Brother Eskimo

Front matter

Book .

GopightN?

COFffitGHT DEPOSIT.

Chapter I

K ELEEPELES, whose name means in English “The Young Hunter,” lay on his back and stared up at the ceiling. It was not papered or plastered or painted like your ceiling; it was made of snow and curved over his head just like the inside of the shell which, if you are careful, you can lift off a hardboiled egg. For Keleepeles was an Eskimo boy and lived in an igloo, — a dome-shaped hut built of ice and snow.

Close beside him snuggled Cunayou, his brother, who was four years younger than he. He found it hard not to lose his temper rather often with Cunayou, for while the elder boy was very earnest and worked hard over his hunting and fishing, Cunayou used to lie about in a very provoking manner, and when scolded only stretched his wide mouth into an enormous and good-natured grin that made him look like the sea sculpin after which he was named. It is known in the Arctic Circle, where the brothers lived, that for his size the sea sculpin has a bigger mouth than anything which flies, creeps, walks, crawls, or swims.

And while we are on the subject of names, it is without question that the small, brown folk of the North are very sensible in such matters. Amongst people we both know, for instance, there may be two Percy Smiths and the only thing in which they are alike is their names. But if they lived in this northern land, where you and I are going to spend a year, one would probably be called “the boy with a face like a seal,” and the other “the boy who rolls when he walks.” That is the way of it. So if you are traveling across the ice and meet a man who has one leg shorter than the other, you just say something about his leg and that is his name. Or if another stranger has had his face clawed by a white bear you just mention how ugly he is and he will answer at once. It is all very simpie and easy and much better than a lot of Percys and Harolds whose names don’t mean anything at all.

J ust as this moment Cunayou was snoring. He always snored when he was not grinning. It was not an ordinary twelve-year-old snore. Of course you know that snores have ages just like people, and after a little experience you can come pretty near guessing a person’s age by the way he snores. This was an insulting kind of thing that began with a saucy, soft, wet little gurgle, went on into something like a flute, and finished with a ptarmigan whistle. Keleepeles paid no attention to it. He had heard it for so long that he hardly heard it at all ; what seemed curious was that he heard no snore from his father, Aivick. He looked about the igloo. Neither his father nor his mother was there.

Just a word more about snoring. Some people think that the principal thing about the Arctic Circle is the midnight sun. Others think about seals or polar bears or caribou, or reindeer getting fat before Christmas work begins, or gray geese, or black swans, or blue foxes. But if you want a real picture of the Arctic, just imagine little, white, egg-shell igloos scattered about on the plains of ice, and inside them small brown people, all lying on their backs and snoring while the wind whistles down from the north.

Presently Keleepeles felt restless and got up. It was not necessary for him to dress. He was already completely dressed ; for in the best Eskimo families when you go to bed you don’t take anything off, but just put a few things over you, such as a caribou skin or two or three bearskins, or a walrus hide. And when he got up the bed-spring did not squeak, for he slept on a little shelf of snow close up against the curving roof.

He stood for a moment staring at the hole in the floor in which the deep sea-water lay very green and quiet. This would be a comfortable arrangement to have in one’s home, for if th© weather were bad outside you could lie in bed and fish; and you could decide for yourself whether you would sooner stretch out and read a boy’s magazine or roll over and watch a twenty-pound salmon thrashing a broad silver tail while it was being pulled straight up through the floor of your bedroom.

Keleepeles stepped around the hole, carefully avoiding the automatic contrivance which tilts up and makes a noise when there is a bite — for fishing goes on all the time — and went out. He didn’t go through the door, there being no door, but got down on his hands and knees and crawled along a narrow tunnel. Then he stood up, rubbed his eyes, and stared. He could not see much, for it was snowing hard, but he started for the igloos that the rest of the tribe had built, just a hundred yards away. Presently he came to a dead stop, for at his feet stretched a broad sheet of gray water into which a multitude of snowflakes settled in a mysterious silence. The village had disappeared.

Now, it is very easy for a man or a child or a cat or a tame rabbit or even a circus elephant to get lost, and it frequently happens down our way, but in the North it is not people or animals but villages that go astray, and what had taken place this time was that the great ice-field on which Aivick’s igloo was built, near the others, had suddenly split in two. Part of it grounded in shallow water and stayed where it was, while the piece on which Keleepeles and Cunayou slept was sailing away, driven before the storm in a strong current.

