Book: The Second Jungle Book

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Very softly down the glade runs a waiting, watching shade,
And the whisper spreads and widens far and near;
And the sweat is on thy brow, for he passes even now--
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!

Ere the moon has climbed the mountain, ere the rocks
are ribbed with light,
When the downward-dipping trails are dank and drear,
Comes a breathing hard behind thee--snuffle-snuffle
through the night--
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!

On thy knees and draw the bow; bid the shrilling arrow go;
In the empty, mocking thicket plunge the spear;
But thy hands are loosed and weak, and the blood has left
thy cheek--
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!

When the heat-cloud sucks the tempest, when the slivered
pine-trees fall,
When the blinding, blaring rain-squalls lash and veer;
Through the war-gongs of the thunder rings a voice more
loud than all--
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!

Now the spates are banked and deep; now the footless
boulders leap--
Now the lightning shows each littlest leaf-rib clear--
But thy throat is shut and dried, and thy heart against
thy side
Hammers: Fear, O Little Hunter--this is Fear!



QUIQUERN

The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow--
They beg for coffee and sugar; they go where the white men go.
The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight;
"They sell their furs to the trading-post: they sell their souls
to the white.
The People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler's
crew;
Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few.
But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man's ken--
Their spears are made of the narwhal-horn, and they are the
last of the Men!
Translation.

"He has opened his eyes. Look!"

"Put him in the skin again. He will be a strong dog. On the
fourth month we will name him."

"For whom?" said Amoraq.

Kadlu's eye rolled round the skin-lined snow-house till it
fell on fourteen-year-old Kotuko sitting on the sleeping-bench,
making a button out of walrus ivory. "Name him for me,"
said Kotuko, with a grin. "I shall need him one day."

Kadlu grinned back till his eyes were almost buried in the fat
of his flat cheeks, and nodded to Amoraq, while the puppy's
fierce mother whined to see her baby wriggling far out of reach
in the little sealskin pouch hung above the warmth of the
blubber-lamp. Kotuko went on with his carving, and Kadlu threw
a rolled bundle of leather dog-harnesses into a tiny little
room that opened from one side of the house, slipped off his
heavy deerskin hunting-suit, put it into a whalebone-net that
hung above another lamp, and dropped down on the sleeping-bench
to whittle at a piece of frozen seal-meat till Amoraq, his wife,
should bring the regular dinner of boiled meat and blood-soup.
He had been out since early dawn at the seal-holes, eight miles
away, and had come home with three big seal. Half-way down the
long, low snow passage or tunnel that led to the inner door
of the house you could hear snappings and yelpings, as the
dogs of his sleigh-team, released from the day's work, scuffled
for warm places.

When the yelpings grew too loud Kotuko lazily rolled off the
sleeping-bench, and picked up a whip with an eighteen-inch
handle of springy whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy,
plaited thong. He dived into the passage, where it sounded as
though all the dogs were eating him alive; but that was no more
than their regular grace before meals. When he crawled out at
the far end, half a dozen furry heads followed him with their
eyes as he went to a sort of gallows of whale-jawbones, from
which the dog's meat was hung; split off the frozen stuff in big
lumps with a broad-headed spear; and stood, his whip in one hand
and the meat in the other. Each beast was called by name,
the weakest first, and woe betide any dog that moved out of his
turn; for the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged
lightning, and flick away an inch or so of hair and hide.
Each beast growled, snapped, choked once over his portion,
and hurried back to the protection of the passage, while the boy
stood upon the snow under the blazing Northern Lights and dealt
out justice. The last to be served was the big black leader of
the team, who kept order when the dogs were harnessed; and to
him Kotuko gave a double allowance of meat as well as an extra
crack of the whip.

"Ah!" said Kotuko, coiling up the lash," I have a little
one over the lamp that will make a great many howlings. SARPOK!
Get in!"

He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted the dry snow from
his furs with the whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door,
tapped the skin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles
that might have fallen from the dome of snow above, and curled
up on the bench. The dogs in the passage snored and whined in
their sleep, the boy-baby in Amoraq's deep fur hood kicked and
choked and gurgled, and the mother of the newly-named puppy lay
at Kotuko's side, her eyes fixed on the bundle of sealskin, warm
and safe above the broad yellow flame of the lamp.

