Book: The Second Jungle Book

R >> Rudyard Kipling >> The Second Jungle Book




"She said to me, 'I jump down, I jump down from my place on the
snow,'" cried Kotuko, with hollow eyes, leaning forward in the
half-lighted hut. "She said, 'I will be a guide.' She said,
'I will guide you to the good seal-holes.' To-morrow I go out,
and the tornaq will guide me."

Then the angekok, the village sorcerer, came in, and Kotuko told
him the tale a second time. It lost nothing in the telling.

"Follow the tornait [the spirits of the stones], and they will
bring us food again," said the angekok.

Now the girl from the North had been lying near the lamp,
eating very little and saying less for days past; but when
Amoraq and Kadlu next morning packed and lashed a little hand-
sleigh for Kotuko, and loaded it with his hunting-gear and as
much blubber and frozen seal-meat as they could spare, she took
the pulling-rope, and stepped out boldly at the boy's side.

"Your house is my house," she said, as the little
bone-shod sleigh squeaked and bumped behind them in
the awful Arctic night.

"My house is your house," said Kotuko; "but I think that we
shall both go to Sedna together."

Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Underworld, and the Inuit
believe that every one who dies must spend a year in her
horrible country before going to Quadliparmiut, the Happy
Place, where it never freezes and the fat reindeer trot up
when you call.

Through the village people were shouting: "The tornait have
spoken to Kotuko. They will show him open ice. He will bring
us the seal again!" Their voices were soon swallowed up by the
cold, empty dark, and Kotuko and the girl shouldered close
together as they strained on the pulling-rope or humoured the
sleigh through the ice in the direction of the Polar Sea.
Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told him to go
north, and north they went under Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer--those
stars that we call the Great Bear.

No European could have made five miles a day over the ice-
rubbish and the sharp-edged drifts; but those two knew exactly
the turn of the wrist that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock,
the jerk that nearly lifts it out of an ice-crack, and the exact
strength that goes to the few quiet strokes of the spear-head
that make a path possible when everything looks hopeless.

The girl said nothing, but bowed her head, and the long
wolverine-fur fringe of her ermine hood blew across her broad,
dark face. The sky above them was an intense velvety black,
changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon, where the great
stars burned like street-lamps. From time to time a greenish
wave of the Northern Lights would roll across the hollow of the
high heavens, flick like a flag, and disappear; or a meteor
would crackle from darkness to darkness, trailing a shower of
sparks behind. Then they could see the ridged and furrowed
surface of the floe tipped and laced with strange colours--red,
copper, and bluish; but in the ordinary starlight everything
turned to one frost-bitten gray. The floe, as you will remember,
had been battered and tormented by the autumn gales till it was
one frozen earthquake. There were gullies and ravines, and holes
like gravel-pits, cut in ice; lumps and scattered pieces frozen
down to the original floor of the floe; blotches of old black
ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gale and heaved
up again; roundish boulders of ice; saw-like edges of ice carved
by the snow that flies before the wind; and sunken pits where
thirty or forty acres lay below the level of the rest of the
field. From a little distance you might have taken the lumps
for seal or walrus, overturned sleighs or men on a hunting
expedition, or even the great Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear
himself; but in spite of these fantastic shapes, all on the
very edge of starting into life, there was neither sound nor
the least faint echo of sound. And through this silence and
through this waste, where the sudden lights flapped and went
out again, the sleigh and the two that pulled it crawled like
things in a nightmare--a nightmare of the end of the world at
the end of the world.

