“He say, that one, no can do,” smiled the interpreter.
The college boy was not disturbed. He jingled something in his hand. Marian, who stood beside him, saw that he held three double eagles. She smiled, for she knew that even here the value of yellow disks marked with those strange pictures which Uncle Sam imprints upon them was known.
The man, dropping his harpoon, began to talk rapidly. He waved his hands. He bobbed his head. At last he arose, sprang from the sleeping compartment and began to walk the space before the open fire. He was still talking. It seemed as if he would never run down.
When at last he had finished and had thrown himself once more upon the floor of the sleeping-room, the interpreter began:
“He say, that one, he say, ‘Wanna go Cape Prince Wales two month, three month, all right, maybe. Go now? Not go.’ He say, that one, ‘Wanna go now; never come back.’ He say, that one, ‘Two, three, four days come ice. Not plenty ice,’ say that one. ‘Some water, some ice. See water. Too much water. Wanna cross. No cross. Quick starve. Quick freeze.’
“‘He say, that one, ‘Tide crack spirit all-a-time lift ice, push ice this way, that way. Wanna kill man. No can go.’
“He say, that one, ‘Great dead whale spirit wanna lift ice, wanna throw ice this way, that way, all way. Wanna kill man. Man no go Cape Prince Wales.’
“He say, that one, ‘Wanna go Cape Prince Wales, mebbe two month, mebbe three month. Mebbe can do. Can’t tell,’ he say, that one.”
The college boy smiled a grim smile and pocketed his gold.
“Which all means,” he said, “that the ice is not sufficiently compact, not well enough frozen together for the old boy to risk a passage, and that we’ll be obliged to wait until he thinks it’s O. K. Probably two or three months. Meanwhile, welcome to our village! Make yourselves at home!” He threw back his shoulders and laughed a boyish laugh.
“Oh!” exclaimed Marian, ready to indulge in a childish bit of weeping.
“Yes,” smiled the boy, “but think of the sketches you’ll have time to make.”
“No canvas,” she groaned.
“That’s easy. Use squares of this sealskin the women tan white for making slippers.”
“The very thing!” exclaimed Marian. She was away at once in search of some of this new style canvas, in her eagerness to be at work on some winter sketches of these most interesting people, quite forgetting the peril of natives, the danger of the food supply giving out, the probability of an unpleasant meeting with the bearded stranger.
Lucile, always of a more practical frame of mind, at once attacked the knotty problem of securing comfort and food for her little party. The question of a warm shelter during these months of sweeping winds and biting frost was solved for them by the aged chief Nepos-sok. He furnished them with a winter igloo. An interesting type of home they found it and one offering great comfort. An outer covering of walrus skin was supported by tall poles set in a semicircle and meeting at the top. The inside of this tepee-like structure was lined with a great circling robe of long-haired deerskin. The hair on these winter skins was two inches long and matted thick as felt. When this lining had been hung, a floor of hand-hewn boards was built across the rear side of the enclosure. This floor, about six by eight feet, was covered with a deerskin rug, over which were thrown lighter robes of soft fawn skin and out-of-season fox skins. Above this floor were hung curtains of deerskin. This sleeping room became a veritable box of long-haired deerskins. When it was completed the girls found it, with a seal oil lamp burning in it, warm and cozy as a steam-heated bedroom.
“Who could dream of anything so comfortable in a wilderness like this?” murmured Lucile before falling asleep in their new home on the first night.
Phi was given a place in the chief’s sleeping room.
The space in the igloo before the girls’ sleeping room was given over to stores. It was used too as kitchen and dining room. Here, by a snapping fire of dwarf willows, the three of them sat on the edge of the sleeping room floor and munched hardtack or dipped baked beans from tin cans.
The problem of securing a variety of food was a difficult one. The supply from the ship was found to be over-abundant in certain lines and woefully lacking in others: plenty of beans and sweet corn in cans, some flour and baking powder but no lard or bacon; some frozen and worthless potatoes; plenty of jelly in glasses; a hundred pounds of sugar. So it ran. Lucile was hard pressed to know how to cook with no oven in which to do baking and with no lard for shortening.
