The No-Good Nine

by John Bemelmans Marciano

  As quietly as I could, I woke up the others and we crept out of the shelter.

  Then they saw us.

  The short one pointed his spear in our direction and said something to the tall one.

  “Hey, watch who you’re pointin’ that stick at!” the Hooligan said, threatening him.

  The tall one now took his rifle off his shoulder and started yelling at the Hooligan.

  “Oh, yeah?” the Hooligan said, like he could understand what the man was saying. “I’ll take on the both a y’uns!”

  “Will you stop!” the Thief yelled at the Hooligan. “They aren’t going to hurt you, you tabarnouche!”

  She turned to the hooded figures and talked to them. In their language.

  “You speak Inuit,” the Rude said.

  “It’s called Inuktitut,” the Thief said. “My second cousin, remember?”

  It wound up that the two Inuit were a boy our age and his father. They were traveling home and had happened upon our campsite. They were more shocked to find us than we were to see them.

  “After all, we don’t see many Americans out here,” the boy said.

  “You speak English?” the Rude said.

  “Yes,” the boy said.“I learn it in school.”

  The boy’s name was Lumiuk and while we were talking his father pointed over to our snow cave and said something.

  “Father is asking, What is that heap of snow?”

  “It’s our snow shelter,” the Thief said proudly.

  “Shelter? Father says. That’s the worst shelter I’ve ever seen! I’m sorry, but Father can be so rude,” Lumiuk said. “He also says that you would have died if it hadn’t been so warm last night.”

  “Warm?” the Rude said. “Last night was warm?”

  “Oh, yes. It was like an early spring!” Lumiuk said.

  His father was now asking another question.

  “Why are you all here?”

  The Know-It-All explained, and Lumiuk’s father nodded along like it was all normal. Not because it was in any way normal, but because the people from the south were always talking crazy stuff. As for Lumiuk, he thought it was grand.

  “Santa! Oh, I have heard much about him. I would love to travel to his workshop. But then I would love to travel anywhere. Especially the great cities I have read about in books and seen in films.”

  As it happened, Lumiuk and his dad were headed in the same direction we were going.

  “Can we please travel together?” Lumiuk said. “It is so lonely with just Father.”

  We huddled to discuss our options.

  “What options?” the Rude said. “We’re going to all die if we don’t go with them. If last night was warm, how are we gonna survive one that’s normal?”

  It was a one-for-nine, nine-for-one moment. But the bigger issue, it wound up, was convincing Lumiuk’s father to let us come with them.

  Lumiuk was definitely trying. In fact, according to the Thief, he was begging.

  “He’s saying, We must let them come with us,” the Thief said. “They will die if we don’t help them. But his dad doesn’t seem to care.”

  In fact, he was completely disgusted by our presence, and wanted no part of us being anywhere near him.

  He was a real charmer.

  I was hungry and ready for breakfast, so I went and found of can of Del Monte pineapple slices and got out the opener. Lumiuk’s father was still shaking his head no, but as soon as I dug into the can and the opener started going

  tup tup tup

  he stopped and looked at me, and then at the can of food.

  He said something. He didn’t sound angry anymore.

  “Father says you can come with us if you share your food,” Lumiuk said. “He loves canned food. In fact, he loves any food.”

  We all looked at each other.

  “Give him the can!” the Brat said, pushing me toward him.

  “But I just opened it!” I said.

  The Cruel snatched it out of my hand and gave it to Lumiuk’s dad, who ate it up so fast it was already gone.

  We were in.

  25. LIFE WITH THE INUIT

  Besides sharing our food, the one thing Lumiuk’s father insisted on was that we help do everything that Inuit children were expected to do—hunt, build igloos, and take care of the dogs. It sounded swell!

  Unfortunately, it turned out to be far from swell. For one thing, hunting was boring. I had never been hunting before, and while it sounded exciting, it, in fact, was not. It mostly involved a lot of standing around doing nothing.

  Well, first it involved a lot of mushing and then a lot of standing around doing nothing.

  For another thing, Lumiuk’s father was a big fat jerk.

  It was really disappointing. I had this idea that the Inuit were different from us ever since I was little and saw Nanook of the North. It was the supposedly real story of an Inuit hunter—Nanook—who was really nice to his kids and could build an igloo in a flash and instead of kissing his wife, they’d rub noses. He was super-quick with his spear and hunted whatever he wanted, no problem. Which made me wonder why it was taking Lumiuk’s father so long to kill anything. And why was he using a rifle?

  “Spears?” Lumiuk says. “Oh, no, Father would never use one of these old-fashioned things. Guns are much better for killing animals. The spear belonged to my grandfather.”

  Lumiuk didn’t much like hunting, either. Because of this, he was a major disappointment to his father, who was constantly yelling at him and making mean comments. Not that he was only mean to his son. He was mean to all of us.

  All day long, Lumiuk’s dad told us what we were doing wrong, be it mushing, hunting, or even how we were eating.

  Frankly, it wasn’t all that different from how my own father treated me, but that was what was so disappointing! In the movie, all the Inuit parents seemed so nice. But I guess parents are the same kind of horrible no matter where you go.