When they were tired Kotuko would make what the hunters call a
"half-house," a very small snow hut, into which they would
huddle with the travelling-lamp, and try to thaw out the frozen
seal-meat. When they had slept, the march began again--thirty
miles a day to get ten miles northward. The girl was always very
silent, but Kotuko muttered to himself and broke out into songs
he had learned in the Singing-House--summer songs, and reindeer
and salmon songs--all horribly out of place at that season.
He would declare that he heard the tornaq growling to him, and
would run wildly up a hummock, tossing his arms and speaking in
loud, threatening tones. To tell the truth, Kotuko was very
nearly crazy for the time being; but the girl was sure that he
was being guided by his guardian spirit, and that everything
would come right. She was not surprised, therefore, when at the
end of the fourth march Kotuko, whose eyes were burning like
fire-balls in his head, told her that his tornaq was following
them across the snow in the shape of a two-headed dog. The girl
looked where Kotuko pointed, and something seemed to slip into
a ravine. It was certainly not human, but everybody knew that
the tornait preferred to appear in the shape of bear and seal,
and such like.

It might have been the Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself,
or it might have been anything, for Kotuko and the girl were
so starved that their eyes were untrustworthy. They had trapped
nothing, and seen no trace of game since they had left the
village; their food would not hold out for another week,
and there was a gale coming. A Polar storm can blow for ten days
without a break, and all that while it is certain death to be
abroad. Kotuko laid up a snow-house large enough to take in the
hand-sleigh (never be separated from your meat), and while he
was shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the
key-stone of the roof, he saw a Thing looking at him from a
little cliff of ice half a mile away. The air was hazy, and the
Thing seemed to be forty feet long and ten feet high, with
twenty feet of tail and a shape that quivered all along the
outlines. The girl saw it too, but instead of crying aloud with
terror, said quietly, "That is Quiquern. What comes after?"

"He will speak to me," said Kotuko; but the snow-knife trembled
in his hand as he spoke, because however much a man may believe
that he is a friend of strange and ugly spirits, he seldom likes
to be taken quite at his word. Quiquern, too, is the phantom of
a gigantic toothless dog without any hair, who is supposed to
live in the far North, and to wander about the country just
before things are going to happen. They may be pleasant or
unpleasant things, but not even the sorcerers care to speak
about Quiquern. He makes the dogs go mad. Like the Spirit-Bear,
he has several extra pairs of legs,--six or eight,--and this
Thing jumping up and down in the haze had more legs than any
real dog needed. Kotuko and the girl huddled into their hut
quickly. Of course if Quiquern had wanted them, he could have
torn it to pieces above their heads, but the sense of a foot-
thick snow-wall between themselves and the wicked dark was great
comfort. The gale broke with a shriek of wind like the shriek of
a train, and for three days and three nights it held, never
varying one point, and never lulling even for a minute. They fed
the stone lamp between their knees, and nibbled at the half-warm
seal-meat, and watched the black soot gather on the roof for
seventy-two long hours. The girl counted up the food in the
sleigh; there was not more than two days' supply, and Kotuko
looked over the iron heads and the deer-sinew fastenings of
his harpoon and his seal-lance and his bird-dart. There was
nothing else to do.

"We shall go to Sedna soon--very soon," the girl whispered.
"In three days we shall lie down and go. Will your tornaq do
nothing? Sing her an angekok's song to make her come here."

He began to sing in the high-pitched howl of the magic songs,
and the gale went down slowly. In the middle of his song the
girl started, laid her mittened hand and then her head to the
ice floor of the hut. Kotuko followed her example, and the two
kneeled, staring into each other's eyes, and listening with
every nerve. He ripped a thin sliver of whalebone from the
rim of a bird-snare that lay on the sleigh, and, after
straightening, set it upright in a little hole in the ice,
firming it down with his mitten. It was almost as delicately
adjusted as a compass-needle, and now instead of listening they
watched. The thin rod quivered a little--the least little jar
in the world; then it vibrated steadily for a few seconds,
came to rest, and vibrated again, this time nodding to another
point of the compass.

"Too soon!" said Kotuko. "Some big floe has broken far away
outside."

The girl pointed at the rod, and shook her head. "It is the big
breaking," she said. "Listen to the ground-ice. It knocks."