He stood for a long time and thought hard. Aivick, and the boys’ mother, Allegoo, the Drinking Cup, were no doubt perfectly safe with friends, and probably at this moment were carving titbits from along the back of a square-flipper seal and chewing them with real content. That is another advantage of the North. You don’t telephone the butcher, who gets the steak from the packing-house and hands it to the delivery man, who gives it to the cook, who turns it over on the stove and then turns it over to the housemaid, who puts it on the table, where your father turns a piece of it over to you. Nothing like that, at all. You kill a seal and eat it, with no bother about cooks, butchers, housemaids, and stoves. The sea is the general shop where one goes for what one wants. So Keleepeles did n’t worry about his parents, but instead began to realize that now he must live by spear and line and put into practice all that Aivick had taught him, and that while he was still a boy of sixteen he must act as a man and do a man’s work, and, for a while at least, be both father and mother to the sculpin-mouthed youth who was still snoring in his own peculiar way. There was just one difficulty. The dogs had gone with Aivick.

He walked slowly back to the igloo and after a moment’s hesitation sat squarely down on the sleeping form of his brother. The ptarmigan whistle broke off suddenly and Cunayou heaved himself up.

“What is the matter? My bones are still full of sleep. Am I a cow walrus, that you sit on me?”

“You are sick with sleep. I want to talk with you.”

“Then talk, O wise one.” Cunayou knew how to be very impertinent.

“The village is lost,” said Keleepeles, slowly. “I tried to walk there, but came to deep water. We are alone — we sons of Aivick.”

Cunayou sat up very straight. Presently he began to grin, — a wide, irrestible grin that seemed to spread to his ears. His oily, copper-colored face became covered with deep, soft wrinkles, his small, flat nose nearly disappeared, and his lids were half closed, but through their narrow slits his bright, beady eyes shone like black stars.

“Then for a time I shall do as I like,” he chuckled.

“For a time you shall do as I like. Can you feed yourself like a seal pup? And when the white bear climbs on the roof of the igloo, what will you do then?”

“Nothing, but you ’ll do it. Is not your name the Young Hunter? My stomach is cold and I would eat.”

Keleepeles tossed him a slice of half -frozen salmon, but Cunayou shook his head.

“It lies beneath my ribs like ice.”

“The seal meat is lost with the yillage and I cannot kill more in a storm. Be content.” But Cunayou had a discomforting vision. What if his brother should kill no seal? “Can we live, you and I?” he asked a little anxiously.

“The wolverine is a robber and he lives, and the white fox is a coward, yet he grows fat. Shall we starve who are neither robbers or cowards? Snore again, my brother, as only you can snore, and when the storm clears you shall stuff your stomach.”

Cunayou took comfort and soon the ptarmigan whistle sounded again,. Keleepeles squatted on the floor, thinking hard. He knew that he would never see that village again. By and by the great floe would recommence its journey and ultimately disappear through Baffin Straits. Aivick and the others would not be there. Somewhere along the shore a new village would be carved among the windwhipped snow-banks, and in the long Arctic evening Allegoo would talk of her sons.

In the North men are like small specks on a thousand-mile counterpane. Keleepeles knew this, but he knew also that sometime and somewhere he would see Aiviek’s kayak, or hunting boat, gliding over the green water, or catch sight of his tiny figure miles away on the flat ice. He drew a long breath and began to chew reflectively at the frozen salmon. But what should he do without the dogs?

Keleepeles and all his tribe lived on the ice without fire and water; and when one can do this, one is not worried by the loss of a village. It was the season of the year when the square-flipper seal comes up to bask on the drifting floes; and to hunt the square-flipper Aivick and the rest tramped many a league behind their panting dogs. The week before, Keleepeles had made his first kill, and now he surveyed his weapons and* the contents of the igloo with sudden and profound interest.

On the floor were some skins of the coast caribou, and against the wall was skewered a piece of ice hacked from the house. Beneath it and a little to one side flickered an oil lamp made of a wisp of moss stuck in a small stone vessel filled with seal oil. Drop by drop the water fell into a small copper bowl hammered out by the Yellowknife Indians. Aivick in turn had hammered it out of the Yellowknives. The water was not to be drunk, but squirted from Aivick’s lips upon the runners of his sledge, next morning.

Against the wall stood two spears, which were very precious, and with them a short, thick bow made of driftwood and a sheaf of stoneheaded arrows. For the rest there were a piece of flint, two knives, a bundle of moss, some fragments of timber from a wreck in Coronation Gulf, a coil of rope made of walrus sinew, a bladder float, two sinew fishing-lines, four hooks of fish bone and two of carved ivory, a piece of flint and a handful of touchwood for lighting fires. Such were the worldly possessions of Keleepeles, the son of Aivick and Allegoo.