  Hunting only got interesting at the end of that day, when we finally came across an animal. Lumiuk’s dad held up a finger to

  Shhhh!

  us.

  The animal was some crazy-looking big buffalo thing. “What the heck is that?” I whispered.

  “A caribou,” the Know-It-All whispered back. “Very common to this area, and a typical hunting target across Canada.”

  “That could feed everyone back home for a week!” Lumiuk whispered, then covered his eyes because he couldn’t bear to watch. His father smacked him in the head and motioned for him to look.

  Then, Lumiuk’s dad moved in for the kill, creeping along the top of the snow as quietly as he could. Slowly—steadily—carefully, he raised his gun.

  As exciting as it was, I started to feel bad for the animal, and then I . . . I . . . ah . . . ah . . .

  “Ah-tchoo!”

  “Gesundheit!” Goody-Two-Shoes said.

  The caribou bolted away.

  Lumiuk’s father began ranting and raving.

  Lumiuk said it wasn’t really worth translating.

  It was so late by the time Lumiuk’s dad calmed down that he decided to make camp right there. No arguments from me! I felt twice as exhausted and frozen as I had yesterday.

  Unfortunately, there was no time to rest. The igloo had to be built.

  No time to rest for us, anyway. Lumiuk’s dad relaxed on a sled nestled in his furs and ate tinned food.

  Lumiuk might not have been much of a hunter, but he was very good at making igloos. He taught us how to do it, and it was actually kind of fun, cold and hungry though we were.

  When the igloo was done, we all felt pretty proud of ourselves. It looked a lot better than the Thief’s heap of snow.

  But there was still no time for rest, because Lumiuk’s father barked at us to go gather moss to get the fire star
ted.

  He then

  tup tup tup

  opened a can of string beans to eat.

  While he did, he complained about how he did all the work, and Lumiuk did nothing. Nothing!

  “The only thing Father considers work is hunting,” Lumiuk explained.

  Finally, it was time for us to sit around the fire and eat something too.

  We got excited when—after having finished his second can of Franco-American spaghetti—Lumiuk’s father pulled out slabs of dried seal meat from his sled.

  The meat, unfortunately, was not for us.

  “That’s no fair!” the Brat said as Lumiuk’s dad downed chunk after chunk of dried seal. “He’s been eating all of our canned food. Why don’t we get any of his meat?”

  “Father says that hunters need to eat food in order to get food,” Lumiuk said. “So only hunters should eat the meat.”

  But then he started tossing hunks of dried seal to the dogs!

  “Without the dogs pulling us, we could never survive,” Lumiuk said. “So Father says it is more important to feed the dogs than ourselves.”

  “But he is feeding himself,” the Hooligan said.

  “Yes. Father hates to be hungry.”

  We complained so much that Lumiuk’s father finally gave us some dried seal to eat.

  “But don’t eat too much!”

  That wasn’t going to be a problem. Seal jerky is even worse than it sounds. It was like chewing on an old shoe.

  There was nothing to do but go to sleep, except I couldn’t even do that, because Lumiuk wouldn’t stop talking. He wanted to know everything about what life was like in Pittsburgh and kept saying how much he wanted to visit. “It sounds wonderful!”

  “Yeah, wonderful,” I said. I then buried my face under a dog and went to sleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  Meanwhile . . .

  While we were mushing, Mummy and the two Jacks were dragging my nemesis and the Vainglorious every which way across the frozen countryside. They were searching all the remote hideouts she used for her bootlegging operation, with her telling the Truant Officer they were her “hunting cabins.”

  Mrs. Mummy certainly is an avid outdoorswoman.

  Her two sons, Rooster Jack and Black Jack, speak no English. Even so, Glorious manages to annoy them, perhaps because he doesn’t believe that they don’t understand him and so keeps talking to them.

  Although we as yet have had no luck locating the children, I enjoy driving in this snowy wilderness. It reminds me so much of Mother Russia.

  We arrive at our next destination and last hope: Bawdy Claude’s Trading Post.

  I question Mr. Claude, who promises that he has not seen Pearl, let alone seven American children.

  Frustratingly, we appear to have hit a dead end. We walk outside, and Mrs. Mummy goes around back to use the outhouse.

  We wait for her. She takes a long time.

  Amazingly, when she finally returns, it is having discovered that the children have taken off on two dogsleds and are headed for the lighthouse of Black Tickle on the coast of Labrador. How she discovered this information in the outhouse, I am not sure.

  Well, I know how she figured it out. She went to the outhouse—which is to say the toilet—and saw her stolen van sitting in back of the trading post. Someone had painted graffiti over her sign, so it now read

  MUMMY SCUMMY

  AND HER TWO SONS ARE DUMMIES!

  Which was pretty funny. The crazy thing, though, is that I had no idea who did it! One of us, I was guessing, but who?

  Anyway, Mummy was pretty ticked off at the whole situation, and she went back inside to confront Bawdy Claude.

  While I don’t know exactly what she did to get Claude to rat us out, I’m guessing it involved threats and weaponry.

  Not that it mattered. What mattered was that she found out where we were going and that we were mushing our way there. Unfortunately for us, Mummy knew a thing or two about mushing herself.

