Let's Go!Let's Go!ToList
Let's Go!ToList
"Man dear! My, my, my! Ain't dat wunnerful, now!"
"Dat 'm de b'y!"
"By de powers!—Git y'r gaff, b'y! Help un in!"
"We'll have 'm all sove, soon's us lays han's on dat rope. Lord bless dat dog!"
At one moment his little brown head would rise on the crest of a streaked, yeasty wave, the rope still in the white teeth—and then as the wave curled and broke he would be plunged to the bottom of the trough and they would lose sight of him. Would he come up again?
"Yes—dere he be! My, my, my! Look at him a-comin' and a-comin'! I never did see a dog the beat o' un! By the livin' Jarge, he's got more sense 'n any o' us humans! I tell ye, thet's a miracle, thet's what it is. Nothin' short o' a gospel miracle!"
So the comment ran—for those who said anything. But many were too surprised and thrilled to speak—and if they cried out it was when they all cheered mightily together as the dog, hauled through the surf by as many as could get their eager hands on him, scrambled out onthe beach and dropped the fag-end of the rope as if it were a stick, thrown into the water in sport, for him to retrieve.
Now that communication was established, the next thing to do was to haul a heavier rope to the beach. On this a breeches-buoy was rigged without delay. In that breeches-buoy the ninety-two were hauled ashore. One of them was a baby, eighteen months old, who traveled in a mail-bag, "pleasantly sleeping and unaware." The last to leave was the captain.
The sea hammered the life out of the boat—but the human life was gone from it, and nobody cared. As for the dog—you can imagine how Reuben Decker's cottage door was kept a-swing till it was nearly torn from its hinges, by friends who dropped in to pat him on the back, and look with curiosity at the animal which a few hours ago they ignored or despised. And Reuben did not tire of telling them all what a dog it was. He could safely say there was no better on the coast. Perhaps in the world.
The rumbling echoes of the dog's brave deed traveled "over the hills and far away," to Curling, where lives from hand to mouth a littlepaper calledThe Western Star. It has a circulation of 675 in fair weather and 600 when it storms. The editor is a man named Barrett, who is a correspondent of the Associated Press. He put a brief dispatch on the wire for all America. Some people in Philadelphia read it, and sent the dog a silver collar, almost big enough to go three times round his neck. Since the dog had no name, the word "Hero" was engraved on the collar.
The day of the presentation was a general holiday. All the way from St. John's, people came to see "Hero" rewarded. Father Brennan made a speech, the sheriff was in his glory, and Reuben Decker and his dog, dragged blinking into the limelight, were equally dumb with modesty, surprise and gratitude. The cheer that was raised when the silver clasp of the magnificent collar clicked round "Hero's" throat drowned out the loud music of the ocean.
Now "Hero," freed forever from bondage to the sled, may lie by the fire in his master's house, his head on his paws, his nose twitching, as he dreams of his great adventure.
When Dr. Grenfell first sailed his mission boat to the Eskimo settlements, the Eskimo swarmed aboard his little schooner, theAlbert. They were singing a hymn the Moravian missionaries taught them.
"What do you know about that?" said Sailor Bill to Sailor Jim. "Them fellers certainly can sing!"
"Yes, an' they got a brass band," answered Jim. "Just hear 'em a-goin' it, over there on the shore when the wind sets our way. You'd sure think the circus was comin' to town! Hey there, where you goin', young feller?"
The "young feller" was an old Eskimo of about seventy, but Jim couldn't be expected to know that. For he was all done up like a figure from fairy-land—in snow-white jumper, peaked fur cap, and sealskin boots.
The Eskimo only grinned from ear to ear. He seemed ready to laugh at everything. His little bright eyes missed nothing.
"These husky-maws are so bloomin' curious," said Jim. "Just like them husky dogs. Hafta take the lid off 'n' look into everything. The cook says he dasn't turn his back to the stove. Don't you let 'em into the cabin!"
"There's one of 'em in there now!" cried Bill. Out of a port-hole issued the notes of a hymn, which one of the Eskimo was pumping out of a melodeon.
