Red Rooney | Page 3

no doubt began in the south of Greenland with a
substratum of truth, but which, in travelling several hundreds of miles
northward, had grown, as a snowball might have grown if rolled the
same distance over the Arctic wastes; with this difference--that whereas
the snowball would have retained its original shape, though not its size,
the tales lost not only their pristine form and size, but became so
amazingly distorted that the original reporters would probably have
failed to recognise them. And now, at last, here was actually a
Kablunet--a real foreigner in the body; but not alive! It was extremely
disappointing!
Our sturdy Eskimo, however, was not a good judge of Kablunet vitality.
He was yet rubbing the man's broad chest, with a sort of pathetic pity,
when a flutter of the heart startled him. He rubbed with more vigour.
He became excited, and, seizing Red Rooney by the arms, shook him
with considerable violence, the result being that the foreigner opened
his eyes and looked at him inquiringly.
"Hallo, my lad," said Rooney, in a faint voice; "not quite so hard. I'm
all right. Just help me up, like a good fellow."
He spoke in English, which was, of course, a waste of breath in the
circumstances. In proof of his being "all right," he fell back again, and
fainted away.
The Eskimo leaped up. He was one of those energetic beings who seem
to know in all emergencies what is best to be done, and do it promptly.
Unrolling the bear-skin, which yet retained a little of its first owner's
warmth, he wrapped the Kablunet in it from head to foot, leaving an
opening in front of his mouth for breathing purposes. With his knife--a
stone one--he cut off a little lump of blubber from the seal, and placed
that in the opening, so that the stranger might eat on reviving, if so
inclined, or let it alone, if so disposed. Then, turning his face towards
the land, he scurried away over the ice like a hunted partridge, or a
hairy ball driven before an Arctic breeze.
He made such good use of his short legs that in less than an hour he

reached a little hut, which seemed to nestle under the wing of a great
cliff in order to avoid destruction by the glittering walls of an
impending glacier. The hut had no proper doorway, but a tunnel-shaped
entrance, about three feet high and several feet long. Falling on his
knees, the Eskimo crept into the tunnel and disappeared. Gaining the
inner end of it, he stood up and glared, speechless, at his astonished
wife.
She had cause for surprise, for never since their wedding-day had Nuna
beheld such an expression on the fat face of her amiable husband.
"Okiok," she said, "have you seen an evil spirit?"
"No," he replied.
"Why, then, do you glare?"
Of course Nuna spoke in choice Eskimo, which we render into English
with as much fidelity to the native idiom as seems consistent with the
agreeable narration of our tale.
"Hoi!" exclaimed Okiok, in reply to her question, but without ceasing
to glare and breathe hard.
"Has my husband become a walrus, that he can only shout and snort?"
inquired Nuna, with the slightest possible twinkle in her eyes, as she
raised herself out of the lamp-smoke, and laid down the stick with
which she had been stirring the contents of a stone pot.
Instead of answering the question, Okiok turned to two chubby and
staring youths, of about fifteen and sixteen respectively, who were
mending spears, and said sharply, "Norrak, