The Walrus Hunters: A Romance of the Realms of Ice. Robert Michael Ballantyne
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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.
“Surely you are not fond of him!” exclaimed Mangivik, regarding his daughter with a look of anxiety.
“You know that I’m not,” answered the girl, playfully hitting her sire on the back with the flap of her tail.
“Of course not—of course not; you could not be fond of an ugly walrus like him,” said the father, replying to her pleasantry by fondly patting her knee.
Just then a young man was seen advancing from the beach, where he had left his kayak.
“It is Oolalik,” said Mrs Mangivik, shading her eyes with her hand from the sun, which, in all the strength of its meridian splendour, was shining full on her fat face. “He must have made a good hunt, or he would not have come home before the others.”
As she spoke Nootka arose hastily and re-entered the hut, from out of which there issued almost