"Come up outa there!" yelled Bill, thrusting his head in at the doorway.
The Eskimo didn't understand the words, but he knew what the tone meant, and meekly turned a smiling face toward the sailor.
Then he jumped up from his seat on the top of a keg and put out his hand. Bill took the pudgy, greasy little fingers. The Eskimo brought from somewhere in his blouse a piece of ivory carved in the likeness of a boat with rowers.
"How much d'ye want for that?" asked Bill.
The Eskimo shook his head.
"Are ye deaf?" cried Bill. "How much d'ye want for the boat?"
"Aw shucks!" exclaimed Jim. "Hollerin'so loud don't do no good. He dunno what you're sayin'. He can't talk English. Show him your clasp-knife. That'll talk to him better'n you can. He wants to swop with ye."
Bill brought out the big knife. The little brown man nodded eagerly. Then he handed over the ivory boat. It was worth a great deal more than the knife. But not to the Eskimo. That knife would be a precious thing to help him carve meat and cut things out of sealskin and perhaps stab a polar bear.
"So everybody's happy?" laughed a clear and pleasant voice at Bill's shoulder. "You traded about even, did you?"
"Guess so, Doctor. He's got what he wants, and I'm goin' to send the boat to the kiddies in the old country."
That night as the men sat around the cabin lamp with their pipes and a big pail of steaming cocoa, Dr. Grenfell told them something about the strange people they had come among.
He had spent all day ashore among them, in various repairs to their bodies, and he had promised to come back to them in the morning.
"They're a nice, jolly, friendly lot," he said."So different from the old days, before the Moravian missionaries came.
"You know, they always called themselves 'Innuits.' That means 'the people.' They said God went on making human beings till He made the Eskimo. When He saw them, He was perfectly satisfied, and didn't make any more.
"But the early Norsemen came along, about a thousand years after the time of Christ, and called them 'skrellings.' That means 'weaklings.' It was the Indians who called them Eskimo. The word means 'eaters of raw meat.'"
"They've sure got some funny ideas about Hell 'n' the Devil, Doctor!" put in an old, wise sailor who was sitting deep in the shadows.
"Yes they have!" agreed the Doctor. "Their God, Tongarsuk, is a good spirit. He rules a lot of lesser spirits, called tongaks, and they run and tell the priests, who are called angekoks, what to do. The angekoks are the medicine-men and the weather-prophets. The Devil isn't he, but she. And she is so dreadful that she hasn't any name, because you're not supposed to talk about her at all.
"The angekoks are awfully busy fellows. They have to keep making journeys to the centre of the earth, the Eskimos believe. Because that's where Tongarsuk the good spirit is, and they have to go and ask him what to do when the little spirits get lazy and won't tell them.
"Anybody who thinks the angekok has an easy time of it on his voyage is mistaken. The journey has to be in winter. It must be at midnight. The angekok's body is standing alone in the hut—his head tied between his legs, his arms bound behind his back. In the meantime his soul has left the body, and is on the way to heaven or hell.
"That's what an ordinary, every-day angekok has to do. But if you want to become an angekok poglit, which is a fat priest (meaning a chief priest), it hurts a lot more, and takes much more time and trouble. Then you have to let a white bear take your wandering soul and drag it down to the sea by one toe. They don't tell you how a soul comes to have a toe to drag it by.
"When the soul reaches the seaboard, it must be swallowed by a sea-lion—and of course the soul may have to sit there in the cold for quite awhile waiting for a sea-lion to come along. After the sea-lion has swallowed it, the same white bear must reappear and swallow it too. Then the white bear must give up the spirit, and let it return to the dark house where the body is waiting for it. All this time the neighbors keep up an infernal racket with a drum and any other musical instruments they may happen to have.
"The Eskimo know very well that once there was a flood—but they cannot say exactly when. The trouble was that the world upset into the sea, and all were drowned except one man who climbed out on a cake of ice. They are sure of what they say, because although the oldest man alive only heard about it from the oldest man when he was a baby, they still find shells in the crannies of the rocks far beyond the maddest reach of the sea: and somebody once found the remains of a whale at the very top of a high mountain.
