The Second Jungle Book
glued to the tiny mark he had made above the hole to guide the downward
thrust of his harpoon, a little seal-skin 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
dogs’ 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 soap-stone lamps in the huts that famine was near. In good
seasons, when blubber was plentiful, the light in the boat-shaped lamps
would be two feet high--cheerful, 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 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 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” seal-hole, 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 said, ‘I will guide you to the good
seal-holes.’ To-morrow 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 pulling-rope, 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
every one who dies must spend a year in her horrible country before
going to Quadliparmiut, the Happy Place, where it never freezes and the
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 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 nearly 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 street-lamps. 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 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 sunken pits where thirty or forty
acres lay 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 ten miles
northward. The girl was always very silent, but Kotuko muttered
to himself and broke out into songs 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 fire-balls 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 something
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 can 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 (never be separated from your meat), and while he was