An hour later the lamps blazed in Kadlu's house; snow-water was
heating; the pots were beginning to simmer, and the snow was dripping
from the roof, as Amoraq made ready a meal for all the village, and
the boy-baby in the hood chewed at a strip of rich nutty blubber, and
the hunters slowly and methodically filled themselves to the very brim
with seal-meat. Kotuko and the girl told their tale. The two dogs sat
between them, and whenever their names came in, they cocked an ear
apiece and looked most thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A dog who has
once gone mad and recovered, the Inuit say, is safe against all
further attacks.
"So the _tornaq_ did not forget us," said Kotuko. "The storm blew, the
ice broke, and the seal swam in behind the fish that were frightened
by the storm. Now the new seal-holes are not two days' distant. Let
the good hunters go to-morrow and bring back the seal I have
speared--twenty-five seal buried in the ice. When we have eaten those
we will all follow the seal on the floe."
"What do _you_ do?" said the sorcerer in the same sort of voice as he
used to Kadlu, richest of the Tununirmiut.
Kotuko looked at the girl from the North, and said quietly, "_We_
build a house." He pointed to the northwest side of Kadlu's house, for
that is the side on which the married son or daughter always lives.
The girl turned her hands palm upward, with a little despairing shake
of her head. She was a foreigner, picked up starving, and could bring
nothing to the housekeeping.
Amoraq jumped from the bench where she sat, and began to sweep things
into the girl's lap--stone lamps, iron skin-scrapers, tin kettles,
deerskins embroidered with musk-ox teeth, and real canvas-needles such
as sailors use--the finest dowry that has ever been given on the far
edge of the Arctic Circle, and the girl from the North bowed her head
down to the very floor.
"Also these!" said Kotuko, laughing and signing to the dogs, who
thrust their cold muzzles into the girl's face.
"Ah," said the _angekok_, with an important cough, as though he had
been thinking it all over. "As soon as Kotuko left the village I went
to the Singing-House and sang magic. I sang all the long nights, and
called upon the Spirit of the Reindeer. _My_ singing made the gale
blow that broke the ice and drew the two dogs toward Kotuko when the
ice would have crushed his bones. _My_ song drew the seal in behind
the broken ice. My body lay still in the _quaggi_, but my spirit ran
about on the ice, and guided Kotuko and the dogs in all the things
they did. I did it."
Everybody was full and sleepy, so no one contradicted; and the
_angekok_, by virtue of his office, helped himself to yet another lump
of boiled meat, and lay down to sleep with the others in the warm,
well-lighted, oil-smelling home.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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