"You do not go up to heaven when you die: you go down,—way, way down, to the bottom of the sea, where the best of everything is. There it's summer all the time. To the Eskimo there is no hell in being hot—hell is terrible cold.Down there where it is summer all the time you don't have to chase reindeer if you want them to pull you about—they come running up to you, obliging as taxicabs, and ask you please to harness them and tell them where you would like to go. And your dinner is ready for you all the time: the seals are swimming about in a kettle of boiling water. The women don't have to spend their time chewing on the sealskins to make them pliable for shoes and garments. The skins come off, all by themselves, already chewed—as nice and soft as can be, fit to make a bed for an Eskimo baby.
"His boat and his weapons go with the warrior to his grave, so that his spirit may have the use of them in the next world.
"Once, one of the sailors from Newfoundland took something from a grave and hid it in his bunk.
"That night the dead Eskimo came looking for his property.
"It was pitch dark—but one of the crew saw and felt the ghost prowling about in the cabin!
"He yelled, and they lit the lamp.
"The ghost went out at the hatchway instantly.
"They put out the light, and the ghost came back. Then shouts were heard, 'There he is! He's a Eskimo! He's huntin' in Tom's bunk!'
"After that, they kept the lamp lit all night long: and the next day, Tom went back and with trembling fingers restored what he had stolen to the grave.
"There are wide chinks in the rocky roof of every properly made Eskimo grave. This is not so that prowling sailor-men may reach in: it is so the spirits will have no trouble going in and out.
"You may still find lying in a grave a modern high-powered rifle ready for business, and good steel knives ready to carve those cooked seals down there in Heaven. I've even found pipes all ready filled with tobacco, to save the spirits the trouble of using their fingers to cram the bowl.
"Nowadays sealskins are exchanged for European goods, especially guns, and the Labrador Eskimo have lost much of the art of using their kayaks, the canoes into which theyused to bind themselves securely, so that when they turned over in the water it did no harm. They would 'bob up serenely' and go right on, and in contests one man would pass his boat right over that of a rival without risk of accident.
"The Eskimo and the Indians were bitter enemies. The story of the last fight is, that the Eskimo had their fishing-huts on an island off the mouth of a river.
"Down-stream by night crept the Indians in their war-canoes. These they dragged ashore and hid in the rocks. Next morning the Eskimo came upon their enemies and at once attacked them.
"The Eskimo are little people as compared with the Indians. The Indians, their squaws fighting like bears beside them, drove the Eskimo back and back toward the sea.
"Stubbornly the 'huskies' contested every inch of the ground. Now and again they would crawl into holes among the rocks—but the Indians would find them there and cut them down without mercy, like animals trapped in their burrows.
"The Eskimo had their choice between the Indians and the sea. They would carry their children and even their wives down to the boats on their backs, and sometimes the frail skin-boats would turn over, and all the people in them would be drowned. If they succeeded in putting out to sea, they had no place to go: the Indians waiting ashore would get them whenever and wherever they landed.
"At last—there were only the Indians in their war-paint, dancing and howling on the beach—not an Eskimo was left to tell the tale."
A few days later, Dr. Grenfell came to Hopedale.
There, he found, the Eskimo believed that Queen Victoria, away off there on the other side of the ocean, was sitting on a rock waiting for theHarmony(the Moravian mission ship from Labrador) to come in sight.
They loaded him down with all sorts of messages they wanted him to give her.
Especially, they wanted him to say to her that they were very, very grateful to her for sending him over the seas to help them.
When they learned that England was at war in Egypt, and a brave general was holding theupper Nile against a crowd of savages, although they hadn't the slightest notion as to where Egypt was or who the Egyptians were, they got out everything they had in the way of firearms and began to drill up and down on the rocky beach.
One old fellow had a policeman's coat split up the back and much too big for him, and he dragged the tail of it along the ground like a bedraggled water-fowl. He also had a single epaulet that had come in a box of cast-off clothing.