When they kneeled this time they heard the most curious muffled
grunts and knockings, apparently under their feet. Sometimes it
sounded as though a blind puppy were squeaking above the lamp;
then as if a stone were being ground on hard ice; and again,
like muffled blows on a drum; but all dragged out and made
small, as though they travelled through a little horn a weary
distance away.

"We shall not go to Sedna lying down," said Kotuko. "It is the
breaking. The tornaq has cheated us. We shall die."

All this may sound absurd enough, but the two were face to face
with a very real danger. The three days' gale had driven the
deep water of Baffin's Bay southerly, and piled it on to the
edge of the far-reaching land-ice that stretches from Bylot's
Island to the west. Also, the strong current which sets east out
of Lancaster Sound carried with it mile upon mile of what they
call pack-ice--rough ice that has not frozen into fields;
and this pack was bombarding the floe at the same time that
the swell and heave of the storm-worked sea was weakening and
undermining it. What Kotuko and the girl had been listening to
were the faint echoes of that fight thirty or forty miles away,
and the little tell-tale rod quivered to the shock of it.

Now, as the Inuit say, when the ice once wakes after its
long winter sleep, there is no knowing what may happen,
for solid floe-ice changes shape almost as quickly as a cloud.
The gale was evidently a spring gale sent out of time, and
anything was possible.

Yet the two were happier in their minds than before. If the floe
broke up there would be no more waiting and suffering. Spirits,
goblins, and witch-people were moving about on the racking ice,
and they might find themselves stepping into Sedna's country
side by side with all sorts of wild Things, the flush of
excitement still on them. When they left the hut after the gale,
the noise on the horizon was steadily growing, and the tough ice
moaned and buzzed all round them.

"It is still waiting," said Kotuko.

On the top of a hummock sat or crouched the eight-legged Thing
that they had seen three days before--and it howled horribly.

"Let us follow," said the girl. "It may know some way that does
not lead to Sedna"; but she reeled from weakness as she took the
pulling-rope. The Thing moved off slowly and clumsily across the
ridges, heading always toward the westward and the land, and
they followed, while the growling thunder at the edge of the
floe rolled nearer and nearer. The floe's lip was split and
cracked in every direction for three or four miles inland,
and great pans of ten-foot-thick ice, from a few yards to twenty
acres square, were jolting and ducking and surging into one
another, and into the yet unbroken floe, as the heavy swell took
and shook and spouted between them. This battering-ram ice was,
so to speak, the first army that the sea was flinging against
the floe. The incessant crash and jar of these cakes almost
drowned the ripping sound of sheets of pack-ice driven bodily
under the floe as cards are hastily pushed under a tablecloth.
Where the water was shallow these sheets would be piled one atop
of the other till the bottommost touched mud fifty feet down,
and the discoloured sea banked behind the muddy ice till the
increasing pressure drove all forward again. In addition to the
floe and the pack-ice, the gale and the currents were bringing
down true bergs, sailing mountains of ice, snapped off from the
Greenland side of the water or the north shore of Melville Bay.
They pounded in solemnly, the waves breaking white round them,
and advanced on the floe like an old-time fleet under full sail.
A berg that seemed ready to carry the world before it would
ground helplessly in deep water, reel over, and wallow in a
lather of foam and mud and flying frozen spray, while a much
smaller and lower one would rip and ride into the flat floe,
flinging tons of ice on either side, and cutting a track half a
mile long before it was stopped. Some fell like swords, shearing
a raw-edged canal; and others splintered into a shower of
blocks, weighing scores of tons apiece, that whirled and skirted
among the hummocks. Others, again, rose up bodily out of the
water when they shoaled, twisted as though in pain, and fell
solidly on their sides, while the sea threshed over their
shoulders. This trampling and crowding and bending and buckling
and arching of the ice into every possible shape was going on as
far as the eye could reach all along the north line of the floe.
>From where Kotuko and the girl were, the confusion looked no
more than an uneasy, rippling, crawling movement under the
horizon; but it came toward them each moment, and they could
hear, far away to landward a heavy booming, as it might have
been the boom of artillery through a fog. That showed that the
floe was being jammed home against the iron cliffs of Bylot's
Island, the land to the southward behind them.

