Chapter 6

Annadoah, sad and lonely, sat by her lamp. Her igloo was like that of all the others. Inside, so as to retain the heat and carry off the water which dripped from the melting dome of snow, there was an interior tent of seal skin. In a great pan of soapstone was a line of moss, which absorbed the walrus fat, and served as a wick for the lamp. This emitted a line of thin, reddish blue flame. Over the light, and supported by a framework, was a large soapstone pot in which bits of walrus meat were simmering. By the side of the pot a large piece of walrus blubber hung over a rod. In the heat of the lamp this slowly exuded a thick oil which, falling into the pan below and saturating the moss wick, gave a constant and steady supply of fuel.

Like the other women, Annadoah sat by her lamp day after day. When she could endure hunger no longer she would eat ravenously of the meagre food in the pot. Regular meals are unknown in the arctic--a native abstains from food as long as he can in days of famine, but when he eats he eats unstintedly.

As Ootah entered the low enclosure Annadoah's eyes lighted.

Ootah told her of the bear encounter, and, with the joy of children, they placed bits of the meat in the pot and sat by, delightedly inhaling the odor as it cooked.

Several days later, while they were eating the last remainder of the meat, both heard an uproar outside. They crept from the igloo and discovered most of the village assembled without.

"Attalaq hath carried off Ahningnetty," one told them.

"He broke into her father's house and seized her with violence!"

Not far away they heard Ahningnetty's screams.

"Attalaq is strong," said one.

"Yea, as a boy did he not kill his brother?" All remembered the brutal encounter of the two brothers years before, when, throwing him to the ground, Attalaq jumped on his brother's body and striking his head with stones beat him to death. Attalaq was a type of the older warriors; unlike his more gentle tribesmen he possessed the atavistic savagery of his forebears of centuries ago when it was customary to abduct brides.

An excited crowd gathered outside of Attalaq's house. Soon Attalaq himself appeared. He was exultant.

"Ha! Ha!" he laughed. "Methinks that is the way to treat a woman!" Then with swollen-up gusto he told them all about it. Tiring of being alone he determined to carry off Ahningnetty. "A woman's mind is as the wind--it constantly changeth," he said. "Women should be driven as the dogs." Ahningnetty, still weeping, still protesting, came to the door. Attalaq turned fiercely upon her and struck her in the face. Then he laughed again. The girl screamed.

"Well," he said, turning to her. "I carried thee here--if thou wouldst return thou canst walk back. Eh?" The girl cowered away, but on her face there was the semblance of a pleased expression. The other women regarded her with a tinge of envy.

"'Tis not often in these days a lover careth sufficiently to carry a maid away," said an aged crone.

"In the days of old there were men like Attalaq," said a younger woman, admiringly.

"Where is Papik?" one asked. He was not to be seen.

"Dost thou not wish to return to thy father?" Annadoah asked Ahningnetty, approaching her.

The girl shook her head. Much as she had protested, she was unquestionably pleased by the forcible abduction.

One of the gossips, desiring to impart the unpleasant news to Papik, had gone to his house.

"Papik sits alone," she called, on her return. "And when I told him Ahningnetty hath been carried away by Attalaq, he replied, ''Tis well! 'Tis well!' And then he showed me his hands--they were frozen--frozen! Verily, he would now be a sorry husband to provide for a wife."

"Papik's fingers frozen!" took up the others. "Unhappy Papik."

"He sobs and weeps--he sobs and weeps," said the old woman. "He saith the dreaded misfortune hath come, and the days of his skill on the hunt are over!"

"Long fingers, short hunt; long nose--short life," remarked Maisanguaq, sententiously.

Attalaq, happy in his conquest, was broad enough to be generous. He declared that Papik should never want as long as he could shoot the arrow. Generous-hearted, many of the others joined in and bits of blubber were soon offered the lonely Papik, as he sat, nursing his frozen members, in his house. The mishap was tragic, for, his hands injured, he had lost not only his skill in the hunt but his ability to protect himself in case of accidents. And from the experience of ages all knew that, sooner or later, he was doomed to a comparatively early death.

During the first period of the night, and after Ootah's first capture, several prowling bears were shot. The howl of occasional wolves was heard in the mountains; then all the bears disappeared, the hunger of the wolves was stilled.

