The Walrus Hunters: A Romance of the Realms of Ice

For some minutes the Eskimo found it difficult to speak; then he returned the pipe, saying, “No. My inside is not yet tough like yours. I will look—and wonder!”

After being admired—with wonder—for a considerable time, the Indian looked at his companion earnestly, again offered him the pipe, and said, “Try again.”

The obliging Eskimo tried again, but with the caution of a child who, having been burnt, dreads the fire. He drew in a little smoke by means of the power of inhalation and choked again slightly, but, being now on his mettle, he resolved not to be beaten. The Indian regarded him meanwhile with grave approval. Then it occurred to Cheenbuk to apply the power of suction instead of inhalation. It was successful. He filled his mouth instead of his lungs, and, in his childlike delight at the triumph, he opened his mouth to its full extent, and sent forth a cloud with a gasp which was the combined expression of a puff and a “ho!” Again he tried it, and was again successful. Overjoyed at this, like a child with a new toy, he went in for quite a broadside of puffs, looking round at his friendly foe with a “ho!” between each, and surrounding his head with an atmosphere of smoke.

Suddenly he stopped, laid down the pipe, rose up, and, looking as if he had forgotten something, retired into the bush.

The Indian took up the discarded pipe, and for the first time displayed a few wrinkles about the corners of his eyes as he put it between his lips.

Presently Cheenbuk returned, somewhat paler than before, and sat down in silence with a look, as if of regret, at the skeleton-goose.

Without any reference to what had passed, the Indian turned to his companion and said, “Why should the men of the ice fight with the men of the woods?”

“Why?” asked Cheenbuk, after a few moments’ profound meditation, “why should the men of the woods attack the men of the ice with their fire-spouters?”

This question seemed to puzzle the Indian so much that he proceeded to fill another pipe before answering it. Meanwhile the Eskimo, being more active-minded, continued—

“Is it fair for the men of the woods to come to fight us with fire-spouters when we have only spears? Meet us with the same weapons, and then we shall see which are the best men.”

The Indian looked at his companion solemnly and shook his head.

“The strongest warriors and the best fighters,” he said, “are not always the best men. He who hunts well, keeps his wives supplied with plenty of food and deerskin robes, and is kind to his children, is the best man.”

Cheenbuk looked suddenly in the face of his sententious companion with earnest surprise in every feature, for the sentiments which had just been expressed were in exact accordance with his own. Moreover, they were not what he expected to hear from the lips of a Dogrib.

“I never liked fighting,” he said in a low voice, “though I have always been able to fight. It does nobody any good, and it always does everybody much harm, for it loses much blood, and it leaves many women and children without food-providers—which is uncomfortable for the men who have enough of women and children of their own to hunt for. But,” continued the youth with emphasis, “I always thought that the men of the woods loved fighting.”

“Some of them do, but I hate it!” said the Indian with a sudden look of such ferocity that the Eskimo might have been justified in doubting the truth of the statement.

The flash, however, quickly disappeared, and a double wreath of smoke issued from his nose as he remarked quietly, “Fighting lost me my father, my two brothers, and my only son.”

“Why, then, do you still come against us with fire-spouters?” asked Cheenbuk.

“Because my people will have it so,” returned the red man. “I do what I can to stop them, but I am only one, and there are many against me.”

“I too have tried to stop my people when they would fight among themselves,” returned the Eskimo in a tone of sympathy; “but it is easier to kill a walrus single-handed than to turn an angry man from his purpose.”

The Indian nodded assent, as though a chord had been struck which vibrated in both bosoms.

“My son,” he said, in a patronising tone, “do not cease to try. Grey hairs are beginning to show upon my head; I have seen and learned much, and I have come to know that only he who tries, and tries, and tries again to do what he knows is right will succeed. To him the Great Manitou will give his blessing.”

“My father,” replied the other, falling in readily with the fictitious relationship, “I will try.”

Having thus come to a satisfactory agreement, this Arctic Peace Society prepared to adjourn. Each wiped his knife on the grass and sheathed it as he rose up. Then they shook hands again after the fashion of the pale-faces, and departed on their respective ways. The red man returned to the wigwams of his people, while the young Eskimo, descending the river in his kayak, continued to hunt the white-whale and pursue the feathered tribes which swarmed in the creeks, rivulets, and marshes that bordered the ice-encumbered waters of the polar seas.

Chapter Two.

Waruskeek

Alas for the hopes and efforts of good men! At the very time that Cheenbuk and the Indian were expressing their detestation of war, elsewhere a young Eskimo was doing his best to bring about that unhappy and ruinous condition of things.

He was an unusually strong young Arctic swashbuckler, with considerably more muscle than brains, a restless spirit, and what may be styled a homicidal tendency. He was also tyrannical, like many men of that stamp, and belonged to the same tribe as Cheenbuk.

