The Second Jungle Book
feet of the rowers, and the women sang songs as they glided from cape to
cape over the glassy, cold waters. All the luxuries that the Tununirmiut
knew came from the south--driftwood for sleigh-runners, rod-iron for
harpoon-tips, steel knives, tin kettles that cooked food much better
than the old soap-stone affairs, flint and steel, and even matches, as
well as coloured ribbons for the women’s hair, little cheap mirrors,
and red cloth for the edging of deerskin dress-jackets. Kadlu traded the
rich, creamy, twisted narwhal horn and musk-ox teeth (these are just
as valuable as pearls) to the Southern Inuit, and they, in turn, traded
with the whalers and the missionary-posts of Exeter and Cumberland
Sounds; and so the chain went on, till a kettle picked up by a ship’s
cook in the Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber-lamp
somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic Circle.
Kadlu, being a good hunter, was rich in iron harpoons, snow-knives,
bird-darts, and all the other things that make life easy up there in the
great cold; and he was the head of his tribe, or, as they say, “the
man who knows all about it by practice.” This did not give him any
authority, except now and then he could advise his friends to change
their hunting-grounds; but Kotuko used it to domineer a little, in the
lazy, fat Inuit fashion, over the other boys, when they came out at
night to play ball in the moonlight, or to sing the Child’s Song to the
Aurora Borealis.
But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was tired of
making snares for wild-fowl and kit-foxes, and most tired of all of
helping the women to chew seal-and deer-skins (that supples them as
nothing else can) the long day through, while the men were out hunting.
He wanted to go into the quaggi, the Singing-House, when the hunters
gathered there for their mysteries, and the angekok, the sorcerer,
frightened them into the most delightful fits after the lamps were put
out, and you could hear the Spirit of the Reindeer stamping on the roof;
and when a spear was thrust out into the open black night it came back
covered with hot blood. He wanted to throw his big boots into the net
with the tired air of the head of a family, and to gamble with the
hunters when they dropped in of an evening and played a sort of
home-made roulette with a tin pot and a nail. There were hundreds of
things that he wanted to do, but the grown men laughed at him and said,
“Wait till you have been in the buckle, Kotuko. Hunting is not ALL
catching.”
Now that his father had named a puppy for him, things looked brighter.
An Inuit does not waste a good dog on his son till the boy knows
something of dog-driving; and Kotuko was more than sure that he knew
more than everything.
If the puppy had not had an iron constitution he would have died from
over-stuffing and over-handling. Kotuko made him a tiny harness with a
trace to it, and hauled him all over the house-floor, shouting: “Aua!
Ja aua!” (Go to the right). “Choiachoi! Ja choiachoi!” (Go to the left).
“Ohaha!” (Stop). The puppy did not like it at all, but being fished for
in this way was pure happiness beside being put to the sleigh for the
first time. He just sat down on the snow, and played with the seal-hide
trace that ran from his harness to the pitu, the big thong in the bows
of the sleigh. Then the team started, and the puppy found the heavy
ten-foot sleigh running up his back, and dragging him along the snow,
while Kotuko laughed till the tears ran down his face. There followed
days and days of the cruel whip that hisses like the wind over ice, and
his companions all bit him because he did not know his work, and the
harness chafed him, and he was dot allowed to sleep with Kotuko any
more, but had to take the coldest place in the passage. It was a sad
time for the puppy.
The boy learned, too, as fast as the dog; though a dog-sleigh is a
heart-breaking thing to manage. Each beast is harnessed, the weakest
nearest to the driver, by his own separate trace, which runs under
his left fore-leg to the main thong, where it is fastened by a sort
of button and loop which can be slipped by a turn of the wrist, thus
freeing one dog at a time. This is very necessary, because young dogs
often get the trace between their hind legs, where it cuts to the bone.
And they one and all WILL go visiting their friends as they run, jumping
in and out among the traces. Then they fight, and the result is more
mixed than a wet fishing-line next morning. A great deal of trouble can
be avoided by scientific use of the whip. Every Inuit boy prides himself
as being a master of the long lash; but it is easy to flick at a mark on
the ground, and difficult to lean forward and catch a shirking dog just
behind the shoulders when the sleigh is going at full speed. If you call
one dog’s name for “visiting,” and accidentally lash another, the two
will fight it out at once, and stop all the others. Again, if you travel
with a companion and begin to talk, or by yourself and sing, the dogs
will halt, turn round, and sit down to hear what you have to say. Kotuko
was run away from once or twice through forgetting to block the sleigh
when he stopped; and he broke many lashings, and ruined a few thongs
before he could be trusted with a full team of eight and the light
sleigh. Then he felt himself a person of consequence, and on smooth,
black ice, with a bold heart and a quick elbow, he smoked along over
the levels as fast as a pack in full cry. He would go ten miles to the
seal-holes, and when he was on the hunting-grounds he would twitch a
trace loose from the pitu, and free the big black leader, who was
the cleverest dog in the team. As soon as the dog had scented a
breathing-hole, Kotuko would reverse the sleigh, driving a couple of
sawed-off antlers, that stuck up like perambulator-handles from the
back-rest, deep into the snow, so that the team could not get away. Then
he would crawl forward inch by inch, and wait till the seal came up
to breathe. Then he would stab down swiftly with his spear and
running-line, and presently would haul his seal up to the lip of the
ice, while the black leader came up and helped to pull the carcass
across the ice to the sleigh. That was the time when the harnessed dogs
yelled and foamed with excitement, and Kotuko laid the long lash like a
red-hot bar across all their faces, till the carcass froze stiff. Going
home was the heavy work. The loaded sleigh had to be humoured among the
rough ice, and the dogs sat down and looked hungrily at the seal instead
of pulling. At last they would strike the well-worn sleigh-road to the
village, and toodle-kiyi along the ringing ice, heads down and tails
up, while Kotuko struck up the “An-gutivaun tai-na tau-na-ne taina” (The
Song of the Returning Hunter), and voices hailed him from house to house
under all that dim, star-littern sky.
