get their year’s store of salmon from the hundreds of streams and lakes of the interior; coming back north in September or October for the musk-ox hunting and the regular winter sealery. This travelling was done with dog-sleighs, twenty and thirty miles a day, or sometimes down the coast in big skin ‘woman-boats’, when the dogs and the babies lay among the feet of the rowers, and the women sang songs as they glided from cape to cape over the glassy, cold waters. All the luxuries that the Tununirmiut knew came from the south—drift-wood for sleigh-runners, rod-iron for harpoon-tips, steel knives, tin kettles that cooked food much better than the old soapstone affairs, flint and steel, and even matches, coloured ribbons for the women’s hair, little cheap mirrors and red cloth for the edging of deerskin dress-jackets. Kadlu traded the rich creamy, twisted narwhal horn and musk-ox teeth (these are just as valuable as pearls) to the Southern Inuit, and they in turn traded with the whalers and the missionary posts of Exeter and Cumberland Sounds; and so the chain went on till a kettle picked up by a ship’s cook in the Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber lamp somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic Circle.
Kadlu being a good hunter was rich in iron harpoons, snowknives, bird-darts and all the other things that make life easy up there in the great cold, and he was the head of his tribe, or, as they say, ‘the man who knows all about it by practice’.
This did not give him any authority, except now and then he could advise his friends to change their hunting-grounds; but Kotuko used it to domineer a little, in the lazy fat Inuit fashion, over the other boys when they came out at night to play ball in the moonlight, or to sing The Child’s Song to the Aurora Borealis.
But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was tired of making snares for wild-fowl and kit-foxes, and very tired of helping the women to chew seal—and deer-skins (that supples them as nothing else can) the long day through while the men were out hunting. He wanted to go into the quaggi, the Singing House, when the hunters gathered there for their mysteries, and the angekok, the sorcerer, frightened them into the most delightful fits after the lamps were put out, and you could hear the spirit of the Reindeer stamping on the roof, when a spear was thrust out into the open black night it came back covered with hot blood. He wanted to throw his big boots into the net with the tired air of the head of a family, and to gamble with the hunters when they dropped in of an evening and played a sort of home-made roulette with a tin pot and a nail. There were hundreds of things that he wanted to do, but the grown men laughed at him and said, ‘Wait till you have been in the buckle, Kotuko. Hunting is not all catching.’
Now that his father had named a puppy for him things looked brighter. An Inuit does not waste a good dog on his son till the boy knows something of dogdriving; and Kotuko was more than sure that he knew more than everything.
If the puppy had not had an iron constitution he would have died from overstuffing and over-handling. Kotuko made him a tiny harness with a trace to it, and hauled him all over the house-floor shouting: ‘Aua! Ja aua!’ (Go to the right). ‘Choiachoi, Ja choiachoi!’ (Go to the left). ‘Ohaha!’ (Stop). The puppy did not like it at all, but being fished for in this way was pure happiness beside being put to the sleigh for the first time. He just sat down on the snow and played with the seal-hide trace that ran from his harness to the pitu, the big thong in the bows of the sleigh. Then the team started and the puppy found the heavy ten-foot sleigh running up his back and dragging him along the snow, while Kotuko laughed till the tears ran down his face. There followed days and days of the cruel whip that hisses like the wind over ice, and his companions all bit him because he did not know his work, and the harness chafed him, and he was not allowed to sleep with Kotuko any more, but had to take the coldest place in the passage. It was a sad time for the puppy.
