cook in the Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber-lamp
somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic Circle.
Kadlu, being a good hunter, was rich in iron harpoons, snow-knives,
bird-darts, and all the other things that make life easy up there in the
great cold; and he was the head of his tribe, or, as they say, “the
man who knows all about it by practice.” This did not give him any
authority, except now and then he could advise his friends to change
their hunting-grounds; but Kotuko used it to domineer a little, in the
lazy, fat Inuit fashion, over the other boys, when they came out at
night to play ball in the moonlight, or to sing the Child’s Song to the
Aurora Borealis.
But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was tired of
making snares for wild-fowl and kit-foxes, and most tired of all of
helping the women to chew seal-and deer-skins (that supples them as
nothing else can) the long day through, while the men were out hunting.
He wanted to go into the quaggi, the Singing-House, when the hunters
gathered there for their mysteries, and the angekok, the sorcerer,
frightened them into the most delightful fits after the lamps were put
out, and you could hear the Spirit of the Reindeer stamping on the roof;
and when a spear was thrust out into the open black night it came back
covered with hot blood. He wanted to throw his big boots into the net
with the tired air of the head of a family, and to gamble with the
hunters when they dropped in of an evening and played a sort of
home-made roulette with a tin pot and a nail. There were hundreds of
things that he wanted to do, but the grown men laughed at him and said,
“Wait till you have been in the buckle, Kotuko. Hunting is not ALL
catching.”
Now that his father had named a puppy for him, things looked brighter.
An Inuit does not waste a good dog on his son till the boy knows
something of dog-driving; and Kotuko was more than sure that he knew
more than everything.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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