She had been studying this problem for some time when one day she suddenly exclaimed, “I have it!”
Drawing on her parka she hurried to the chief’s igloo and asked for seal oil. Gravely he poured a supply of dark liquid from a wooden container into a tin cup.
Lucile put this to her lips for a taste. The next instant she with great difficulty set the cup on the floor while all her face was distorted with loathing.
“Rotten!” she sputtered. “A year old!”
“Eh—eh,” grinned the chief, “always eat ‘em so, Chukche.” Thoroughly disheartened, she left the igloo. But on her way back she came upon a woman skinning a seal. Seeing the thick layer of fat that was taken from beneath the animal’s skin she hastened to trade three cans of beans for it. Bearing this home in triumph she soon had the fat trying out over a slow fire.
Seal oil proved to be quite as good cooking oil as lard. Even doughnuts fried in it were pronounced delicious by the ever-hungry Phi.
Experimenting with native food was interesting. Seal steak was not bad, and seal liver was as good as calf’s liver. Polar bear steak and walrus stew were impossible. “Wouldn’t even make good hamburger,” was Phi’s verdict. The boiled flipper of a white-whale was tender as chicken. But when a hind quarter of reindeer meat found its way into the village there was feasting indeed.
In a land so little known as this one does not seek long for opportunities to express strange and unusual things. Marian had not been established a week with Lucile in their igloo, when an unusual opportunity presented itself.
Among the supplies brought from the ship was found a well-equipped medicine-chest. During her long visits in out-of-the-way places, Marian had learned much of the art of administering simple remedies. She had not been in the village three days before her fame as a doctor became known to all the village.
She had learned, with a feeling of great relief, that the bearded stranger who had posed as a witch-doctor had gone away from the village. Whether he had gone toward Whaling, or south to some other village, no one appeared to know. Now that he had departed, it seemed obvious that she was destined to take his place as the village practitioner.
It was during one of her morning “clinics,” as she playfully called them, that a native of strange dress brought his little girl to her for treatment. The ailment seemed but a simple cold. Marian prescribed cough syrup and quinine, then called for the next patient. Patients were few that morning. She soon found herself wandering up the single street of the village. There she encountered the strange native and his child.
“Who are they?” she asked of a boy who understood English.
“Reindeer Chukches.”
“Reindeer Chukches?” she exclaimed excitedly. “Where do they live?”
“Oh, mebbe fifteen miles from here.”
“Do they live on the tundra as they used to?”
“Yes.”
“Are there many of them?”
“Not now. Many, one time. Now very few. Not many reindeer. Too much not moss. Plenty starve. Plenty die.”
“Ask the Chukche,” Marian said eagerly, “if I may go home with him to see his people.”
The boy spoke for a moment with the grave-visaged stranger.
“He say, that one, he say yes,” smiled the boy.
“Tell him I will be back quick.” Marian was away like a shot.
Tearing into their igloo she drove Lucile into a score of activities. The medicine chest was filled and closed,
paints stowed in their box, garments packed, sleeping-bags rolled up. Then they were away.
Ere she knew it, Lucile was tucked in behind a fleet-footed reindeer, speeding over the low hills.
“Now, please tell me where we are going,” she asked with a smile.
“We are going to visit the most unique people in all the world—the Reindeer Chukches. They are almost an extinct race now, but the time was when every clump of willows that lined the banks of the rivers of the far north in Siberia hid one of their igloos, and every hill and tundra fed one of their herds.