The boy learnt, too, as fast as the dog; though a dog-sleigh is a heart-breaking thing to manage. Each beast is harnessed—the weakest nearest to the driverby his own separate trace, which runs under his left fore-leg to the main thong, where it is fastened by a sort of button and loop which can be slipped by a turn of the wrist, thus freeing one dog at a time. This is very necessary, because young dogs often get the trace between their hind legs, where it cuts to the bone. And they one and all will go visiting their friends as they run, jumping in and out among the traces. Then they fight, and the result is more mixed than a wet fishing-line next morning. A great deal of trouble can be avoided by scientific use of the whip. Every Inuit boy prides himself as being a master of the long lash; but it is easy to flick at a mark on the ground and difficult to lean forward and catch a shirking dog just behind the shoulders when the sleigh is going at full speed. If you call one dog’s name for ‘visiting’ and accidentally lash another the two will fight it out at once, and stop all the others. Again, if you travel with a companion and begin to talk, or by yourself and sing, the dogs will halt, turn round, and sit down and hear what you have to say. Kotuko was run away from once or twice through forgetting to block the sleigh when he stopped; and he broke many lashings and ruined a few thongs ere he could be trusted with a full team of eight and the light sleigh. Then he felt himself a person of consequence, and on smooth black ice, with a bold heart and a quick elbow, he smoked along over the levels as fast as a pack in full cry. He would go ten miles to the seal-holes, and when he was on the hunting-grounds he would twitch a trace loose from the pitu and free the big black leader, who was then the cleverest dog in the team. As soon as the dog had scented a breathing-hole Kotuko would reverse the sleigh, driving a couple of sawed-off antlers that stuck up like perambulator handles deep into the snow, so that the team might not get away. Then he would crawl forward inch by inch and wait till the seal came up to breathe. Then he would stab down swiftly with his spear and running line, and presently would haul his seal on to the lip of the ice while the black leader came up and helped to pull the carcass across the ice to the sleigh. That was the time when the harnessed dogs yelled and foamed with excitement, and Kotuko laid the long lash like a red-hot bar across all their faces till the carcass froze stiff. Going home was the heavy work. The loaded sleigh had to be humoured among the rough ice, and the dogs sat down and looked hungrily at the seal instead of pulling. At last they would strike the wellworn sleigh-road to the village, and toodle-ki-yi along the ringing ice, heads down and tails up, while Kotuko struck up the ‘Angutivun tai-na tau-na-ne taina’ (The Song of the Returning Hunter), and voices hailed him from house to house under all that dim, star-litten sky.
When Kotuko, the dog, came to his full growth, he enjoyed himself too. He fought his way up the team steadily, fight after fight, till one fine evening over their food he tackled the big black leader (Kotuko, the boy, saw fair play) and made second dog of him, as they say. So he was promoted to the long thong of the leading dog, running five feet in advance of all the others: it was his bounden duty to stop all fighting, in harness or out of it, and he wore a collar of copper wire, very thick and heavy. On special occasions he was fed with cooked food inside the house, and sometimes was allowed to sleep on the bench with Kotuko.
He was a good seal-dog, and would keep a musk-ox at bay by running round him and snapping at his heels. He would even—and this for a sleigh-dog is the last proof of bravery—he would even stand up to the gaunt Arctic wolf, whom all dogs of the north, as a rule, fear beyond anything that walks the snow. He and his masterthey did not count the team of ordinary dogs as company—hunted together, day after day and night after night—fur-wrapped boy and savage, longhaired, narrow-eyed, white-fanged, yellow brute. All an Inuit has to do is to get food and skins for himself and his family. The women-folk make the skins into clothing, and occasionally help in trapping small game; but the bulk of the foodand they eat enormously—must be found by the men. If the supply fails there is no one up there to buy or beg or borrow from. The people must die.
An Inuit does not think of these chances till he is forced to. Kadlu, Kotuko, Amoraq, and the boy baby who kicked about the fur hood and chewed pieces of blubber all day, were as happy together as any family in the world. They came of a very gentle race—an Inuit seldom loses his temper, and almost never strikes a child—who did not know exactly what telling a real lie meant; still less how to steal. They were content to spear their living out of the heart of the bitter, hopeless cold; to smile oily smiles, and tell queer ghost and fairy-tales of evenings; and eat till they could eat no more, and sing the endless woman’s song: ‘Amna aya, aya amna, ah! ah!’ through the long lamp-lighted days as they mended their clothes and hunting gear.