By these things Aivick had lived, and the mind of Keleepeles did not go beyond them. The boy had learned to bait a hook before or almost as soon as he could walk, and when he was twelve he saw Aivick and Larquil the stout man kill a white bear with their spears, beside an ice hummock, while the dogs snapped at the big creature’s flanks. He knew the weather signs and though he had not come to full height he was very strong. Now he would just have to do by himself what previously he had done under Aivick’s eye. So he worried not at all, but crawled into the sleeping-bag beside Cunayou with a queer little appeal to the Great Spirit, who keeps a friendly eye on all good Eskimo, that in the days to come he might prove himself a man.

Do you begin to see him, — this short, broadshouldered, flat-faced, black-eyed boy? He was honest, because in the far North the lives of men depend on the few things they possess, and to steal is to take away that upon which life depends. He was brave, because the coward is likely to die soon under the midnight sun. He dreamed of hunting, because his days were destined to be one long hunt, and his standing would be reckoned by the flight of his harpoon and the thrust of his broad-bladed spear. He was wise, because while he thought slowly he acted like a flash, and though Keleepeles did not know it, but only did the things that he found to do in his wanderings, and did them bravely and without complaint, he was destined to become the wisest and strongest Eskimo between Coronation Gulf and Baffin Straits.

Chapter II

I T was toward the end of March that Aivick stayed behind with the village, while his house and his sons moved on. In the month of March the Arctic Eskimo notice that the days are getting a little longer. There are perhaps five hours of good light. The past five months have been partly spent under the shimmery curtain of the aurora. This is not the pale light that sometimes hangs in the winter sky of the country most of us live in, but a great sheet of violet and purple flame that half fills the heavens and quivers exactly as though some giant were shaking one edge of it till strange waves of color ripple through it from end to end. Keleepeles always watched the aurora very carefully, — though, of course, that is not what he called it, — because one could read the weather by its depth and changes. And for the rest of the time the light was something like a gray dawn that got brighter if the skies were clear.

The thing to remember about Keleepeles is that his family had a yearly program. It was n’t anything like yours. Instead of going where they wanted to, they went where they had to because the ice took them.

It was a simple and practical and very cheap way of traveling. Instead of jamming things into an innovation trunk, they took the whole house with them, and saved all the packing. There were n'o tickets — and no dining-car, where they stood in the aisle and wondered why the other passengers ate so much and so slowly. The dining-car was just under the house. In fact, the house moved along on top of the dining-car, which was a mile or two deep. The rate of travel was slow and the climate did not alter, but one did not miss the train, and one knew in a very accurate way just where he was going. One’s friends and relations went along, too. This may not always be an advantage, for sometimes a fellow wants to get away to talk about his present friends to a set of entirely new ones, but, be that as it may, the whole arrangement has suited the Eskimo so well for a great number of years that they are not likely to change it.

Now, as March was nearly over, the mind of Aivick the father of Keleepeles had been full of walrus-hunting, and if you have ever seen a walrus you will realize that it does not take many of them to fill one’s mind. So when Keleepeles woke up next morning, he crawled out of his sleeping-bag and fingered the two spears that stood against the wall. Presently he poked the butt end of one of them into the ribs of Cunayou.

“Get up, brother; we have work to do.”

Cunayou rubbed his eyes. “I have a great hunger. Go and kill something.”

Keleepeles smiled. “I go, and you with me,” he said. ‘To-day we shall have fresh meat.”

“What meat?”

“A cow walrus. The flesh beside her ribs is very good.”

“Does the wolverine kill the whHe bear?” said Cunayou, his eyes very round.

“Two wolverines, you and I, will kill to-day.”

“But we are small and the walrus is big like the oomiak, the women’s boat.”

Keleepeles chuckled. “His heart is not far under his skin.”

“But he has tusks, and a beard. I like not his face when his mouth is open. Also, he roars like the grinding ice. My stomach is turned within me. I want no meat.”

“I speak of a cow, not a bull,” said the elder boy, steadily. “I am the son of Aivick and not afraid. You too are his son. We shall do great things, you and I, and when again we see Allegoo, our mother, we shall be hunters and not children. Remember the tale of the great sickness that fell upon the tribe, and how Allegoo killed the white bear when -the men were too weak to hunt. She who was nursing you put you down so that she might fight. I watched from the mouth of the igloo, and saw the bear run upon her spear. She was not strong enough to hold it, so put the end in a crack in the ice and the other end went through the bear and stuck out of his back. Are you a girl child and do your knees knock together when you walk?”