“Long before the Eskimos of Alaska thought of herding the reindeer, short-haired deerskin and soft, spotted fawn-skins were traded across Bering Straits and far up along the Alaskan coast. These skins came from the camps of the Reindeer Chukches of Siberia. Many years ago the Mikado of Japan, in the treasure of furs with which he decorated his royal family, besides the mink, ermine and silver fox, had skins of rare beauty, spotted skins, brown, white and black. These were fawn-skins traded from village to village until they reached Japan. They came from the camps of the Reindeer Chukches. And now we are to see them as they were many years ago, for they have not changed. And I am to paint them! Paint them! Think of it!”
“Yes, but,” Lucile smiled doubtfully, “supposing the ice gets solid while we’re gone. Suppose Phi takes a fancy to cross without us? What then?”
Marian’s face sobered for a moment. But the zeal of a born artist and explorer was upon her.
“Oh, fudge!” she exclaimed, “it won’t. He won’t. I—I—why, I’ll hurry. We’ll be back at East Cape in no time at all.”
No wildest nomadic dream could have exceeded the life which the two girls lived in the weeks that followed.
Trailing a reindeer herd over hills and tundra; camping now in a clump of willows by the glistening ice of a stream, now beneath some shelving rock, and now in the open, wind-swept tundra; eating about an open fire, while the smoke curled from the top of the dome of the tepee-like igloo, they reveled in the strange wildness of it all. Here was a people who paid no rent, no taxes, owned no land yet lived always in abundance. In the box beside the sleeping platform were tea and sugar. Over the fire hung a copper teakettle of ancient design. In the sleeping-box, which was made of long-haired deerskins, were many robes of short-haired deerskin, fawn-skin and Siberian squirrel.
To all these the two girls were more than welcome. Their guide and his daughter did not live alone. A little tribe whose twenty igloos dotted the tundra traveled with him. These people were sometimes in need of simple remedies. For these they were singularly grateful. They, their women and their children, posed untiringly for sketches. But one thing Marian had not taken into consideration; these people seldom visited the village of East Cape. Although she did not know it, their herds were at this time feeding away from this trading metropolis of the Straits region. Each day while she seized every opportunity to sketch and hastened her work as much as she could, found them some ten miles farther from East Cape.
When at last, by signs and such native words as she knew, she indicated to her native friends that she was ready to return to East Cape, they stared at her in astonishment and indicated by a diagram on the snow that they were now at a point three days’ journey from that town and that none of them expected to return before the moon was again full.
No amount of gesturing and jabbering could make them understand that it was necessary for the girls to return at once.
“We’ll never get back,” Marian mourned in despair, “and it’s all my fault.”
“Oh, we’ll make it still,” encouraged Lucile, cheerfully. “Probably the Straits are not fully frozen over yet anyway.”
However, after a week of inaction, even Lucile lost her cheerful smile.
One morning, after they had reached what appeared to be the final depths of despair, they heard a cry of, “Tomai! Tomai! Tomai,” rise in a chorus from among the tents. By this they knew that visitors had arrived. They hurried out to find the villagers grouped about three fur-clad figures standing beside three reindeer hitched to sleds of a strange design.
By a few words and by signs they were made to understand that these people came from a point some two hundred miles farther north, a village on the north coast of Russia.
As ever, eager to look upon some new type, Marian crowded through the throng when, to her immense surprise, the smaller of the three, in reality only a boy, sprang forward, and, kneeling at her feet, kissed the fur fringe of her parka.
This action, so unusual among these natives, struck her dumb. But once he had looked up into her face, she understood all; he was none other than the strange brown boy who had come swimming to them from the sea off the coast of Washington.
She was so surprised and startled at first sight of him that she found herself incapable of action. It seemed to her that she must be seeing a ghost. It appeared entirely incredible that he should be in this out of the way place when they had left him, months before, on a deserted island of Puget Sound.
Her second reaction was one of great joy; here was someone who really owed them a debt of gratitude. Might they not hope to receive assistance from him in solving the problem of making their way to the shore of Bering Straits?
Springing to his feet, the boy mingled native dialect with badly spoken English in his expression of joy at meeting them again.
At last, when the crowd had gone its way and the girls had invited him to their tent, he told them in the few words of English he had learned since seeing them, and with many clever drawings, the story of his adventures.