But one terrible winter everything betrayed them. The Tununirmiut returned from the yearly salmon fishing and made their houses on the fresh ice to the north of Bylot’s Island ready to go after the seal as soon as the sea froze. But it was an early and savage autumn. All through September there were continuous gales that broke up the smooth seal ice where it was only four or five feet thick and forced it inland, and piled a great barrier some twenty miles broad of lumped and ragged and needly ice, over which it was impossible to draw the sleighs. The edge of the floe off which the seal were used to fish in winter lay perhaps twenty miles beyond this barrier and out of reach of the Tununirmiut. Even so, they might have managed to scrape through the winter on their stock of frozen salmon and stored blubber and what the traps gave them, but in December one of their hunters came across a tupik, a skin-tent, of three women and a girl nearly dead, whose men had come down from the far north and been crushed in their little skin hunting-boats while they were out after the long-horned narwhal. Kadlu, of course, could only distribute the women among the huts of the winter village, for no Inuit dare refuse a meal to a stranger. He never knows when his own turn may come to beg. Amoraq took the girl, who was about fourteen, into her own house as a sort of servant. From the cut of her sharp-pointed hood, and the long diamond pattern of her white deer-skin leggings, they supposed she came from Ellesmere Land. She had never seen tin cooking-pots or wooden-shod sleighs before; but Kotuko the boy and Kotuko the dog were rather fond of her.
Then all the foxes went south, and even the wolverine, that growling, bluntheaded little thief of the snow, did not take the trouble to follow the line of empty traps that Kotuko set. The tribe lost a couple of their best hunters, who were badly crippled in a fight with a musk-ox, and this threw more work on the others.
Kotuko went out, day after day, with a light hunting-sleigh and six or seven of the strongest dogs, looking till his eyes ached for some patch of clear ice where a seal might, perhaps, have scratched a breathing-hole. Kotuko, the dog, ranged far and wide, and in stillness of the ice-fields Kotuko, the boy, could hear his half-choked whine of excitement, above a seal-hole three miles away, as plainly as though he were at his elbow. When the dog found a hole the boy would build himself a little low snow wall to keep off the worst of the bitter wind, and there he would wait ten, twelve, twenty hours for the seal to come up to breathe, his eyes glued to the tiny mark he had made above the hole to guide the downward thrust of his harpoon, a little sealskin mat under his feet, and his legs tied together in the tutareang—the buckle that the old hunters had talked about. This helps to keep a man’s legs from twitching as he waits and waits and waits for the quick-eared seal to rise. Though there is no excitement in it, you can easily believe that the sitting still in the buckle with the thermometer perhaps forty degrees below zero is the hardest work an Inuit knows. When a seal was caught, Kotuko, the dog, would bound forward, his trace trailing behind him, and help to pull the body to the sleigh where the tired and hungry dogs lay sullenly under the lee of the broken ice.
A seal did not go very far, for each mouth in the little village had a right to be filled, and neither bone, hide, nor sinew was wasted. The dog’s meat was taken for human use, and Amoraq fed the team with pieces of old summer skin-tents raked out from under the sleeping-bench, and they howled and howled again; and waked to howl hungrily. One could tell by the lamps in the huts that famine was near. In good seasons, when blubber was plentiful, the light in the boat-shaped bowls would be two feet highcheerful, oily, and yellow. Now it was a bare six inches: Amoraq carefully pricked down the moss wick when an unwatched flame brightened for a moment, and the eyes of all the family followed her hand. The horror of famine up there in the great cold is not so much dying as dying in the dark. All the Inuit dread the dark that presses on them without a break for six months in each year; and when the lamps are low in the houses the minds of people begin to be shaken and confused.
But worse was to come.
The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the passages, glaring at the cold stars and snuffing into the bitter wind night after night. When they stopped howling the silence fell down again as solid and as heavy as a snowdrift against a door, and men could hear the beating of their blood in the thin passages of the ear and the thumping of their own hearts that sounded as loud as the noise of sorcerers’ drums beaten across the snow. One night Kotuko the dog, who had been unusually sullen in harness, leaped up and pushed his head against Kotuko’s knee.
Kotuko patted him, but the dog still pushed blindly forward, fawning. Then Kadlu waked and gripped the heavy wolf-like head and stared into the glassy eyes. The dog whimpered as though he were afraid, and shivered between Kadlu’s knees. The hair rose about his neck and he growled as though a stranger were at the door; then he barked joyously and rolled on the ground and bit at Kotuko’s boot like a puppy.
