Red Rooney | Page 2

mass. Here he stopped and looked up, with a sigh. But the
sinking of the heart was momentary. Deep snow had so filled up the
crevices of the shattered blocks that it was possible to advance slowly
by winding in and out among them. As the ascent grew steeper the
forlorn man dropped on all-fours and crawled upwards until he reached
the top.

The view that burst upon him would have roused enthusiasm if his
situation had been less critical. Even as it was, an exclamation of
surprise broke from him, for there, not five miles distant, was the coast
of Greenland; desolate, indeed, and ice-bound--he had expected
that--but inexpressibly grand even in its desolation. A mighty tongue of
a great glacier protruded itself into the frozen sea. The tip of this tongue
had been broken off, and the edge presented a gigantic wall of crystal
several hundred feet high, on which the sun glittered in blinding rays.
This tongue--a mere offshoot of the great glacier itself--filled a valley
full ten miles in length, measuring from its tip in the ocean to its root
on the mountain brow, where the snow-line was seen to cut sharply
against the sky.
For some minutes Red Rooney sat on one of the ice-blocks, gazing
with intense eagerness along the shore, in the hope of discerning smoke
or some other evidence of man's presence. But nothing met his
disappointed gaze save the same uniform, interminable waste of white
and grey, with here and there a few dark frowning patches where the
cliffs were too precipitous to sustain the snow.
Another despairing sigh rose to the man's lips, but these refused to give
it passage. With stern resolve he arose and stumbled hurriedly forward.
The strain, however, proved too great. On reaching the level ice on the
other side of the ridge he fell, apparently for the last time, and lay
perfectly still. Ah! how many must have fallen thus, to rise no more,
since men first began to search out the secrets of that grand mysterious
region!
But Red Rooney was not doomed to be among those who have perished
there. Not far from the spot where he fell, one of the short but muscular
and hairy-robed denizens of that country was busily engaged in
removing the skin from a Polar bear which he had just succeeded in
spearing, after a combat which very nearly cost him his life. During the
heat of the battle the brave little man's foot had slipped, and the
desperately wounded monster, making a rush at the moment,
overturned him into a crevice between two ice-blocks, fortunately the
impetus of the rush caused the animal to shoot into another crevice

beyond, and the man, proving more active than the bear, sprang out of
his hole in time to meet his foe with a spear-thrust so deadly that it
killed him on the spot. Immediately he began to skin the animal,
intending to go home with the skin, and return with a team of dogs for
the meat and the carcass of a recently-caught seal.
Meanwhile, having removed and packed up the bear-skin, he swung it
on his broad shoulders, and made for the shore as fast as his short legs
would carry him. On the way he came to the spot where the fallen
traveller lay.
His first act was to open his eyes to the uttermost, and, considering the
small, twinkling appearance of those eyes just a minute before, the
change was marvellous.
"Hoi!" then burst from him with tremendous emphasis, after which he
dropped his bundle, turned poor Rooney over on his back, and looked
at his face with an expression of awe.
"Dead!" said the Eskimo, under his breath--in his own tongue, of
course, not in English, of which, we need scarcely add, he knew
nothing.
After feeling the man's breast, under his coat, for a few seconds, he
murmured the word "Kablunet" (foreigner), and shook his head
mournfully.
It was not so much grief for the man's fate that agitated this child of the
northern wilderness, as regret at his own bad fortune. Marvellous were
the reports which from the south of Greenland had reached him, in his
far northern home, of the strange Kablunets or foreigners who had
arrived there to trade with the Eskimos--men who, so the reports went,
wore smooth coats without hair, little round things on their heads
instead of hoods, and flapping things on their legs instead of sealskin
boots--men who had come in monster kayaks (canoes), as big as
icebergs; men who seemed to possess everything, had the power to do
anything, and feared nothing. No fabrications in the Arabian Nights, or
Gulliver, or Baron Munchausen, ever transcended the stories about

those Kablunets which had reached this broad, short, sturdy
Eskimo--stories which