On the strength of that uniform they made him captain of the company.
Then they all marched up to the missionaries and said:
"We want to go to war and help the English!"
"It won't be any use," said the missionaries. "Egypt is a long, long way off—and the war will be over before you could get there!"
"Never mind!" insisted the "huskies." "We want to go!"
They kept on drilling and making warlike noises with their mouths till the ice melted andthe cod came in. And after that, in the struggle with the cold sea and the barren land for a living they forgot all about war and the rumors of war.
There were seals and bears and foxes to be hunted, instead of men.
Dr. Grenfell found one man who was lucky enough to catch a black fox in a trap of stones.
He was so happy over the catch that tears of joy ran down his face as he carried the precious skin to the store. He said God had heard his prayers and made his family suddenly rich.
The storekeeper paid him forty-five dollars. That seemed like a fortune. The price was not paid in cash, however, but in food.
Staggering under the load he came back to his hut, and when the stuff was put on the shelves it looked like such a lot he began to think he and his family never would be able to get it eaten before the end of the world came.
So he sent out for his friends and neighbors.
Be sure they came. An Eskimo can smell food cooking (or even merely rotting) for miles beyond the power of sight to detect it.
The invitation ran: "Come and eat and stay with me." And then the Eskimo ran too, thebig ones tumbling over the little ones, and the dogs outstripping their masters, and all making loud noises according to their kind.
Alas! in two days they had literally eaten their generous host out of house and home, and along with the dogs of the quarreling packs there was the wolf of hunger gnawing at the door.
One of the Newfoundland fishermen left an Eskimo in charge of his supplies for the winter. Of these provisions he had set aside plenty for the Eskimo—for he knew how much a "husky" can eat. The Eskimo seems to have a "bread-basket" quite as extensible as any dog he drives.
Then all the other Eskimo came swarming: and he fed them all, so that in two days the whole crowd were starving together.
Grenfell found that the white man, green to the business of dog-driving or whale-hunting, had to win the respect of the Eskimo.
The Eskimo knows that most of his paleface brethren from the south are wholly unable to paddle their own canoes.
The white man, as a rule, cannot slay the seal, nor catch the cod, nor catch anything else except a cold.
He cannot stand up to a polar bear with a knife in fair fight.
He cannot sit out on a rock in a rain-storm all day without an umbrella and seem to enjoy it.
He cannot stand hunger, thirst and frost, and he chokes when the fumes and the black smoke of oil lamps get into his throat.
Then he is so funny about food! He doesn't care for stinking fish: he doesn't like his meat crawling with maggots after it has been buried in the ground; he doesn't know how much better molasses tastes when mice have fallen into it and expired.
The white man washes. How silly! He takes a brush made of little white bristles and rubs his teeth with it. Well, if the white man's mouth, which is full of water, isn't clean, then what part of him can be clean? And why does he turn up his nose at the Eskimo for being dirty?
As for smells, what is a bad smell? The Eskimo doesn't seem to know. In Kipling's wonderful address on "Travel," before the Royal Geographical Society, he had much to sayabout smells, and how they suggest places. Eskimo taken to the World's Fair in Chicago were homesick for the smell of decaying blubber, rancid whale-meat, steaming bodies in the igloo, the rich perfume of the dogs, and all the other aromatic comforts of home. As smells are their special delight, so dirt is their peculiar glory. A bath in warm water would make them as unhappy as it makes a cat.
Fond of eating as they are, they like a change of food, and if bear-meat is all they find to eat in a certain spot, they hitch up and hike on to a better meal at a distance. They always want to be on the go. They rarely stay in one place more than a year or two.
Even the rifle does not seem, in the long run, to be helping them much. When the sealer used a harpoon, he hardly ever missed the seal, for he always struck at close range. But with the rifle, shooting from afar, the sea often swallows up his prey ere he can reach it. The walrus has gone to the farthest North and the seal is becoming gun-shy very fast.