"This has never been before," said Kotuko, staring stupidly.
"This is not the time. How can the floe break NOW?"

"Follow THAT! the girl cried, pointing to the Thing half
limping, half running distractedly before them. They followed,
tugging at the hand- sleigh, while nearer and nearer came the
roaring march of the ice. At last the fields round them cracked
and starred in every direction, and the cracks opened and
snapped like the teeth of wolves. But where the Thing rested,
on a mound of old and scattered ice-blocks some fifty feet high,
there was no motion. Kotuko leaped forward wildly, dragging the
girl after him, and crawled to the bottom of the mound.
The talking of the ice grew louder and louder round them,
but the mound stayed fast, and, as the girl looked at him,
he threw his right elbow upward and outward, making the Inuit
sign for land in the shape of an island. And land it was that
the eight-legged, limping Thing had led them to--some granite-
tipped, sand-beached islet off the coast, shod and sheathed
and masked with ice so that no man could have told it from the
floe, but at the bottom solid earth, and not shifting ice!
The smashing and rebound of the floes as they grounded and
splintered marked the borders of it, and a friendly shoal ran
out to the northward, and turned aside the rush of the heaviest
ice, exactly as a ploughshare turns over loam. There was danger,
of course, that some heavily squeezed ice-field might shoot up
the beach, and plane off the top of the islet bodily; but that
did not trouble Kotuko and the girl when they made their snow-
house and began to eat, and heard the ice hammer and skid along
the beach. The Thing had disappeared, and Kotuko was talking
excitedly about his power over spirits as he crouched round the
lamp. In the middle of his wild sayings the girl began to laugh,
and rock herself backward and forward.

Behind her shoulder, crawling into the hut crawl by crawl,
there were two heads, one yellow and one black, that belonged to
two of the most sorrowful and ashamed dogs that ever you saw.
Kotuko the dog was one, and the black leader was the other.
Both were now fat, well-looking, and quite restored to their
proper minds, but coupled to each other in an extraordinary
fashion. When the black leader ran off, you remember,
his harness was still on him. He must have met Kotuko the dog,
and played or fought with him, for his shoulder-loop had caught
in the plaited copper wire of Kotuko's collar, and had drawn
tight, so that neither could get at the trace to gnaw it apart,
but each was fastened sidelong to his neighbour's neck.
That, with the freedom of hunting on their own account,
must have helped to cure their madness. They were very sober.

The girl pushed the two shamefaced creatures towards Kotuko,
and, sobbing with laughter, cried, "That is Quiquern, who led
us to safe ground. Look at his eight legs and double head!"

Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his arms, yellow and
black together, trying to explain how they had got their senses
back again. Kotuko ran a hand down their ribs, which were round
and well clothed. "They have found food," he said, with a grin.
"I do not think we shall go to Sedna so soon. My tornaq sent
these. The sickness has left them."

As soon as they had greeted Kotuko, these two, who had
been forced to sleep and eat and hunt together for the past
few weeks, flew at each other's throat, and there was a
beautiful battle in the snow-house. "Empty dogs do not fight,"
Kotuko said. "They have found the seal. Let us sleep. We shall
find food."

When they waked there was open water on the north beach of the
island, and all the loosened ice had been driven landward.
The first sound of the surf is one of the most delightful that
the Inuit can hear, for it means that spring is on the road.
Kotuko and the girl took hold of hands and smiled, for the
clear, full roar of the surge among the ice reminded them of
salmon and reindeer time and the smell of blossoming ground-
willows. Even as they looked, the sea began to skim over between
the floating cakes of ice, so intense was the cold; but on the
horizon there was a vast red glare, and that was the light of
the sunken sun. It was more like hearing him yawn in his sleep
than seeing him rise, and the glare lasted for only a few
minutes, but it marked the turn of the year. Nothing, they felt,
could alter that.