  26. A CHAPTER YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP IF YOU’RE SQUEAMISH

  I’d tell you what happened on the second day of traveling with the Inuit, except it wasn’t that much different from what happened the first day.

  Or the third day.

  Or any of the days we spent with them.

  “We’re wasting too much time!” the Know-It-All said. “If it wasn’t for all this hunting, we’d already be at the l-l-lighthouse!”

  For once, everybody agreed with him. We now knew how to build an igloo lickety-split and get a roaring fire going, so we could survive just fine without Lumiuk and his dad. If not better! Lumiuk’s father had practically polished off all our food.

  “We’re gonna starve if we spend any more time with that guy!” the Hooligan said.

  The next morning, we told Lumiuk that we were going off on our own.

  He was devastated.

  “Why do you have to go?” he said, and begged us to stay just a little while longer.

  That’s when I got the idea.

  Snap!

  (That was me snapping my fingers.)

  “Why don’t you come with us!” I said. “We could always use another member.”

  Especially since that would make us nine.

  Lumiuk was tempted, but he couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing his mom or his sisters and the other members of his family again.

  “Besides, I’m not naughty like the rest of you.”

  Being a horrible human being should never be a qualification for joining a club. But in our case, it kinda was.

  Before he left, Lumiuk gave me his spear.

  “I can’t take this,” I said. “It was your grandfather’s!”

  “He wouldn’t mind,” Lumiuk said. “Grandfather is a lot nicer than father. Besides, you might need it. I’ve never even used it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  For the next few days, we mushed along at our fastest clip yet.

  “According to my calculations, we only have 27.88 hours of mushing left before we reach the lighthouse at B-B-Black Tickle!” the Know-It-All said.

  We had one tiny little problem, though. We were down to our last can of food. And it was a bad one.

  Campbell’s Ox Tail Soup.

  I opened it, pried out the round frozen brick of meat stew, and smashed it into pieces. As we each gnawed on a chunk, we discussed what we had to do.

  Hunt.

  While we had learned certain survival skills, none of us had ever caught an animal.

  We did have the spear, and even if it wasn’t as good as a gun, it was still how people had hunted for thousands of years. It was just a question of getting close enough to an animal to stab it. But we had to find one first, and that was no easy thing.

  The next day, we mushed along on empty stomachs. We only had two more days of sledding to get to the lighthouse, but there was no way we’d make it without real food.

  For lunch, we ate snow.

  “We could always eat one of the dogs,” the Cruel said.

  “We are not eating a puppy!” Goody-Two-Shoes said.

  “Yeah!” I said. But I couldn’t help but wonder what one would taste like. THAT is how hungry I was!

  It was after our snow lunch that we had a stroke of luck.

  “Hey, what’s that?” the Rude said, halting his sled and pointing to a spot over near the coast.

  I had no idea how he could see that far, but as we got closer, we saw the spot was a walrus. A sick walrus. Even when we got to be standing just a few yards away from it, the animal still wasn’t moving.

  “Poor walrus,” the Rude said, kneeling down. “Sorry we gotta kill ya and eat ya, big feller.”

  I handed the spear to the Know-It-All.

  “What are you h-h-h-
handing me this for?”

  “To kill the walrus,” I said.

  “Why don’t you d-d-d-do it!” the Know-It-All said, trying to force it back to me. “You’re the one Lumiuk gave the spear to!”

  “I can’t,” I said. “It’s against my religion.”

  “No it’s not. You’re C-C-Catholic.”

  “But it’s a Friday,” I said. “And anyway, it’ll be a piece of cake. The walrus looks half-dead as it is. You’ll just be putting it out of its misery.”

  “There’s no way I’m killing it. H-h-here,” he said, and handed the spear to the Hooligan.

  “Forget it!” the Hooligan said. “If it was the Brat y’uns wanted me to spear, I’d do it. But I ain’t spearin’ no walrus!”

  He handed the spear to the Rude, who also refused.

  “Each of those tusks is bigger than my whole body!” he said. “Besides, I found it. I already did my job!”

  The only boy left was the Brat.

  “Fine!” the Brat said, taking the weapon. “I will do it.”

  The Brat took a few steps toward the walrus, the snow crunching under his feet. He stopped and poised the spear right by his ear, ready to lunge. Then the walrus turned and looked up at him.

  It had the face of an old dog.

  Pleading.

  Sweet.

  Loving.

  The Brat froze. And stayed frozen.

  He couldn’t do it.

  “Tsk tsk tsk,” the Cruel went. “I’m disappointed in you.”

  With a sneer, she snatched the spear out of his hand. Then she turned to the Thief.

  “And you?” the Cruel said, offering her the weapon. “Boys are all weak when you get right down to it, but you? Don’t you have a great-uncle once removed who taught you how to use a spear? Or are you like the boys? Nothing but talk.”

  The Thief looked down at her feet.

  “But the walrus is just so cute. . . .”

  The Cruel turned to Goody-Two-Shoes and offered the spear to her.

  Goody was defiant.

  “I would never kill anything,” she said. “Killing is wrong.”