When the third moon rose not a thing stirred outside the igloos. A glacial silence gripped the northern world. In their shelters the natives clustered together, warming one another with their breathing and the heat of their bodies. They lacked the courage even to speak.

Day by day their supply of food had run low. Day by day they decreased their portions; their cheeks sunk, hunger burned in their eyes. To save the precious fuel they burned only one lamp in their houses; they were unable to sleep because of the intense cold. Finally their food gave out. From his store Ootah silently doled out allotments until starvation confronted him. One by one the dogs were eaten. And this caused a dull ache, for the men loved their dogs only a little less than they did their wives and children. The quaking fear of the long hours slowly gave way to a dull lethargy. In their igloos, where single lamps smoked, they sat, and to keep up their circulation and to prevent themselves from falling into a coma, they rocked their bodies like things only half alive.

The black days and black nights slowly, tediously, achingly passed. One day was like another--one night seemed to mark no progress of time. Only the children, to whom parents gave the last bits of food, showed some animation. They played listlessly with one another. For toys they had crude carvings of soapstone--tiny soapstone lamps and pots with which they made pitiful mimicry of cooking. The little girls played with crude dolls just as do little girls in more southern lands--but they were grotesque effigies, made of skin roughly sewn together. The boys found brief zest in a game which was played by sticking ivory points in a piece of bone, hanging from the roof of the igloo, and which was perforated with holes. Finally, as the night wore on, the children lost interest in their games, and with aching stomachs, lay silent by the fires. Starvation steadily claimed its toll. Death, slowly, surely, laid its grim and terrible hands upon that pitiful fringe of earth's humanity on the desolate star-litten roof of the world. One by one a stark body would be carried from an igloo into the black, bitter cold silence without and buried under blocks of snow. And above, intense and incandescent, the Pole Star--that unerring time mark of God's inevitable and unerring laws--burned like an all-seeing, sentient and pitiless eye of fire in the heavens.

Annadoah lay upon her couch of furs. Her face was thin, and white as the snows without. The flame in her stone lamp was about to flicker into extinction.

Ootah, entering the igloo, sprang quickly to her side. Her breath came very faintly. He seized her hands. He breathed on her face. He opened her ahttee and rubbed her little breasts. He felt something very strange, and wonderful, stirring within him. And with it a ghastly fear that the thing he loved was dying.

Into the lamp he placed the last meagre bits of remaining blubber. Then he again set to chafing the tender little hands. Cold and hunger had wrought havoc upon Annadoah. Ootah's heart ached.

Finally her eyelids stirred. Her lips parted. A smile brightened her face. Ootah leaned forward, breathlessly. Her lips framed an inaudible word:

"Olafaksoah . . . Olafaksoah . . ." She opened her eyes. The smile faded. "Thou . . . ?" she said.

"Yea, Annadoah, I have brought thee food," Ootah said. It was his last.

"I hunger," she breathed. "It is very cold . . . I was in the south . . . where the sun is warm . . . it is very cold here."

Eagerly he pressed her hands. She drifted again into a stupor and for a long while was silent. Ootah's warm panting breath finally brought blood to her cheeks.

"Thou art so big . . . and strong . . ." she smiled again. "Thy arms hurt me . . . as the embrace of _nannook_ (the bear). . . ." Her smile deepened . . . her breath came more quickly. "Oh, oh, it is pleasant . . . here . . . in . . . the south."

"Annadoah!" Ootah's wail of hurt recalled her.

Her eyes sought the igloo wonderingly.

"Thou?" she repeated, dully. "Yea, it is cold here. I am hungry . . . Are there not _ahmingmah_ in the mountains, Ootah? Didst thou not tell me there were _ahmingmah_ in the mountains . . . why do not the men of the tribe seek the musk oxen in the mountains?"

With a sudden start Ootah remembered having told Annadoah of the herd he had found in the inland valley--it was strange, he thought, he had not remembered the herd before. And it was stranger still that now she should remind him. But the improbability of ever reaching the game, the obvious impossibility of such a journey at this time of winter, had prevented any such suggestion.

"Many musk oxen are there in the mountains," he said, soothing her hands. She drew them away. "And thou art hungry . . ."