And all this happened far away to the north, beyond Labrador,
beyond Hudson's Strait, where the great tides heave the ice
about, north of Melville Peninsula--north even of the narrow
Fury and Hecla Straits--on the north shore of Baffin Land,
where Bylot's Island stands above the ice of Lancaster Sound
like a pudding-bowl wrong side up. North of Lancaster Sound
there is little we know anything about, except North Devon and
Ellesmere Land; but even there live a few scattered people,
next door, as it were, to the very Pole.

Kadlu was an Inuit,--what you call an Esquimau,--and his tribe,
some thirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut--"the
country lying at the back of something." In the maps that
desolate coast is written Navy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name
is best, because the country lies at the very back of everything
in the world. For nine months of the year there is only ice and
snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that no one can realise
who has never seen the thermometer even at zero. For six months
of those nine it is dark; and that is what makes it so horrible.
In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other
day and every night, and then the snow begins to weep off on the
southerly slopes, and a few ground-willows put out their woolly
buds, a tiny stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom, beaches
of fine gravel and rounded stones run down to the open sea,
and polished boulders and streaked rocks lift up above the
granulated snow. But all that is gone in a few weeks, and the
wild winter locks down again on the land; while at sea the ice
tears up and down the offing, jamming and ramming, and splitting
and hitting, and pounding and grounding, till it all freezes
together, ten feet thick, from the land outward to deep water.

In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to the edge of this
land-ice, and spear them as they came up to breathe at their
blow-holes. The seal must have open water to live and catch fish
in, and in the deep of winter the ice would sometimes run eighty
miles without a break from the nearest shore. In the spring he
and his people retreated from the floes to the rocky mainland,
where they put up tents of skins, and snared the sea-birds, or
speared the young seal basking on the beaches. Later, they would
go south into Baffin Land after the reindeer, and to get their
year's store of salmon from the hundreds of streams and lakes of
the interior; coming back north in September or October for the
musk-ox hunting and the regular winter sealery. This travelling
was done with dog-sleighs, twenty and thirty miles a day, or
sometimes down the coast in big skin "woman-boats," when the
dogs and the babies lay among the feet of the rowers, and the
women sang songs as they glided from cape to cape over the
glassy, cold waters. All the luxuries that the Tununirmiut knew
came from the south--driftwood for sleigh-runners, rod-iron for
harpoon-tips, steel knives, tin kettles that cooked food much
better than the old soap-stone affairs, flint and steel, and
even matches, as well as coloured ribbons for the women's hair,
little cheap mirrors, and red cloth for the edging of deerskin
dress-jackets. Kadlu traded the rich, creamy, twisted narwhal
horn and musk-ox teeth (these are just as valuable as pearls) to
the Southern Inuit, and they, in turn, traded with the whalers
and the missionary-posts of Exeter and Cumberland Sounds; and so
the chain went on, till a kettle picked up by a ship's 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.

If the puppy had not had an iron constitution he would have died
from over-stuffing and over-handling. Kotuko made him a tiny
harness with a trace to it, and hauled him all over the house-
floor, shouting: "Aua! Ja aua!" (Go to the right). Choiachoi! Ja
choiachoi!" (Go to the left). "Ohaha!" (Stop). The puppy did not
like it at all, but being fished for in this way was pure
happiness beside being put to the sleigh for the first time.
He just sat down on the snow, and played with the seal-hide
trace that ran from his harness to the pitu, the big thong in
the bows of the sleigh. Then the team started, and the puppy
found the heavy ten-foot sleigh running up his back, and
dragging him along the snow, while Kotuko laughed till the tears
ran down his face. There followed days and days of the cruel
whip that hisses like the wind over ice, and his companions all
bit him because he did not know his work, and the harness chafed
him, and he was dot allowed to sleep with Kotuko any more,
but had to take the coldest place in the passage. It was a sad
time for the puppy.