As a hunter, the Eskimo is not wanting in nerve. A mighty hunter north of Nain was outgunning for big birds—ptarmigan, guillemot and divers,—when he came on a robust and fierce polar bear, a monstrous specimen.
The Eskimo had a shotgun, not a rifle. It takes a ball cartridge of large calibre to do for Mr. Bruin ordinarily—and he can "make his getaway" with a good deal of lead in him. But the "husky" calmly walked up close to the bear, and discharged his shotgun pointblank in the face of the astonished animal. If the hunter had been at a distance, the bear would have minded the dose about as much as a pinch of pepper. As it was, the animal was blinded, and turned in fury on the hunter.
The Eskimo tore off his sealskin tunic and threw it over the bear's head, the way a bull-fighter confuses a charging bull with a mantilla. The bear stopped to tear the garment in pieces before proceeding to kill and devour the owner.
But the delay was fatal to Mr. Bear. In jig-time the hunter had reloaded the gun. He put the second charge into the bear's head through the eye,—and the monster expired at his feet.
The boys have bows and arrows; they begin by practising on small birds and later becomeproficient with a gun, so that by the time they are twelve years old they are veteran hunters.
The greatest joy in the life of the Eskimo is to spend a day in a seal-hunt.
Hours before dawn, the hunter climbs a rock and looks out to sea, anxious to learn if it will be a good day for his watery business.
Then he gets his breakfast. In the old days, it was a drink of water. Nowadays, if the Eskimo has learned to like the white man's hot drink, it may be a cup of coffee.
At any rate, he drinks his breakfast: he doesn't eat it. He says food in his stomach makes him unhappy in the kayak.
The only food he takes with him is a plug of tobacco. He carries the kayak to the water, puts his weapons where he can get his hands on them instantly, climbs into the hole amidship and fastens his jacket round the circular rim.
He may have to go a dozen miles out to sea. Now and then, to vary the paddling, he throws a bird-dart. Like the Eskimo harpoon, this dart and the stick that throws it are most ingenious contrivances, and beautifully wrought.
The hunter grabs the beak of a wounded birdin his teeth, and with a wrench breaks the creature's neck. He then ties his prey to the rear of the kayak and grins at the other hunters.
At the hunting-ground, seals' heads are to be seen everywhere, like raisins in a pudding. This is not sealing on the ice, as along the coast of Newfoundland: it is hunting them in open water—a very different thing.
Papik (let us call him) spots the seal he wants and creeps up on it, paddling warily.
The seal, a wise creature where such hunting is concerned, sees him and dives.
Papik rests on his paddle, and gets his harpoon ready for the reappearance of the seal.
It is a waiting game. Whenever the seal bobs up, the kayak is a little nearer, for while the seal is under water a few strokes of the paddle have cut down the distance.
A seal can stay under water a long, long time.
But an Eskimo, for his part, can sit all day as still as a tombstone in a cemetery.
Woe be to the furry creature, if it waits a fraction of a second too long before it dives!
In the clear sunlight the shaft flashes whistling from the throwing stick, the barb strikes, and theseal goes down in a welter of blood-stained foam. At the end of the harpoon line is a bladder—and as the bladder dances away over the surface, sometimes bobbing out of sight, Papik is after it like a hound chasing a rabbit.
The bladder is to the barbed harpoon what the fisherman's float is to the baited hook.
When the seal comes up, furious to attack and punish the hunter, it first tears the bladder in pieces—then it makes at the kayak.
But Papik is calmly ready. He has a lance with which he takes careful aim.
The seal comes on, bent double to hurl itself forward with all its might. It seems strange that a creature usually so gentle can show such ferocity.
The lance is flung. It goes through the seal's mouth and comes out at the back of the neck. The seal shakes its head violently, but it is doomed.
Papik's second lance strikes through a flipper into the lungs.
The seal is still alive as he comes close. Papik stabs it with his long knife, and it ceases to struggle at last. The seal is a creature thatclings to life a long, long time. He ties the seal to the stern of the kayak, rearranges his apparatus, coils his rope, puts his lances in their place, and is ready for another. If he is in luck, he may paddle homeward with four seals, and even more, in his wake.