"I am hungry," she replied, faintly.

After he had given her the last bit of meat he left her igloo. Above him the stars burned, the air was clear and still. Not a thing moved, not a sound was heard--the earth was gripped in that unrelenting spell of wintry silence. Above the imprisoned sea the January moon was rising and for ten sleeps--ten twenty-four hour days--it would circle about the horizon of the entire sky. Already the sky above the sea was bright as a frosted globe of glass, and pearly fingers of light were stealing upward over the interior mountains.

"She is hungry," Ootah repeated over and over again. "And the tribe starves . . . and there may be _ahmingmah_ in the mountains." Behind him they loomed, gigantic and precipitous. That such a journey meant almost certain death he knew; but that did not deter him in the resolve to essay a feat no native had ever dared in many hundreds of years.

The face of Sipsu, the _angakoq_, as I have said, resembled dried and wrinkled leather. He had been an old man when the eldest of the tribe were children. He had seen hard times, he had suffered from starvation during many winters; yet never even in his experience had the lashes of _ookiah_ struck so blastingly upon the tribe. Yea, they had even lost their fear of the _tornarssuit_ and no longer brought propitiatory offerings of blubber to him. Yet being wise with age, early in the summer he had buried sufficient supplies beneath the floor of his house to keep him from starving. He scowled maliciously as he heard someone creeping through the underground entrance of his igloo. Presently the cadaverous face of Maisanguaq appeared.

The interior was heavy with the stench of oil. The room hung with soot from the lamp. A thin spiral thread of black smoke rose from the taper. In the dim light the leering face of Sipsu appeared like the face of the great demon himself. His small half-closed eyes blazed through their slits.

"The spirits are wrathful. The tribe is forgetful. What wilt thou have?"

Maisanguaq, with unconcealed hesitation, placed a bit of blubber before the magician.

"The last I have," he mumbled. Sipsu seized it avidly.

"Ootah goeth to the mountains," Maisanguaq said, panting for breath.

The old man sneered bitterly:

"He cannot brave the spirits. No man can live in the mountains. The breath of the spirits is death."

"Yea, he goeth. He says that he knows where the _ahmingmah_ abound. The air is still; the moon rises for ten sleeps. By then, so he saith, he can return with meat."

"No man hath ever ventured there. The shadow of _Perdlugssuaq_ is very dark."

"Yea, may he smite Ootah!" exclaimed Maisanguaq.

Sipsu laughed harshly.

"Couldst thou cause the hill spirits to strike?" Maisanguaq asked eagerly.

Sipsu faced Maisanguaq fiercely.

"In my youth I went unto the mountains and I heard the hill spirits sing. Thereupon I became a great magician. They spoke to me; I was silent; thereafter, when I called they answered. What wouldst thou?"

Maisanguaq indicated the blubber.

"I would thou call them now; that they release the glaciers, that Ootah may be carried to his death. I hate Ootah, I would that he die." He shook his fist.

Sipsu's body quivered from head to foot. "Ootah hath never consulted my familiar spirits," he rejoined bitterly. "He despiseth them."

Rising from his sitting posture Sipsu seized his drum and began moving his body. He groaned with extreme pain. By degrees his dance increased. He improvised a monotonous spirit song. His face grimaced demoniacally. As his conjuration approached the climax, his voice rose to a series of shrieks. He shuddered violently; he seemed to suffer agonies in his limbs. Finally he fell to the floor in a writhing paroxysm.

"_Pst_!" Maisanguaq's eyes lighted.

Outside he heard the sharp barking of dogs. "_Huk_! _Huk_!" Ootah's voice called. Others joined in the clamor. The entire tribe seemed to wake as from a sleep of the dead.

"He starts for the mountains," said Maisanguaq. "Thinkest thou the spirits will strike?"

Sipsu opened his eyes--and glared wildly at Maisanguaq.

"Speak," Maisanguaq demanded. "Hast thou not the power?"

"Did I not once go to the bottom of the sea to _Nerrvik_, she who rules over the sea creatures? Hath she not only one hand, and is she not powerless to plait her hair? Doth she not obey me? For did I not plait her hair? Did I not carry wood for weapons to the spirits of the mountains? And have they not answered for nigh a thousand moons?"

