several hundreds of miles northward, had grown, as a snowball might have grown if rolled the same distance over the Arctic wastes; with this difference—that whereas the snowball would have retained its original shape, though not its size, the tales lost not only their pristine form and size, but became so amazingly distorted that the original reporters would probably have failed to recognise them. And now, at last, here was actually a Kablunet—a real foreigner in the body; but not alive! It was extremely disappointing!
Our sturdy Eskimo, however, was not a good judge of Kablunet vitality. He was yet rubbing the man’s broad chest, with a sort of pathetic pity, when a flutter of the heart startled him. He rubbed with more vigour. He became excited, and, seizing Red Rooney by the arms, shook him with considerable violence, the result being that the foreigner opened his eyes and looked at him inquiringly.
“Hallo, my lad,” said Rooney, in a faint voice; “not quite so hard. I’m all right. Just help me up, like a good fellow.”
He spoke in English, which was, of course, a waste of breath in the circumstances. In proof of his being “all right,” he fell back again, and fainted away.
The Eskimo leaped up. He was one of those energetic beings who seem to know in all emergencies what is best to be done, and do it promptly. Unrolling the bear-skin, which yet retained a little of its first owner’s warmth, he wrapped the Kablunet in it from head to foot, leaving an opening in front of his mouth for breathing purposes. With his knife—a stone one—he cut off a little lump of blubber from the seal, and placed that in the opening, so that the stranger might eat on reviving, if so inclined, or let it alone, if so disposed. Then, turning his face towards the land, he scurried away over the ice like a hunted partridge, or a hairy ball driven before an Arctic breeze.
He made such good use of his short legs that in less than an hour he reached a little hut, which seemed to nestle under the wing of a great cliff in order to avoid destruction by the glittering walls of an impending glacier. The hut had no proper doorway, but a tunnel-shaped entrance, about three feet high and several feet long. Falling on his knees, the Eskimo crept into the tunnel and disappeared. Gaining the inner end of it, he stood up and glared, speechless, at his astonished wife.
She had cause for surprise, for never since their wedding-day had Nuna beheld such an expression on the fat face of her amiable husband.
“Okiok,” she said, “have you seen an evil spirit?”
“No,” he replied.
“Why, then, do you glare?”
Of course Nuna spoke in choice Eskimo, which we render into English with as much fidelity to the native idiom as seems consistent with the agreeable narration of our tale.
“Hoi!” exclaimed Okiok, in reply to her question, but without ceasing to glare and breathe hard.
“Has my husband become a walrus, that he can only shout and snort?” inquired Nuna, with the slightest possible twinkle in her eyes, as she raised herself out of the lamp-smoke, and laid down the stick with which she had been stirring the contents of a stone pot.
Instead of answering the question, Okiok turned to two chubby and staring youths, of about fifteen and sixteen respectively, who were mending spears, and said sharply, “Norrak, Ermigit, go, harness the dogs.”
Norrak rose with a bound, and dived into the tunnel. Ermigit, although willing enough, was not quite so sharp. As he crawled into the tunnel and was disappearing, his father sent his foot in the same direction, and, having thus intimated the necessity for urgent haste, he turned again to his wife with a somewhat softened expression.
“Give me food, Nuna. Little food has passed into me since yesterday at sunrise. I starve. When I have eaten, you shall hear words that will make you dream for a moon. I have seen,”—he became solemn at this point, and lowered his voice to a whisper as he advanced his head and glared again—“I have seen a—a—Kablunet!”
He drew back and gazed at his wife as connoisseurs are wont to do when examining a picture. And truly Nuna’s countenance was a picture-round, fat, comely, oily, also open-mouthed and eyed, with unbounded astonishment depicted thereon; for she thoroughly believed her husband, knowing that he was upright and never told lies.
Her mental condition did not, however, interfere with her duties. A wooden slab or plate, laden with a mess of broiled meat, soon smoked before her lord. He quickly seated himself on a raised platform, and had done some justice to it before Nuna recovered the use of her tongue.
“A Kablunet!” she exclaimed, almost solemnly. “Is he dead?”
Okiok paused, with a lump of blubber in his fingers close to his mouth.
“No; he is alive. At least he was alive when I left him. If he has not died since, he is alive still.”
Having uttered this truism, he thrust the blubber well home, and continued his meal.
Nuna’s curiosity, having been aroused, was not easily allayed. She sat down beside her spouse, and plied him with numerous questions, to which Okiok gave her brief and very tantalising replies until he was gorged, when, throwing down the platter, he turned abruptly to his wife, and said impressively—
“Open your ears, Nuna. Okiok is no longer what he was. He has been born only to-day. He has at last seen with his two eyes—a Kablunet!”
He paused to restrain his excitement. His wife clasped her hands and looked at him excitedly, waiting for more.
“This Kablunet,” he continued, “is very white, and not so ruddy as we have been told they are. His hair is brown, and twists in little circles. He wears it on the top of his head, and on the bottom of his head also—all round. He is not small or short. No; he is long and broad,—but he is thin, very thin, like the young ice at the beginning of winter. His eyes are the colour of the summer sky. His nose is like the eagle’s beak, but not so long. His mouth—I know not what his mouth is like; it is hid in a nest of hair. His words I understand not. They seem to me nonsense, but his voice is soft and deep.”
“And his dress—how does he dress?” asked Nuna, with natural feminine curiosity.
“Like ourselves,” replied Okiok, with a touch of disappointment in his tone. “The men who said the Kablunets wear strange things on their heads and long flapping things on their legs told lies.”
“Why did you not bring him here?” asked Nuna, after a few moments’ meditation on these marvels.
“Because he is too heavy to lift, and too weak to walk. He has been starving. I wrapped him in the skin of a bear, and left him with a piece of blubber at his nose. When he wakes up he will smell; then he will eat. Perhaps he will live; perhaps he will die. Who can tell? I go to fetch him.”
As the Eskimo spoke, the yelping of dogs outside told that his sons had obeyed his commands, and got ready the sledge. Without another word he crept out of the hut and jumped on the sledge, which was covered with two or three warm bearskins. Ermigit restrained the dogs, of which there were about eight, each fastened to the vehicle by a single line. Norrak handed his father the short-handled but heavy, long-lashed whip.
Okiok looked at Norrak as he grasped the instrument of punishment.
“Jump on,” he said.
Norrak did so with evident good-will. The whip flashed in the air with a serpentine swing, and went off like a pistol. The dogs yelled in alarm, and, springing away at full speed, were soon lost among the hummocks of the Arctic sea.