If a storm comes before he gets to the shore, his watermanship is severely tested. He fights not only to bring his boat and himself through the tumult of the waters: he means to save every one of those carcasses wallowing along behind.
In the midst of his hard fighting with the waves, which turn him over and roll him about, as he stubbornly rights himself after each capsizing and hurls himself through the next curving green hillside of water, he comes upon a helpless comrade.
Ordinarily, the second man, Patuak, could bob up again and go on, like stalwart Papik.
But Patuak's jacket worked loose at the rim of the body-hole of the kayak. The water rushed in. Now he is water-logged. He will lose his boat, his seals, his life, unless Papik can save him.
Is Papik tempted to think only of himself and leave Patuak to his fate? If he is, it does not appear in what he does. He runs his kayak alongside that of his friend: he puts his paddle across both boats, and if he cannot bring in both kayaks, with such help as Patuak is able to give, he may even carry Patuak lying across the prow of his own boat.
It is easier to drown a seal than to drown an Eskimo.
The women stand on the rocks, shielding their eyes with their hands as they gaze eagerly seaward—just as the women of Nantucket stood on the roofs of the houses in olden times watching and waiting for the whaling-fleet.
At the first sign of the approaching hunters a cry goes up: "They are coming!"
Then they begin to count.
They thank their own idea of Heaven when they find that—seals or no seals—their men are coming back in safety.
If a man is towing seals, they shout his name with joy—and after it put the word "kaligpok," which means "towing."
The women haul in the boats, rub noses withtheir husbands to show their affection, and proceed to prepare the feast of raw blubber.
After that feast the men tell the story of the day's work—without boasting, but with touches of humor that send the listeners off into ringing peals of laughter.
The story-telling is a part of the seal-hunt. The phrases are straight-flung as a seal-lance.
"When the time came for using the harpoon, I looked to it, I took it, I seized it, I gripped it, I had it fast in my hand, I balanced it"—and so on. The audience, mouths agape, misses no word. It is the nearest thing the Eskimos have to motion pictures—and what a motion picture the whole of the seal-hunt is! No wonder the hunter lolls back like a lord, and lets himself be waited on, a conquering hero.
The old men feel their youth renewed as they sit and listen to these wonder-tales. In their turn, they are moved to tell how they met the walrus in fair fight and overcame him. Perhaps the dreaded tusk went right through the side of the boat and wounded the hunter. But there are no friends like Eskimo friends for a man in such a plight. They killed thewalrus—they dined off the meat—and the tusks are kept to this day to show for it. A skin canoe against a walrus—that is a battle indeed. The younger men know what it means: and the old man is comforted by the remembrance of what he used to be.
They are patient people, the Eskimo, and they need all the patience they have. An Inspector sent a boat-load of Eskimo to a fiord to get some grass for his goats.
They were gone a long time, and he wondered what had become of them.
When at last they returned, he asked them why they remained away so long. They told him that when they got to the place where he told them to go, they found the grass was too short. So they had to sit down and wait until it grew. Their time was of no value. And they had their orders to obey!
The world owes it to these brave people not to take from them their birthright to their few possessions in the far places where they dwell.
There was an Eskimo boy named Pomiuk who lived in the far north of Labrador, at Nachoak Bay. Pomiuk had the regular sea-and-land training of the Eskimo boy. In summer his family lived in a skin tent, in winter they occupied an ice igloo. It is a fine art making one of those rounded domes—the curving blocks must be shaped and fitted exactly, so as to come out even at the top.
Blubber in a stone dish supplied light and heat. If the air got too thick, father could thrust the handle of his dog-whip through the roof. Nobody bothered about bathing on Saturday night, and nobody minded the smell of rotten whale-meat for the dogs. In an atmosphere that would stifle a white man, Pomiuk and his brothers and sisters throve and laughed and had the time of their lives. Pomiuk had his own whip of braided walrus hide, and even when he was little the dogs respected him andran forward when he shouted "oo-isht!" turned to the right at "ouk!" and stopped and sat down panting when he shouted "ah!"
