Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the NorthWaldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
History
Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North
Waldo, Fullerton L. (Fullerton Leonard)
Grenfell, Wilfred Thomason, Sir, 1865-1940
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 molasses 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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