There was a long silence. Then Cunayou began to grin and his brother knew that the point was won. The grin widened and the boy’s mouth lengthened till its corners seemed to disappear at the back of his neck, while his white teeth gleamed like polished ivory. He was very fat, and, as Aivick always said, walked near the ground. And this is a great help to a hunter, though it comes a little hard in soft snow.

“Give me a spear,” he said, smiling. “Where do we go?”

“To the open water and follow it. We are not far from land.”

They crawled out, and, before starting off, Keleepeles searched the horizon carefully. Another and larger ice-floe had come up in the night, and where it touched the one on which they stood it had thrust up a pressure ridge of tumbled blocks, several feet high. This stretched east and west, it seemed for miles, but Keleepeles, climbing to the top, thought he caught a glint of water far to the south, and just beyond it a bit of broken sky-line that looked like land. It was all a dead, glistening white, with that unbroken glare which eats hotly into a white man’s eyes and makes him blind. Keleepeles climbed down, fished in his pocket, and pulled out two pairs of the bone blinkers which the Eskimo use at a season of the year. Then, with their eyes shielded from the reflection of the plain, the boys struck south.

It was not bad going, except for the ridges which are like long thick walls that have been overturned in great confusion. When icefields, driven by the tide, current or wind, meet, their edges crumble from enormous pressure, and these, turning upward, form great broken parapets that traverse the Arctic from end to end and from top to bottom. To Keleepeles, who understood them, they meant extra work and that was all. Here and there as the boys tramped southward were unexpected pools of m’otionless green water at which he looked contentedly and hurried on. It was a good omen for the future. At the end of two hours he dodged behind a spur of the ridge and beckoned excitedly to Cunayou, who toiled up, the sweat pouring from his round face.

“Swallow your breath and do not speak; but look”

The fat boy gulped and peeped, and as he peeped his bones turned to water and his stomach rolled over inside of him. Two hundred yards away was a patch of open water where the ice-field, driven east, had been thrust off shore by a low spur of polished rock. In its lee a tiny spot in the Arctic Ocean lay open to the sun. Cunayou’s eyes bulged as he stared, for on the smooth surface of the rock a herd of walrus lay basking in the sun.

“Good hunting,” whispered Keleepeles.

Cunayou gulped again but did not stir. Farthest from them a great bull raised his whiskered head, and the sun fell bright on his long downward-gleaming tusks. The coarse bristles about his mouth were wet, and the boy could see the big mouth open redly and the bull-like head tilt back, while the great creature sent out a deep, hoarse, booming roar that made Cunayou’s knees knock together as though he were indeed a girl. Between the big bull and the water the rest were scattered lazily, — huge, sleek, shapeless masses with swollen glossy sides, strong, shiny flippers, and broad, silky backs.

The younger boy drew a long and difficult breath.

“How much does he weigh, — the lord of the herd?”

“More than fifty Cunayous,” whispered his brother with brotherly comfort. “Would you like to kill him?”

“Not this year; some other year,” came the trembling reply. “Why should the lord of the herd die at my hands?”

Keleepeles chuckled. “Your stomach may be sick, but it is full of great mercy. Choose the one which is to die.”

Cunayou looked long and thoughtfully. “That calf near the water/’ he said after a pause.

“He is too near safety and we should not have time ; also, we should be between the lord of the herd and the water. It is not well to stand between a bull walrus and the place where he would go.”

A prickly feeling ran suddenly through the roots of Cunayou’s black hair, and just then he heard a friendly whisper: “It is not long since Allegoo carried you on her back and there is much to learn. The walrus has a great body but a small head. He thinks with his stomach and there is nothing to fear. His fat is very sweet. Were we in the kayaks which we shall build when the next moon comes, I should go hunt elsewhere, but here is meat for the taking. It is easy. Not far from the bull and nearly as far from the water behold that two-year cow. She is young and very tender. When we run suddenly at her, beware of the bull. Keep on one side and a little behind me. Now we shall kill.”

The great bull raised his grizzled head and bellowed a furious

challenge r f

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Very carefully Keleepeles climbed down from the ridge and worked along its northern side toward the shore, with his brother at his heels. When the cover ended there was but a hundred feet of clear ice between them and the drowsy herd. He paused for a moment, glanced over his shoulder to see if Cunayou was ready, then, sloping his spear, dashed out. On the instant the old bull saw him, and, lifting his mighty shoulders, sent out a hoarse note of alarm. Fear rippled through the herd and there began the lurching of huge, smooth bodies toward safety and the deep green water.