When Kotuko the dog came to his full growth he enjoyed himself too. He
fought his way up the team steadily, fight after fight, till one fine
evening, over their food, he tackled the big, black leader (Kotuko the
boy saw fair play), and made second dog of him, as they say. So he was
promoted to the long thong of the leading dog, running five feet in
advance of all the others: it was his bounden duty to stop all fighting,
in harness or out of it, and he wore a collar of copper wire, very thick
and heavy. On special occasions he was fed with cooked food inside the
house, and sometimes was allowed to sleep on the bench with Kotuko. He
was a good seal-dog, and would keep a musk-ox at bay by running round
him and snapping at his heels. He would even--and this for a sleigh-dog
is the last proof of bravery--he would even stand up to the gaunt Arctic
wolf, whom all dogs of the North, as a rule, fear beyond anything
that walks the snow. He and his master--they did not count the team of
ordinary dogs as company--hunted together, day after day and night
after night, fur-wrapped boy and savage, long-haired, narrow-eyed,
white-fanged, yellow brute. All an Inuit has to do is to get food and
skins for himself and his family. The women-folk make the skins into
clothing, and occasionally help in trapping small game; but the bulk
of the food--and they eat enormously--must be found by the men. If the
supply fails there is no one up there to buy or beg or borrow from. The
people must die.
An Inuit does not think of these chances till he is forced to. Kadlu,
Kotuko, Amoraq, and the boy-baby who kicked about in Amoraq’s fur hood
and chewed pieces of blubber all day, were as happy together as any
family in the world. They came of a very gentle race--an Inuit seldom
loses his temper, and almost never strikes a child--who did not know
exactly what telling a real lie meant, still less how to steal. They
were content to spear their living out of the heart of the bitter,
hopeless cold; to smile oily smiles, and tell queer ghost and fairy
tales of evenings, and eat till they could eat no more, and sing the
endless woman’s song: “Amna aya, aya amna, ah! ah!” through the long
lamp-lighted days as they mended their clothes and their hunting-gear.
But one terrible winter everything betrayed them. The Tununirmiut
returned from the yearly salmon-fishing, and made their houses on the
early ice to the north of Bylot’s Island, ready to go after the seal
as soon as the sea froze. But it was an early and savage autumn. All
through September there were continuous gales that broke up the smooth
seal-ice when it was only four or five feet thick, and forced it inland,
and piled a great barrier, some twenty miles broad, of lumped and ragged
and needly ice, over which it was impossible to draw the dog-sleighs.
The edge of the floe off which the seal were used to fish in winter
lay perhaps twenty miles beyond this barrier, and out of reach of the
Tununirmiut. Even so, they might have managed to scrape through the
winter on their stock of frozen salmon and stored blubber, and what
the traps gave them, but in December one of their hunters came across a
tupik (a skin-tent) of three women and a girl nearly dead, whose men
had come down from the far North and been crushed in their little skin
hunting-boats while they were out after the long-horned narwhal. Kadlu,
of course, could only distribute the women among the huts of the winter
village, for no Inuit dare refuse a meal to a stranger. He never knows
when his own turn may come to beg. Amoraq took the girl, who was about
fourteen, into her own house as a sort of servant. From the cut of her
sharp-pointed hood, and the long diamond pattern of her white deer-skin
leggings, they supposed she came from Ellesmere Land. She had never seen
tin cooking-pots or wooden-shod sleighs before; but Kotuko the boy and
Kotuko the dog were rather fond of her.
Then all the foxes went south, and even the wolverine, that growling,
blunt-headed little thief of the snow, did not take the trouble to
follow the line of empty traps that Kotuko set. The tribe lost a
couple of their best hunters, who were badly crippled in a fight with
a musk-ox, and this threw more work on the others. Kotuko went out, day
after day, with a light hunting-sleigh and six or seven of the strongest
dogs, looking till his eyes ached for some patch of clear ice where
a seal might perhaps have scratched a breathing-hole. Kotuko the dog
ranged far and wide, and in the dead stillness of the ice-fields
Kotuko the boy could hear his half-choked whine of excitement, above a
seal-hole three miles away, as plainly as though he were at his elbow.
When the dog found a hole the boy would build himself a little, low snow
wall to keep off the worst of the bitter wind, and there he would wait
ten, twelve, twenty hours for the seal to come up to breathe, his eyes