When Pomiuk was ten years old a ship came on a strange errand. Pomiuk's family and their friends were fishing for cod. But when the strange ship dropped anchor, they flocked to it shouting in their own tongue "Stranger! stranger!" When they learned why it came they were amazed.
An Eskimo interpreter who came with the white men from the south explained that what they wanted was to take the Eskimo to that far-off land called America, where at a place called Chicago most wonderful things were gathered together in huge igloos for all the world to see. They wanted the Eskimo to come themselves and to bring with them their boats and dogs, their sleds, their tools, their clothing, and the things with which they hunted whales and seals and polar bears. In fact the white men could not pretend to show the world anything very remarkable, unless such clever people as the Eskimo brought their things with them.
The men from the south urged and flatteredand argued till a number of the Eskimo let themselves be persuaded. The Eskimo had no idea of the trouble and disaster they were letting themselves in for, or they never would have started. The beautiful fairy-tales told by the white men inflamed their imaginations. They had always been very well pleased with their own white, cold world of whales and seals and kayaks—those canoes in which they are as much at home as the fish in the sea. But here was a chance to travel, and see marvels, and come home and rouse the envy of those who had not dared. It was too good a chance to miss. They would return rich men, and have nothing to do but brag about their adventures for the rest of their lives.
Pomiuk's father didn't care to go. But he was broad-minded. It was a big sacrifice for him to part with his wife and son, for it is the teeth of the women that must chew the sealskins to make them pliable for shoes and clothes: it is the fingers of women that do all the sewing. But Pomiuk's mother could show the helpless white women how to make skin boots, and Pomiuk could teach the paleface men and children touse the dog whip as he used it every day. If the Eskimo brought back money enough to buy many things at the nearest trading-post, the time spent on the long southward trek would not be wasted. The Eskimo, unlike the northern Indian, is a good business man, counting his puppies after they are born and his fox-skins before he spends them.
So the Eskimo sailed away from their own coast, with a gnawing homesickness at heart, though their lips were silent about it: and when they got to Chicago the life was strange with hideous sight and sound, and altogether unbearable: and they longed to get away from it to the sea and the ice and behold again their northern lights, which to the Eskimo are the spirits of the dead at play.
But there they were cooped up behind a stockade, like creatures at the zoo, to amuse the crowd, and be giggled at and poked toward as if they were some newly imported breed of monkey. An Eskimo likes as little as any other human to have fun made of him.
Worst of all, they lived in the white man's houses, and found the four walls instead of the"wide and starry sky" intolerable. A snow house has its own kind of stuffiness—the smell of whale-blubber and seal-oil to Eskimo nostrils is a sweet perfume. To be cooped up in a bedroom, and expected to sleep on a mattress with pillows, is pure torture.
While they were on the exhibition stand, in the torrid heat, they had to wear those heavy clothes of furs and skins which the ladies said looked so picturesque. They knew how the polar bear felt in his cage away from his ice-blocks. The food the white man ate with relish was such queer stuff. They longed for that delicious tidbit, the flipper of a seal. How good the entrails of a gull, or a fox's stomach would have tasted! But the white men seemed to think that coffee, and watermelon and corn on the cob, and ham and eggs, and the pies their Eskimo mothers never used to make were good enough for them. Except for the warm blood of the seal, the Eskimo ordinarily has no use for a hot drink.
Several of the older Eskimo wilted away like flowers, and died. They were buried and forgotten; and when the dogs died they were buriedand forgotten too: there was about the same lack of ceremony in the one case as in the other.
But little Pomiuk through thick and thin was the joyous life of the party. They worked him hard, because he amused the visitors. The visitors would throw nickels and dimes into the enclosure, and as the coins flickered in the air Pomiuk would lash out at them with his thirty-five foot whip. If he nicked the coin it was his. Then he would laugh—a very musical laugh, that could be heard a long way off. He was a jolly, friendly little soul, and he wore a smile that hardly came off even when he slept.