“Come quickly,” panted Keleeples. “They move down hill and very fast. Run in at the side, after me.”

In another second he had leaped upon the rock. The great bull halted, raised his grizzled head, and bellowed a furious challenge that turned Cunayou’s blood to water. He was very much frightened, but his brother heeded not. Jumping to one side, Keleepeles sprang toward the laboring cow. J ust at that moment a stone turned beneath his foot and Cunayou saw him stagger. A sick feeling flooded over the younger boy, but, remembering orders, he made a thrust at the smaller animal. Simultaneously the bull, answering the calls of the herd, flung himself toward the water. The next moment Keleepeles’s spear was darting in and out of the cow’s glossy side.

Half an hour afterward Cunayou gave a long, contented sigh, stopped eating, and looked around. So far* as concerns the cow, it was not a pretty sight ; but, then, neither would it be if you got your steak straight from the animal instead of from the cook. Cunayou, however, was full of great contentment. Presently) Keleepelesi began to talk.

“It was a good hunt and you did well, my brother, that you went straight for the cow as I told you. Walrus, having round heads, do not remember one thing long, for it is the animals with the flat heads that are wise and remember. He is strong in the sea but weak on the land.”

Cunayou nodded. He was too full of walrus to be anything but lazy and grateful. “There is a lot of meat here, but how shall we take it home, having no dogs?” he yawned, a little sleepily.

His brother’s eyes began to twinkle and he got up and pushed the butt of his spear several times into a snowbank that lay close beside the rock.

“It is better to take our home to the meat. We will bring what is in our- igloo and build another one here. There are holes where the square-flippers will come for air and sun, and under these cliffs the she bear suckles her young beneath the snow. Next moon we shall be in our kayak, hunting with the harpoon, and then will come long days with much food. Is it well, little brother?”

It all sounded so promising that of course Cunayou nodded at once and began to grin.

“There is much that we shall see,” went on the other, happily, “when the winter has run away in water to the sea. The ducks and geese and eagles will come, and there will be many things along the shore. The caribou will run.

very many of them, and the gray wolves will pull down the outcasts of the herd. The white foxes will feast on dead whales when the tide is low, and the old birds will teach their young just as I shall teach you, O snoring one, with a mouth like a water-hole.”

Now, the reason that Keleepeles finished up with his somewhat insulting remark was that Cunayou, who was lying flat on his back on the bare rock, had fallen sound asleep.

Chapter III

T HEN came the last night the boys spent in the house of their father. Nearly every one down our way has moved at least once and knows just what a curious lost feeling one has when the furniture is standing in the street and the furniture man is scratching his head and wondering just how he is going to get the things into the van. There is something shocking and disgraceful about it. But this move was different. The old house would never be used again, and by and by would dissolve into the sea. It is true that the furniture was in the street, but the boys merely rolled it up into bundles and slung it on their backs by means of pack-straps that ran across their foreheads. There were the spears and knives and fishing-lines, but Keleepeles carried these in his hands, and when they arrived at the cow-walrus place there was only the simple so matter of building a new house and the whole thing was finished.

Now, it takes two skilled hunters working an hour to build an igloo that is fit to live in, and it took the boys a good deal longer. The snow must be just right and wind-packed not too hard, and the blocks must be cut with the proper thickness and taper, and the curve of the roof must be true, or the whole thing will collapse half-way up.

The first three rounds were not so bad. Keleepeles stood inside and placed the blocks one by one as Cunayou, pressing them against his stomach, staggered up with load after load. Higher up the work got harder, and the last three courses, which are more and more horizontal, nearly broke the big boy’s heart. But the igloo grew, though it was not pretty, and the joints were uneven and the thickness of wall was irregular.

And just here it might be well to say something about igloos, — that is, if you really want to understand the boys’ method of life.

To be civilized is to take the things of the country and use them as intelligently as you know how. So ‘Keleepeles was, if you think about it, really a civilized person. He knew, for instance, that the walls of an igloo must not be too thick when the weather is mild or too thin when it is very cold; that the entrance tunnel must face down wind, and that it is a labor-saving plan to cut the first course or two of blocks out of the floor. It is the habit of the white bear sometimes to climb on top of an igloo in search of food in a season of storm, so the roof must be strong enough to carry him; and if an igloo is properly built, the key block, the last to go in at the very crown of the arch, should bind with every one of the previous course.