‘What is it?’ said Kotuko, for he was beginning to be afraid.
‘The sickness,’ Kadlu answered. ‘It is the dog-sickness.’ Kotuko the dog lifted his nose and howled and howled again.
‘I have not seen this before. What will he do?’ said Kotuko.
Kadlu shrugged one shoulder a little and crossed the hut for his short stabbing-harpoon. The big dog looked at him, howled again, and slunk away down the passage, while the other dogs drew aside right and left to give him ample room. When he was out on the snow he barked furiously, as though on the trail of a musk-ox, and, barking and leaping and frisking, passed out of sight. His trouble was not hydrophobia but simple plain madness. The cold and the hunger, and above all the dark, had turned his head: and when the terrible dog-sickness once shows itself in a team it spreads like wild-fire. Next hunting day another dog sickened, and was killed then and there by Kotuko as he bit and struggled among the traces. Then the black second-dog who had been the leader in the old days suddenly gave tongue on an imaginary reindeer track, and when they slipped him from the pitu he flew at the throat of an ice-cliff, and ran away as his leader had done, his harness on his back. After that no one would take the dogs out again. They needed them for something else, and the dogs knew it; and though they were tied down and fed by hand their eyes were full of despair and fear. To make things worse the old women began to tell ghost-tales, and to say that they had met the spirits of the dead hunters lost that autumn who prophesied all sorts of horrible things.
Kotuko grieved more for the loss of his dog than anything else, for though an Inuit eats enormously he also knows how to starve. But the hunger, the darkness, the cold, and the exposure told on his strength, and he began to hear voices inside his head, and to see people, who were not there, out of the tail of his eye. One night—he had unbuckled himself after ten hours waiting above a ‘blind’ sealhole, and was staggering back to the village faint and dizzy—he halted to lean his back against a boulder, which happened to be supported like a rocking-stone on a single jutting point of ice. His weight disturbed the balance of the thing, it rolled over ponderously, and as Kotuko sprang aside to avoid it, slid after him squeaking and hissing on the ice-slope.
That was enough for Kotuko. He had been brought up to believe that every rock and boulder had its owner (its inua), who was generally a one-eyed kind of a Woman-Thing called a tornaq, and that when a tornaq meant to help a man she rolled after him inside her stone house, and asked him whether he would take her for a guardian spirit. (In summer thaws the ice-propped rocks and boulders roll and slip all over the face of the land, so you can easily see how the idea of live stones arose.) Kotuko heard the blood beating in his ears as he had heard it all day, and he thought that was the tornaq of the stone speaking to him. Before he reached home he was quite certain that he had held a long conversation with her, and as all his people believed that this was quite possible no one contradicted him.
‘She said to me, “I jump down, I jump down from my place on the snow,”’ cried Kotuko with hollow eyes, leaning forward in the half-lighted hut. ‘She said, “I will be a guide.” She says, “I will guide you to good seal-holes.” Tomorrow I go out and the tornaq will guide me.’ Then the angekok, the village sorcerer, came in and Kotuko told him the tale a second time. It lost nothing in the telling.
‘Follow the tornait (the spirits of the stones) and they will bring us food again,’ said the angekok.
Now the girl from the north had been lying near the lamp, eating very little and saying less for days past, but when Amoraq and Kadlu next morning packed and lashed a little hand-sleigh for Kotuko, and loaded it with his hunting gear and as much blubber and frozen seal-meat as they could spare, she took the pullingrope, and stepped out boldly at the boy’s side.
‘Your house is my house,’ she said, as the little bone-shod sleigh squeaked and bumped behind them in the awful Arctic night.
‘My house is your house,’ said Kotuko, ‘but I think that we shall both go to Sedna together.’ Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Underworld, and the Inuit believe that everyone who dies must spend a year in her horrible country before going to Quadliparmiut, the Happy Place, where it never freezes and fat reindeer trot up when you call.
Through the village people were shouting: ‘The tornait have spoken to Kotuko. They will show him open ice. He will bring us the seal again.’ Their voices were soon swallowed up by the cold empty dark, and Kotuko and the girl shouldered close together as they strained on the pulling-rope or humoured the sleigh through the ice, in the direction of the Polar Sea. Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told him to go north, and so north they went under Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer—those stars that we call the Great Bear.