The boy learned, too, as fast as the dog; though a dog-sleigh is
a heart-breaking thing to manage. Each beast is harnessed,
the weakest nearest to the driver, by his own separate trace,
which runs under his left fore-leg to the main thong, where it
is fastened by a sort of button and loop which can be slipped by
a turn of the wrist, thus freeing one dog at a time. This is
very necessary, because young dogs often get the trace between
their hind legs, where it cuts to the bone. And they one and all
WILL go visiting their friends as they run, jumping in and out
among the traces. Then they fight, and the result is more mixed
than a wet fishing-line next morning. A great deal of trouble
can be avoided by scientific use of the whip. Every Inuit boy
prides himself as being a master of the long lash; but it is
easy to flick at a mark on the ground, and difficult to lean
forward and catch a shirking dog just behind the shoulders when
the sleigh is going at full speed. If you call one dog's name
for "visiting," and accidentally lash another, the two will
fight it out at once, and stop all the others. Again, if you
travel with a companion and begin to talk, or by yourself and
sing, the dogs will halt, turn round, and sit down to hear what
you have to say. Kotuko was run away from once or twice through
forgetting to block the sleigh when he stopped; and he broke
many lashings, and ruined a few thongs before he could be
trusted with a full team of eight and the light sleigh. Then he
felt himself a person of consequence, and on smooth, black ice,
with a bold heart and a quick elbow, he smoked along over the
levels as fast as a pack in full cry. He would go ten miles to
the seal-holes, and when he was on the hunting~grounds he would
twitch a trace loose from the pitu, and free the big black
leader, who was the cleverest dog in the team. As soon as the
dog had scented a breathing-hole, Kotuko would reverse the
sleigh, driving a couple of sawed-off antlers, that stuck up
like perambulator-handles from the back-rest, deep into the
snow, so that the team could not get away. Then he would crawl
forward inch by inch, and wait till the seal came up to breathe.
Then he would stab down swiftly with his spear and running-line,
and presently would haul his seal up to the lip of the ice,
while the black leader came up and helped to pull the carcass
across the ice to the sleigh. That was the time when the
harnessed dogs yelled and foamed with excitement, and Kotuko
laid the long lash like a red-hot bar across all their faces,
till the carcass froze stiff. Going home was the heavy work.
The loaded sleigh had to be humoured among the rough ice,
and the dogs sat down and looked hungrily at the seal instead
of pulling. At last they would strike the well-worn sleigh-road
to the village, and toodle-kiyi along the ringing ice, heads
down and tails up, while Kotuko struck up the "An-gutivaun
tai-na tau-na-ne taina" (The Song of the Returning Hunter),
and voices hailed him from house to house under all that dim,
star-littern sky.

When Kotuko the dog came to his full growth he enjoyed himself
too. He fought his way up the team steadily, fight after fight,
till one fine evening, over their food, he tackled the big,
black leader (Kotuko the boy saw fair play), and made second dog
of him, as they say. So he was promoted to the long thong of the
leading dog, running five feet in advance of all the others:
it was his bounden duty to stop all fighting, in harness or out
of it, and he wore a collar of copper wire, very thick and
heavy. On special occasions he was fed with cooked food inside
the house, and sometimes was allowed to sleep on the bench with
Kotuko. He was a good seal-dog, and would keep a musk-ox at bay
by running round him and snapping at his heels. He would even--
and this for a sleigh-dog is the last proof of bravery--he would
even stand up to the gaunt Arctic wolf, whom all dogs of the
North, as a rule, fear beyond anything that walks the snow.
He and his master--they did not count the team of ordinary dogs
as company--hunted together, day after day and night after
night, fur-wrapped boy and savage, long-haired, narrow-eyed,
white-fanged, yellow brute. All an Inuit has to do is to get
food and skins for himself and his family. The women-folk make
the skins into clothing, and occasionally help in trapping small
game; but the bulk of the food--and they eat enormously--must be
found by the men. If the supply fails there is no one up there
to buy or beg or borrow from. The people must die.