Kotuko found the dogs fighting over a fresh-killed seal who was
following the fish that a gale always disturbs. He was the first
of some twenty or thirty seal that landed on the island in the
course of the day, and till the sea froze hard there were
hundreds of keen black heads rejoicing in the shallow free water
and floating about with the floating ice.

It was good to eat seal-liver again; to fill the lamps
recklessly with blubber, and watch the flame blaze three feet in
the air; but as soon as the new sea-ice bore, Kotuko and the
girl loaded the hand-sleigh, and made the two dogs pull as they
had never pulled in their lives, for they feared what might have
happened in their village. The weather was as pitiless as usual;
but it is easier to draw a sleigh loaded with good food than to
hunt starving. They left five-and-twenty seal carcasses buried
in the ice of the beach, all ready for use, and hurried back to
their people. The dogs showed them the way as soon as Kotuko
told them what was expected, and though there was no sign of a
landmark, in two days they were giving tongue outside Kadlu's
house. Only three dogs answered them; the others had been eaten,
and the houses were all dark. But when Kotuko shouted, "Ojo!"
(boiled meat), weak voices replied, and when he called the
muster of the village name by name, very distinctly, there were
no gaps in it.

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.

Kadlu looked at the girl from the North, and said quietly,
"WE build a house." He pointed to the north-west 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, deer- skins 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.

.....

Now Kotuko, who drew very well in the Inuit fashion, scratched
pictures of all these adventures on a long, flat piece of ivory
with a hole at one end. When he and the girl went north to
Ellesmere Land in the year of the Wonderful Open Winter, he left
the picture-story with Kadlu, who lost it in the shingle when
his dog-sleigh broke down one summer on the beach of Lake
Netilling at Nikosiring, and there a Lake Inuit found it next
spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who was interpreter on a
Cumberland Sound whaler, and he sold it to Hans Olsen, who was
afterward a quartermaster on board a big steamer that took
tourists to the North Cape in Norway. When the tourist season
was over, the steamer ran between London and Australia, stopping
at Ceylon, and there Olsen sold the ivory to a Cingalese
jeweller for two imitation sapphires. I found it under some
rubbish in a house at Colombo, and have translated it from one
end to the other.



'ANGUTIVAUN TAINA'

[This is a very free translation of the Song of the Returning
Hunter, as the men used to sing it after seal-spearing.
The Inuit always repeat things over and over again.]

Our gloves are stiff with the frozen blood,
Our furs with the drifted snow,
As we come in with the seal--the seal!
In from the edge of the floe.

Au jana! Aua! Oha! Haq!
And the yelping dog-teams go,
And the long whips crack, and the men come back,
Back from the edge of the floe !

We tracked our seal to his secret place,
We heard him scratch below,
We made our mark, and we watched beside,
Out on the edge of the floe.

We raised our lance when he rose to breathe,
We drove it downward--so!
And we played him thus, and we killed him thus,
Out on the edge of the floe.

Our gloves are glued with the frozen blood,
Our eyes with the drifting snow;
But we come back to our wives again,
Back from the edge of the floe!

Au jana! Aua! Oha! Haq!
And the loaded dog-teams go,
And the wives can hear their men come back.
Back from the edge of the floe!



RED DOG

For our white and our excellent nights---for the nights of
swift running.
Fair ranging, far seeing, good hunting, sure cunning!
For the smells of the dawning, untainted, ere dew has departed!
For the rush through the mist, and the quarry blind-started!
For the cry of our mates when the sambhur has wheeled and is
standing at bay,
For the risk and the riot of night!
For the sleep at the lair-mouth by day,
It is met, and we go to the fight.
Bay! O Bay!

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