At length, one evening, after just such a bad spell of weather and of luck, Nandla begged to be taken out on to the hunting grounds. Now, his relatives had been thinking things over rather grimly, and had seen nothing ahead for him but long years of misery and possibly of want. The problem suggested but one solution. It was simple enough. This request of the blind man’s to be equipped once more for the hunt and taken along with the rest, gave them their opportunity. They fell in with his desire and made their plan. They knew of a certain rout where danger lay. Nandla should be taken that way. It was neither treachery nor murder they planned, but an end for the afflicted man of his anxieties and griefs. Nandla set out that morning full of delight. His heart was full of unwonted excitement. He yelled to the dogs and bumped and glided over the ice on the sled with a long missed sense of exhilaration. They soon reached the grounds. Nandla’s guide seized his hand and led him towards a gaping seal hole. “Follow me!” he said, dropping the other’s hand and lightly stepping to one side. “I follow!” replied the sightless man, and straightway fell into the hole. He went right under, then and there—under the ice—and was immediately drowned and frozen. A handy piece of ice served to seal the death trap, and all was over. Nandla had died on the hunt, and had entered the Eskimo heaven like the other valiant men of his tribe, and taken his place with the doughtiest of them, where there would be joy and plenty for evermore. CHAPTER XI TRIBAL LIFE—Continued Childhood in the arctics does not last long. There are among the Eskimo a number of strange customs and superstitions attending not only the transition time between girlhood and maturity, but the whole physical life of woman, which may have their interest for the ethnologist (especially from the point of view of the interpretation of the mentality of primitive peoples), but in which the general reader would scarcely find much interest. Suffice it to say that the root reason—probably instinctive—underlying many of these observances and rites, these taboos and indications, is very possibly a hygienic one, since in nearly every instance some purpose of the sort seems to be unconsciously served. It may be that herein lies one of the true distinctions between uncivilised and civilised existence. In the latter, most of the functional aspects of life are subordinated to the intellectual and the spiritual, while in the former they bulk self-consciously and far more obtrusively even than among the lower animals.