An Inuit does not think of these chances till he is forced to.
Kadlu, Kotuko, Amoraq, and the boy-baby who kicked about in
Amoraq's fur hood and chewed pieces of blubber all day, were as
happy together as any family in the world. They came of a very
gentle race--an Inuit seldom loses his temper, and almost never
strikes a child--who did not know exactly what telling a real
lie meant, still less how to steal. They were content to spear
their living out of the heart of the bitter, hopeless cold;
to smile oily smiles, and tell queer ghost and fairy tales
of evenings, and eat till they could eat no more, and sing
the endless woman's song: "Amna aya, aya amna, ah! ah!" through
the long lamp-lighted days as they mended their clothes and
their hunting-gear.

But one terrible winter everything betrayed them.
The Tununirmiut returned from the yearly salmon-fishing,
and made their houses on the early ice to the north of Bylot's
Island, ready to go after the seal as soon as the sea froze.
But it was an early and savage autumn. All through September
there were continuous gales that broke up the smooth seal-ice
when it was only four or five feet thick, and forced it inland,
and piled a great barrier, some twenty miles broad, of lumped
and ragged and needly ice, over which it was impossible to draw
the dog-sleighs. The edge of the floe off which the seal were
used to fish in winter lay perhaps twenty miles beyond this
barrier, and out of reach of the Tununirmiut. Even so, they
might have managed to scrape through the winter on their stock
of frozen salmon and stored blubber, and what the traps gave
them, but in December one of their hunters came across a tupik
(a skin-tent) of three women and a girl nearly dead, whose men
had come down from the far North and been crushed in their
little skin hunting-boats while they were out after the long-
horned narwhal. Kadlu, of course, could only distribute the
women among the huts of the winter village, for no Inuit dare
refuse a meal to a stranger. He never knows when his own turn
may come to beg. Amoraq took the girl, who was about fourteen,
into her own house as a sort of servant. From the cut of her
sharp-pointed hood, and the long diamond pattern of her white
deer-skin leggings, they supposed she came from Ellesmere Land.
She had never seen tin cooking-pots or wooden-shod sleighs
before; but Kotuko the boy and Kotuko the dog were rather
fond of her.

Then all the foxes went south, and even the wolverine, that
growling, blunt-headed little thief of the snow, did not take
the trouble to follow the line of empty traps that Kotuko set.
The tribe lost a couple of their best hunters, who were badly
crippled in a fight with a musk-ox, and this threw more work on
the others. Kotuko went out, day after day, with a light
hunting-sleigh and six or seven of the strongest dogs, looking
till his eyes ached for some patch of clear ice where a seal
might perhaps have scratched a breathing-hole. Kotuko the dog
ranged far and wide, and in the dead stillness of the ice-fields
Kotuko the boy could hear his half-choked whine of excitement,
above a seal-hole three miles away, as plainly as though he were
at his elbow. When the dog found a hole the boy would build
himself a little, low snow wall to keep off the worst of the
bitter wind, and there he would wait ten, twelve, twenty hours
for the seal to come up to breathe, his eyes glued to the tiny
mark he had made above the hole to guide the downward thrust of
his harpoon, a little seal-skin mat under his feet, and his legs
tied together in the tutareang (the buckle that the old hunters
had talked about). This helps to keep a man's legs from
twitching as he waits and waits and waits for the quick-eared
seal to rise. Though there is no excitement in it, you can
easily believe that the sitting still in the buckle with the
thermometer perhaps forty degrees below zero is the hardest work
an Inuit knows. When a seal was caught, Kotuko the dog would
bound forward, his trace trailing behind him, and help to pull
the body to the sleigh, where the tired and hungry dogs lay
sullenly under the lee of the broken ice.

A seal did not go very far, for each mouth in the little village
had a right to be filled, and neither bone, hide, nor sinew was
wasted. The dogs' meat was taken for human use, and Amoraq fed
the team with pieces of old summer skin-tents raked out from
under the sleeping-bench, and they howled and howled again, and
waked to howl hungrily. One could tell by the soap-stone lamps
in the huts that famine was near. In good seasons, when blubber
was plentiful, the light in the boat-shaped lamps would be two
feet high--cheerful, oily, and yellow. Now it was a bare six
inches: Amoraq carefully pricked down the moss wick, when an
unwatched flame brightened for a moment, and the eyes of all the
family followed her hand. The horror of famine up there in the
great cold is not so much dying, as dying in the dark. All the
Inuit dread the dark that presses on them without a break for
six months in each year; and when the lamps are low in the
houses the minds of people begin to be shaken and confused.