"Yet there is doubt in thy voice, Sipsu!"

"Yea, to be truthful with thee, Maisanguaq, there is dispute among the spirits. I cannot determine what they say." He bent his head as if listening. Then he asked:

"Doth Ootah not go that Annadoah may have food?"

Maisanguaq nodded assent.

"And the tribe?"

Maisanguaq again nodded.

As though he suddenly heard some terrifying converse among his familiars the necromancer's face blanched. He struggled to his feet.

"Take thy food," he flung the blubber to Maisanguaq. "I dare not take thy gift. I am afraid."

Maisanguaq sprang at the old man. "Revoke not thy curse," he breathed, his fingers sinking into the _angakoq's_ throat. "Will the hill spirits strike?"

"Yea," the old man gasped, "but they say----"

Maisanguaq's fingers loosened. "What?" he demanded.

"That there is . . . some other power . . . which is very strange--which----"

"Yea, yea----"

"Protecteth Ootah . . . It concerneth . . . Annadoah. I do not wish thy gift. I fear the spirits. The magic of Ootah--what it is . . . I cannot tell thee . . . But the spirits say . . . it . . . concerneth . . . Annadoah. And against it none of the _tornarssuit_ can prevail." Maisanguaq threw the old man fiercely to the floor and, disgusted, left the igloo.

Outside, the entire tribe, with the exception of those dying of hunger, had gathered in groups. Ootah lifted his whip. His team of eight lean dogs howled.

"_Tugto_! _Tugto_!" he called. The dogs leaped into the air--his sled shot forward. Ootah strode forward.

In his desperate adventure Ootah was joined by one of the younger members of the tribe, Koolotah by name, a lad barely eighteen years of age. All the others had hung back. Koolotah's mother was dying; a desperate desire to save her stirred in his heart as he lifted his whip in the signal to start. The tribe cheered.

"_Huk_! _Huk_!" he shouted, and his lean dogs followed Ootah's team.

"_Au-oo-au-oo_!" called the natives.

"_Auoo-auoo_!" the voices of Ootah and Koolotah returned.

Over the snow-covered stretch of level shoreland the moon poured a flood of silver incandescence. In this magical light the forms of Ootah and his companion were magnified into the likeness of those of the giants that the old men said once lived in the highlands. Their dogs were distended into creatures of the size of musk oxen. Their whips exploded as they dashed past the straggling line of snow and stone houses; the snow crisply cracked and splintered under their feet.

Then the village disappeared behind them. The voices of their tribesmen trailed shudderingly into silence.

The assembled tribe watched the teams diminishing in the distance. Presently someone whispered a terrible thing.

"Sipsu hath cursed Ootah."

A low ominous murmur passed from lip to lip among the gathered men and women. In the distance a black speck in the moonlight marked the departing hunters.

"Yea, he hath called upon the spirit of the mountains to destroy Ootah."

A low groan followed this.

"Methinks he hath prophesied too many deaths," said Arnaluk.

"He hath declared that Koolotah's mother will die."

"And Koolotah--did he not say two moons ago that Koolotah would depart on a long journey from which he should never return?"

"And the wife of Kyutah--did she not perish after his evil prophesy? And Piuaitsoq--did not the spirit of the skin tents strike him when he lay asleep? And did not yon evil wretch tell of it long before?"

A dozen voices angrily rose in assent.

"Verily he hath found hatred in his heart for Ootah. For Ootah hath had no need of his powers. Did not Ootah's mother sew into his cap the skin from the roof of a bear's mouth? And hath he not become as strong as the bear? Did not his father place in his _ahttee_ the feet of a hawk--and have not his own feet the swiftness of the wings of a bird? And doth not Sipsu hate him for his strength? Yea, as he hateth all who are young, who are brave, and who find joy in their shadow."

Their voices rose threateningly. Maisanguaq, chagrined and bitter at the old man, leered among the crowd.

"Hath he not lived too long," he whispered softly. And the others suddenly shouted:

"Let Sipsu die!"