No European could have made five miles a day over the ice rubbish and the sharp-edged drifts; but those two knew exactly the turn of the wrist that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock, the jerk that neatly lifts it out of an ice-crack, and the exact strength that goes to the few quiet strokes of the spear-head that make a path possible when everything looks hopeless.
The girl said nothing, but bowed her head, and the long wolverine fur fringe of her ermine hood blew across her broad, dark face. The sky above them was an intense velvety black, changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon, where the great stars burned like streetlamps. From time to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights would roll across the hollow of the high heavens, flick like a flag and disappear; or a meteor would crackle from darkness to darkness trailing a shower of sparks behind. Then they could see the ridged and furrowed surface of the floe all tipped and laced with strange colours—red, copper, and bluish; but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bitten gray. The floe, as you will remember, had been battered and tormented by the autumn gales till it was one frozen earthquake. There were gullies and ravines; and holes like gravel-pits cut in ice, lumps and scattered pieces frozen down to the original floor of the floe; blotches of old black ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gale, and heaved up again; roundish boulders of ice; saw-like edges of ice carved by the snow that flies before the wind and sunk pits where thirty or forty acres lay five or six feet below the level of the rest of the field. From a little distance you might have taken the lumps for seal, or walrus, overturned sleighs or men on a hunting expedition, or even the great Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself, but in spite of these fantastic shapes, all on the very edge of starting into life, there was neither sound nor the least faint echo of sound. And through this silence and through this waste where the sudden lights flapped and went out again, the sleigh and the two that pulled it crawled like things in a nightmare—a nightmare of the end of the world at the end of the world.
When they were tired, Kotuko would make what the hunters call a ‘half house’, a very small snow hut, into which they would huddle with the travelling lamp, and try to thaw out the frozen seal-meat. When they had slept, the march began again—thirty miles a day to get five miles northward. The girl was always very silent, but Kotuko muttered to himself and broke out into song he had learned in the Singing-House—summer songs, and reindeer and salmon songs—all horribly out of place at that season. He would declare that he heard the tornaq growling to him, and would run wildly up a hummock tossing his arms and speaking in loud threatening tones. To tell the truth, Kotuko was very nearly crazy for the time being; but the girl was sure that he was being guided by his guardian spirit, and that everything would come right. She was not surprised, therefore, when at the end of the fourth march, Kotuko, whose eyes were burning like fireballs in his head, told her that his tornaq was following them across the snow in the shape of a two-headed dog. The girl looked where Kotuko pointed, and some Thing seemed to slip into a ravine. It was certainly not human, but everybody knew that the tornait preferred to appear in the shape of bear and seal and such like.
It might have been the Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself, or it might have been anything, for Kotuko and the girl were so starved that their eyes were untrustworthy. They had trapped nothing and seen no trace of game since they had left the village, their food would not hold out for another week, and there was a gale coming. A Polar storm will blow for ten days without a break, and all that while it is certain death to be abroad. Kotuko laid up a snow-house large enough to take in the hand-sleigh (it is never wise to be separated from your meat), and while he was shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the keystone of the roof he saw a Thing looking at him from a little cliff of ice half a mile away. The air was hazy, and the thing seemed to be forty feet long and ten feet high, with twenty feet of tail and a shape that quivered all along the outlines. The girl saw it too, but instead of crying aloud with terror, said quietly: ‘That is Quiquern.
What comes after?’
‘He will speak to me,’ said Kotuko, but the snow-knife trembled in his hand as he spoke, because however much a man may believe that he is a friend of strange and ugly spirits he seldom likes to be taken quite at his word. Quiquern, too, is the phantom of a gigantic toothless dog without any hair, who is supposed to live in the far north, and to wander about the country just before things are going to happen. They may be pleasant or unpleasant things, but not even the sorcerers care to speak about Quiquern. He makes the dogs go mad. Like the Spirit Bear he has several extra pairs of legs six or eight—and this Thing jumping up and down in the haze had more legs than any real dog needed.