But there came a time when even happy little Pomiuk could not smile.
One day as he leapt high in the air, agile as a Russian dancer, to bring down one of those spinning coins with his whip, he fell on the boards, his hip striking a nail that stuck out.
His mother ran to pick him up. His face was twisted with agony.
He tried to stand, for her sake, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back in her arms, weak as a baby. What was she to do? The men who ran the exhibit had not kept theirpromises. Pomiuk was the chief bread-winner for them all. The coins he had nicked with his whip were most of what they had to spend.
With this money they sent out and got a so-called "surgeon" who did not know his business, but took the money just the same. He patched up poor "Prince" Pomiuk so that the boy was worse off than before.
The Fair closed: the Eskimo were stranded. If that had happened on a sea-beach at home, they would have known what to do: they would have laughed—for they are merry people, like our southern negroes—and they would have killed sea-birds with stones and made their way alongshore. But to be stranded in Chicago is another story. God knows how a few survivors of the band found pity in men's hearts, and straggled back to their home at Nachoak Bay.
Pomiuk's wound never healed—he could not run about, nor walk, nor even stand. His mother had to carry him everywhere. In Newfoundland the fishermen and the sealers, desperately poor as they were, took them into their bare cabins, and gave them bread and tea taken from the mouths of their own hungry children.
Dr. Frederick Cook, creation's champion liar, did a golden deed for which the Recording Angel should give him a good mark in the Book of Life. He made room for several of the Eskimo on his journey to the Labrador coast: and fishing-schooners took the rest of the survivors.
Imagine how happy Pomiuk was, in spite of the pain in his hip, when he thought of crawling back into the mouth of his own snow house again, and rubbing noses with his father once more!
But when the mother and the child were put ashore at Nachoak Bay—they were told that the father's spirit was at play with the rest among the northern lights. In this world they would not see him again. He had been murdered while his wife and child were in Chicago.
It was at that dark hour that Dr. Grenfell came into his life.
Grenfell found the poor little boy, who had earned so much money, and brought so much glory to his tribe, lying naked on the rocks beside the hut. The mother had married again, and gone off "over the mountains" with theother children, leaving her crippled son to the tender mercy of the neighbors. It was indeed a "come-down" in the world for a "prince," whose father was a "king" among his fellows. It was deemed best to send Pomiuk south on the little hospital steamer with the Doctor. The Doctor could fix him up, if anybody could, and moreover—this was the clinching argument—he was "no good fishing." So the next day found Pomiuk bound south, clasping his only worldly possession—a letter from a clergyman of Andover, Massachusetts. There was a photograph with it. If you asked Pomiuk what he had there, he would turn on that magic smile and show you the picture, and say: "Me love even him."
The minister who wrote the letter sent money for the care of the poor "Prince." Next summer Grenfell saw him again, and the child laughed as he said, "Me Gabriel Pomiuk now." A Moravian missionary had given him the name. They had made him as comfortable as possible at the Indian Harbor hospital: his own disposition made him happy. He had been moved from the hospital to a near-by home, and he hoppedabout on crutches as gayly as though he could run and play like the other children.
But malignant disease in his hip was sapping his strength, just as the ants of Africa will eat away a leg of furniture till it is a hollow shell, and one day the whole table or chair falls crashing. His strength was ebbing fast. Suddenly he became very ill: he was put to bed, with high fever, and was often unconscious. In a week he was dead. But that little generous, courageous life was the foundation-stone of Dr. Grenfell's noble orphanage at St. Anthony, put up with the pennies of American children, where I had the pleasure of telling dog-stories to smiling Eskimo boys in the summer of 1919. Gabriel is the angel of comfort: and this small Gabriel has left behind him the comfort of fatherless homes in Labrador for ages yet to be.
Dr. Grenfell says that on the night of his passing the heavens were aflame with the aurora. It was as though little Prince Pomiuk's father had come to welcome him, and they were at play once more in the old games they knew.