In a wild rush they bore down upon the _angakoq's_ igloo. Screaming with rage they kicked in the sides. The icy dome shattered about the startled old man. They leaped upon him as hungry dogs upon a dying bear. A dozen hands ferociously gripped his throat. They moved to and fro in a mad struggle over the uneven ice. They seized hold of one another in the blood-thirsty desire to lay their hands upon the old man. He made no struggle. Finally all drew away. Amid the wreck of his igloo Sipsu lay, motionless, his face sneering evilly in the moonlight. His dead lips seemed to frame a curse.

They secured a rope of leather lashings and placed a noose about the old man's neck. Then they dragged his body from the wrecked igloo. Weak from lack of food, they still forced themselves to dig up the frozen snow at a spot where they knew there were stones, for according to their belief they had to bury the old man--otherwise, his spirit would haunt them. To this spot they brought the rotted skins of his bed, and on them placed the body, fearful lest they touch it. By the body they placed the old man's lamp, stone dishes, membrane-drum and instruments of incantation. Over the corpse they piled the ice encrusted stones, and over these in turn weighty masses of frozen snow. Then they turned in silence and entered their respective shelters. Thenceforth, until a child should be born to whom it could be given, the name of Sipsu might not pass their lips.

VI

"_As he looked upon the descending wraiths, Koolotah saw they had the spirit-semblance of gleaming faces, and that their eyes burned, through the enveloping cloud-veils, like fire . . . 'The dead--the dead . . .' he said, 'we have come into a land of the dead.' . . .

"Then the glacial mountainside to which he clung trembled . . . the silver-swimming world of white dust-driven fire became suddenly black--and the earth seemed removed from under him . . ._"

Leaving the low-lying shore, Ootah's path led up through a narrow gorge between two great cliffs. Since he had returned from the mountains the path had been covered by many successive falls of snow. At places the path sloped abruptly downward at a terrible angle, and the ice cracked and slid beneath the hardy hunters' feet. With the agility of cats, the dogs fastened their claws into the ice and climbed upward.

Constantly the two men had to hold to the jagged rocks to their right, otherwise, time after time, they would have slipped into the perilous abyss below. Through the chasm the moon poured its liquid rays. At certain points towering crags shut off the light--then Ootah and his companion had to feel their way slowly upward in the dark. Finally Ootah's dogs, with a loud chorus of barking, leaped ahead. Seizing an overhanging ledge of rock Ootah lifted himself to the top of the precipice. Koolotah's team followed.

For interminable miles a vast icy plateau stretched before them--a plain glistening with snow and reflecting like a burnished mirror the misty silveriness of the moon. Over the glacial expanse an eerily greenish phosphorescence, which palpitated and shifted at times with vivid splashes of opal and deeper tones of burning blue, hung low.

The upland was split with thousands of canyons that writhed over the white expanse like snakes in tortuous convulsions. From these bottomless abysses arose a luminous amethystine vapor. In the depths jutting icicles took fire and glowed through the lustrous mists like burning eyes. Where the chasms joined with others or widened, ominous shapes, swathed in wind-blown blackish-purple robes, with extended arms, took form. As Ootah and Koolotah dashed forward, great spaces of clear ice palpitated on all sides of them with interior opaline fires.

Neither spoke. Holding the rear framework of their sleds, they trusted to the instinct of their dogs. Mile after mile swept under their feet. Their road often lay along the very edges of purple-black abysses. The echoes of their sharp gliding sleds cutting the ice, of the very patter of their dogs' feet, were magnified in volume in the clear air, and it seemed as though, in the hollow depths on every side, ghostly teams were following. Koolotah was white with fear. But Ootah encouraged him onward.

They paced off twenty miles. They reached an altitude of more than a thousand feet above the sea.

The great moon slowly circled about the sky; the scurrying clouds contorted like grotesque living things.

The two hunters made precipitous descents over unexpected frozen slopes--at times it seemed as though they were about to be hurled to instantaneous death. Yet Ootah steeled his heart. His teeth chattered but he gritted them firmly.

"Annadoah needeth food," he murmured, "and----"

His eyes shone, a new pity not unmingled with a taint of bitterness filled his heart. Annadoah must live; she must have food. For a strange thing, he observed, had come upon her. Her inexplicable moods, her brief moments of tenderness, her riotous griefs, and other prefigurements of maternity--these made her dearer to Ootah. So he vigorously cracked his whip and urged the dogs.