Walrus Creek was the summer residence of the tribe of Eskimos to which Cheenbuk belonged. It was a narrow inlet which ran up into a small island lying some distance off the northern shores of America, to discover and coast along which has been for so many years the aim and ambition of Arctic explorers. How it came by its name is not difficult to guess. Probably in ages past some adventurous voyagers, whose names and deeds have not been recorded in history, observing the numbers of walruses which scrambled out of the sea to sun themselves on the cliffs of the said creek, had named it after that animal, and the natives had adopted the name. Like other aborigines they had garbled it, however, and handed it down to posterity as Waruskeek, while the walruses, perhaps in order to justify the name, had kept up the custom of their forefathers, and continued to sun themselves there as in days of yore. Seals also abounded in the inlet, and multitudes of aquatic birds swarmed around its cliffs.

The Eskimo village which had been built there, unlike the snow-hut villages of winter, was composed chiefly of huts made of slabs of stone, intermingled with moss and clay. It was exceeding dirty, owing to remnants of blubber, shreds of skins, and bones innumerable, which were left lying about. There might have been about forty of these huts, at the doors of which—or the openings which served for doors—only women and children were congregated at the time we introduce them to the reader. All the men, with the exception of a few ancients, were away hunting.

In the centre of the village there stood a hut which was larger and a little cleaner than the others around it. An oldish man with a grey beard was seated on a stone bench beside the door. If tobacco had been known to the tribe, he would probably have been smoking. In default of that he was thrown back upon meditation. Apparently his meditations were not satisfactory, for he frowned portentously once or twice, and shook his head.

“You are not pleased to-day, Mangivik,” said a middle-aged woman who issued from the hut at the moment and sat down beside the man.

“No, woman, I am not,” he answered shortly.

Mangivik meant no disrespect by addressing his wife thus. “Woman” was the endearing term used by him on all occasions when in communication with her.

“What troubles you? Are you hungry?”

“No. I have just picked a walrus rib clean. It is not that.”

He pointed, as he spoke, to a huge bone of the animal referred to.

“No, it is not that,” he repeated.

“What then? Is it something you may not tell me?” asked the woman in a wheedling tone, as she crossed her legs and toyed with the flap of her tail.

Lest the civilised reader should be puzzled, we may here remark that the costume of the husband and wife whom we have introduced—as, indeed, of most if not all Eskimo men and women—is very similar in detail as well as material. Mangivik wore a coat or shirt of seal-skin with a hood to it, and his legs were encased in boots of the same material, which were long enough to cover nearly the whole of each leg and meet the skirt of the coat. The feet of the boots were of tough walrus-hide, and there was a short peak to the coat behind. The only difference in the costume of the woman was that the hood of her coat was larger, to admit of infants and other things being carried in it, and the peak behind was prolonged into a tail with a broad flap at the end. This tail varied a little in length according to the taste of the wearer—like our ladies’ skirts; but in all cases it was long enough to trail on the ground—perhaps we should say the ice—and, from the varied manner in which different individuals caused it to sweep behind them, it was evident that the tail, not less than the civilised skirt, served the purpose of enabling the wearers to display more or less of graceful motion.

“There is nothing that I have to hide from my woman,” said the amiable Eskimo, in reply to her question. “Only I am troubled about that jump-about man Gartok.”

“Has he been here again?” asked the wife, with something of a frown on her fat face. “He is just as you say, a jump-about like the little birds that come to us in the hot times, which don’t seem to know what they want.”

“He is too big to look like them,” returned the husband. “He’s more like a mad walrus. I met him on one of the old floes when I was after a seal, and he frightened it away. But it is not that that troubles me. There are two things he is after: he wants to stir up our young men to go and fight with the Fire-spouters, and he wants our Nootka for a wife.”

“The dirty walrus!” exclaimed Mrs Mangivik, with as much vigour as if she had been civilised, “he shall never have Nootka. As for fighting with the Fire-spouters, I only hope that if he does go to do so, he will get killed and never come back.”

“H’m!” grunted Mangivik, “if he does get killed he’s not likely to come back.”

“Who is not likely to come back?” asked a young girl, with an affectionate expression in her pretty brown eyes, issuing from the hut at that moment and seating herself close to the old man. The girl’s face, on the whole, was unusually pretty for that of an Eskimo, and would have been still more so but for the grease with which it was besmeared—for the damsel had just been having a little refreshment of white-whale blubber. Her figure was comparatively slim and graceful, and would have been obviously so but for the ill-fitting coat and clumsy boots with which it was covered.

“Your mother and I were talking of a bad man, Nootka,” said Mangivik.

“Ay, a very very bad man,” exclaimed Mrs Mangivik, with a decided nod of her head.

“If he is so very bad,” returned Nootka, “it would be good that he should never come back. Who is it?”

“Gartok,” answered her mother, with the air of one who has mentioned the most hateful thing in creation.

Nootka laughed.