But worse was to come.

The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the passages,
glaring at the cold stars, and snuffing into the bitter wind,
night after night. When they stopped howling the silence fell
down again as solid and heavy as a snowdrift against a door,
and men could hear the beating of their blood in the thin
passages of the ear, and the thumping of their own hearts,
that sounded as loud as the noise of sorcerers' drums beaten
across the snow. One night Kotuko the dog, who had been
unusually sullen in harness, leaped up and pushed his head
against Kotuko's knee. Kotuko patted him, but the dog still
pushed blindly forward, fawning. Then Kadlu waked, and gripped
the heavy wolf-like head, and stared into the glassy eyes.
The dog whimpered and shivered between Kadlu's knees. The hair
rose about his neck, and he growled as though a stranger were at
the door; then he barked joyously, and rolled on the ground, and
bit at Kotuko's boot like a puppy.

"What is it?" said Kotuko; for he was beginning to be afraid.

"The sickness," Kadlu answered. "It is the dog sickness." Kotuko
the dog lifted his nose and howled and howled again.

"I have not seen this before. What will he do?" said Kotuko.

Kadlu shrugged one shoulder a little, and crossed the hut for
his short stabbing-harpoon. The big dog looked at him, howled
again, and slunk away down the passage, while the other dogs
drew aside right and left to give him ample room. When he was
out on the snow he barked furiously, as though on the trail of
a musk-ox, and, barking and leaping and frisking, passed out of
sight. His trouble was not hydrophobia, but simple, plain
madness. The cold and the hunger, and, above all, the dark,
had turned his head; and when the terrible dog-sickness once
shows itself in a team, it spreads like wild-fire. Next hunting-
day another dog sickened, and was killed then and there by
Kotuko as he bit and struggled among the traces. Then the black
second dog, who had been the leader in the old days, suddenly
gave tongue on an imaginary reindeer-track, and when they
slipped him from the pitu he flew at the throat of an ice-cliff,
and ran away as his leader had done, his harness on his back.
After that no one would take the dogs out again. They needed
them for something else, and the dogs knew it; and though they
were tied down and fed by hand, their eyes were full of despair
and fear. To make things worse, the old women began to tell
ghost-tales, and to say that they had met the spirits of the
dead hunters lost that autumn, who prophesied all sorts of
horrible things.

Kotuko grieved more for the loss of his dog than anything else;
for though an Inuit eats enormously he also knows how to starve.
But the hunger, the darkness, the cold, and the exposure told on
his strength, and he began to hear voices inside his head, and
to see people who were not there, out of the tail of his eye.
One night--he had unbuckled himself after ten hours' waiting
above a "blind" seal-hole, and was staggering back to the
village faint and dizzy--he halted to lean his back against
a boulder which happened to be supported like a rocking-stone
on a single jutting point of ice. His weight disturbed the
balance of the thing, it rolled over ponderously, and as Kotuko
sprang aside to avoid it, slid after him, squeaking and hissing
on the ice-slope.

That was enough for Kotuko. He had been brought up to believe
that every rock and boulder had its owner (its inua), who was
generally a one-eyed kind of a Woman-Thing called a tornaq,
and that when a tornaq meant to help a man she rolled after him
inside her stone house, and asked him whether he would take her
for a guardian spirit. (In summer thaws the ice-propped rocks
and boulders roll and slip all over the face of the land, so you
can easily see how the idea of live stones arose.) Kotuko heard
the blood beating in his ears as he had heard it all day, and he
thought that was the tornaq of the stone speaking to him.
Before he reached home he was quite certain that he had held a
long conversation with her, and as all his people believed that
this was quite possible, no one contradicted him.

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