The Jungle Books (36 page)

But one terrible winter everything betrayed them. The Tununirmiut returned from the yearly salmon fishing and made their houses on the fresh ice to the north of Bylot 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 where 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 sleighs. The edge of the floe off which the seal were used to fishing 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 Innuit 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 hoop, and the long diamond pattern of her white deerskin 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 glued to the tiny mark he had made above the hole to guide the downward thrust of his harpoon, a little sealskin 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 Innuit 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 lamps in the huts that famine was near. In good seasons, when blubber was plentiful, the light in the boat-shaped bowls 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 Innuit
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 as 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 as though he were afraid, 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 wildfire. 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 Innuit 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 says: ‘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 Innuit 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 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 so 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 neatly 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 all tipped and laced with strange colours—red, copper, and bluish—but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bitten grey. 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; sawlike edges of ice carved by the snow that flies before the wind and sunk pits where thirty or forty acres lay five or six feet 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 five 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 fireballs 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 some Thing seemed to slip into a ravine. It was certainly not human, but everybody knew that the
tornaq
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 will 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 (it is never wise to be separated from your meat), and while he was shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the keystone of the roof he saw a Thing looking at him from a little cliff of ice half a mile away. The air was hazy, and the Thing seemed to be forty feet long and ten feet high, with twenty feet of tail and a shape that quivered all along the outlines. The girl saw it too, but instead of crying aloud with terror, said quietly: “That is Quiquern. What comes after?”