Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North Part 14

"Down-stream by night crept the Indians in their war-canoes. These they dragged ash.o.r.e and hid in the rocks. Next morning the Eskimo came upon their enemies and at once attacked them.

"The Eskimo are little people as compared with the Indians. The Indians, their squaws fighting like bears beside them, drove the Eskimo back and back toward the sea.

"Stubbornly the 'huskies' contested every inch of the ground. Now and again they would crawl into holes among the rocks--but the Indians would find them there and cut them down without mercy, like animals trapped in their burrows.

"The Eskimo had their choice between the Indians and the sea. They would carry their children and even their wives down to the boats on their backs, and sometimes the frail skin-boats would turn over, and all the people in them would be drowned. If they succeeded in putting out to sea, they had no place to go: the Indians waiting ash.o.r.e would get them whenever and wherever they landed.

"At last--there were only the Indians in their war-paint, dancing and howling on the beach--not an Eskimo was left to tell the tale."

A few days later, Dr. Grenfell came to Hopedale.

There, he found, the Eskimo believed that Queen Victoria, away off there on the other side of the ocean, was sitting on a rock waiting for the _Harmony_ (the Moravian mission ship from Labrador) to come in sight.

They loaded him down with all sorts of messages they wanted him to give her.

Especially, they wanted him to say to her that they were very, very grateful to her for sending him over the seas to help them.

When they learned that England was at war in Egypt, and a brave general was holding the upper Nile against a crowd of savages, although they hadn't the slightest notion as to where Egypt was or who the Egyptians were, they got out everything they had in the way of firearms and began to drill up and down on the rocky beach.

One old fellow had a policeman's coat split up the back and much too big for him, and he dragged the tail of it along the ground like a bedraggled water-fowl. He also had a single epaulet that had come in a box of cast-off clothing.

On the strength of that uniform they made him captain of the company.

Then they all marched up to the missionaries and said:

"We want to go to war and help the English!"

"It won't be any use," said the missionaries. "Egypt is a long, long way off--and the war will be over before you could get there!"

"Never mind!" insisted the "huskies." "We want to go!"

They kept on drilling and making warlike noises with their mouths till the ice melted and the cod came in. And after that, in the struggle with the cold sea and the barren land for a living they forgot all about war and the rumors of war.

There were seals and bears and foxes to be hunted, instead of men.

Dr. Grenfell found one man who was lucky enough to catch a black fox in a trap of stones.

He was so happy over the catch that tears of joy ran down his face as he carried the precious skin to the store. He said G.o.d had heard his prayers and made his family suddenly rich.

The storekeeper paid him forty-five dollars. That seemed like a fortune. The price was not paid in cash, however, but in food.

Staggering under the load he came back to his hut, and when the stuff was put on the shelves it looked like such a lot he began to think he and his family never would be able to get it eaten before the end of the world came.

So he sent out for his friends and neighbors.

Be sure they came. An Eskimo can smell food cooking (or even merely rotting) for miles beyond the power of sight to detect it.

The invitation ran: "Come and eat and stay with me." And then the Eskimo ran too, the big ones tumbling over the little ones, and the dogs outstripping their masters, and all making loud noises according to their kind.

Alas! in two days they had literally eaten their generous host out of house and home, and along with the dogs of the quarreling packs there was the wolf of hunger gnawing at the door.

One of the Newfoundland fishermen left an Eskimo in charge of his supplies for the winter. Of these provisions he had set aside plenty for the Eskimo--for he knew how much a "husky" can eat. The Eskimo seems to have a "bread-basket" quite as extensible as any dog he drives.

Then all the other Eskimo came swarming: and he fed them all, so that in two days the whole crowd were starving together.

Grenfell found that the white man, green to the business of dog-driving or whale-hunting, had to win the respect of the Eskimo.

The Eskimo knows that most of his paleface brethren from the south are wholly unable to paddle their own canoes.

The white man, as a rule, cannot slay the seal, nor catch the cod, nor catch anything else except a cold.

He cannot stand up to a polar bear with a knife in fair fight.

He cannot sit out on a rock in a rain-storm all day without an umbrella and seem to enjoy it.

He cannot stand hunger, thirst and frost, and he chokes when the fumes and the black smoke of oil lamps get into his throat.

Then he is so funny about food! He doesn't care for stinking fish: he doesn't like his meat crawling with maggots after it has been buried in the ground; he doesn't know how much better mola.s.ses tastes when mice have fallen into it and expired.

The white man washes. How silly! He takes a brush made of little white bristles and rubs his teeth with it. Well, if the white man's mouth, which is full of water, isn't clean, then what part of him can be clean? And why does he turn up his nose at the Eskimo for being dirty?

As for smells, what is a bad smell? The Eskimo doesn't seem to know.

In Kipling's wonderful address on "Travel," before the Royal Geographical Society, he had much to say about smells, and how they suggest places. Eskimo taken to the World's Fair in Chicago were homesick for the smell of decaying blubber, rancid whale-meat, steaming bodies in the igloo, the rich perfume of the dogs, and all the other aromatic comforts of home. As smells are their special delight, so dirt is their peculiar glory. A bath in warm water would make them as unhappy as it makes a cat.

Fond of eating as they are, they like a change of food, and if bear-meat is all they find to eat in a certain spot, they hitch up and hike on to a better meal at a distance. They always want to be on the go. They rarely stay in one place more than a year or two.

Even the rifle does not seem, in the long run, to be helping them much. When the sealer used a harpoon, he hardly ever missed the seal, for he always struck at close range. But with the rifle, shooting from afar, the sea often swallows up his prey ere he can reach it. The walrus has gone to the farthest North and the seal is becoming gun-shy very fast.

As a hunter, the Eskimo is not wanting in nerve. A mighty hunter north of Nain was out gunning for big birds--ptarmigan, guillemot and divers,--when he came on a robust and fierce polar bear, a monstrous specimen.

The Eskimo had a shotgun, not a rifle. It takes a ball cartridge of large calibre to do for Mr. Bruin ordinarily--and he can "make his getaway" with a good deal of lead in him. But the "husky" calmly walked up close to the bear, and discharged his shotgun pointblank in the face of the astonished animal. If the hunter had been at a distance, the bear would have minded the dose about as much as a pinch of pepper. As it was, the animal was blinded, and turned in fury on the hunter.

The Eskimo tore off his sealskin tunic and threw it over the bear's head, the way a bull-fighter confuses a charging bull with a mantilla.

The bear stopped to tear the garment in pieces before proceeding to kill and devour the owner.

But the delay was fatal to Mr. Bear. In jig-time the hunter had reloaded the gun. He put the second charge into the bear's head through the eye,--and the monster expired at his feet.

The boys have bows and arrows; they begin by practising on small birds and later become proficient with a gun, so that by the time they are twelve years old they are veteran hunters.

The greatest joy in the life of the Eskimo is to spend a day in a seal-hunt.

Hours before dawn, the hunter climbs a rock and looks out to sea, anxious to learn if it will be a good day for his watery business.

Then he gets his breakfast. In the old days, it was a drink of water.

Nowadays, if the Eskimo has learned to like the white man's hot drink, it may be a cup of coffee.

At any rate, he drinks his breakfast: he doesn't eat it. He says food in his stomach makes him unhappy in the kayak.

The only food he takes with him is a plug of tobacco. He carries the kayak to the water, puts his weapons where he can get his hands on them instantly, climbs into the hole amidship and fastens his jacket round the circular rim.