He was a native of the north coast of Russia; a far away point where white men’s boats never come. One whaleship had, however, been carried there by the ice-floes. After trading for the natives’ furs and ivory, and having found an open channel of water to the east, the captain had kidnapped him and carried him from his home. He had been made the captain’s slave.
So badly was he treated, over-worked, kicked, cuffed and beaten, that when at last he saw land off the coast of Washington, dressed only in his bird-skin suit, he had leaped overboard when no one was looking and had attempted to swim ashore.
The ship had passed on out of sight. He had been swimming for two hours when the girls rescued him from what was almost sure to have been a watery grave, for he was almost ready to give up hope.
He had been missed from the ship and the captain, fearing the strong arm of the law if he were rescued by others, sent three seamen to search for him along the island. How he had fared with these, the girls knew well enough.
After leaving the camp of the girls he had wandered in the woods and along the beach for two weeks. He had at last been picked up by some honest fishermen who turned him over to the revenue cutter which made Alaskan ports. By the cutter he had been carried to Nome and from there made his way, little by little, by skin-boat, dog-team, and reindeer back to his native village. When he had finished telling his story he turned to Marian and said:
“Idel-bene?” (yours) meaning he would like to hear their story.
Marian was not slow in telling their troubles.
“Me, I will take you back,” the boy exclaimed as she finished. “Today we go.”
Two hours later, with sleds loaded, they were discussing two possible trails, one leading down a river where blizzards constantly threatened, the other a valley trail through wolf-infested hills. The latter course was finally chosen, since it promised to be the least dangerous at that time of the year. Then they were away.
CHAPTER IX
A CLOSE CALL
They had made half the distance to the village. Hopes were running high, when something occurred which threatened disaster.
Far up on the side of the hill along the base of which they were traveling, there stood here and there a clump of scraggly, wind-torn fir trees. Suddenly there appeared from out one of these clumps of scrub trees, a gray streak. Another appeared, then another and another, until there were six. They did not pause
at the edge of the bush, but rushed with swift, gliding motion down the steep hillside, and their course led them directly toward the little caravan. Six gaunt gray wolves they were, a pack of brigands in the Arctic desert.
Perhaps Marian, who rode on the last sled, saw them first. Perhaps Ad-loo-at, the native, did. At any rate, before she could scream a warning to him he had slapped his reindeer on the back and the sled on which Marian rode shot forward so suddenly that she was nearly thrown from her seat. In driving in the north they do not travel single file, but each deer runs beside the sled of the one before it. The driver who is to occupy the foremost position chooses the best trained deer and attaches two reins to his halter that he may guide him. The drivers who follow use but one rein. By jerking this they can cause the reindeer to go faster, but they have no power to guide him. He simply trots along in his place beside the other sled.
Marian had thought this an admirable arrangement until now. It left her free to admire the sharp triangles of deep purple and light yellow which lay away in the distance, a massive mountain range whose tops at times smoked with the snow of an oncoming blizzard. Or, if she tired of this, she might sit and dream of many things as they glided over the snow. But now with a wolf-pack on their trail, with the nearest human habitation many miles away, with her reindeer doing his utmost to keep up with the racing lead-deer, that slender jerk-line with which she could do so little seemed a fragile “life-line” in case of emergency.
With wrinkled brow she watched the pack which now had made its way down the hillside and was following in full cry on their trail. They were not gaining; her heart was cheered by that. At least she did not think they were, yet, yes, there was one, a giant wolf, a third larger than his fellows, outstripping the others. Now he appeared to be ten yards ahead of them, now twenty, now thirty. The rest were only holding the pace of the reindeer, but this one was gaining, there was no mistaking that. She shivered at the thought.
It was a perilous moment, and she felt so helpless. She longed to urge her deer to go faster. She could not do that. He was keeping his place with difficulty. She could only sit and hope that somehow the wolf-leader would tire of the chase.
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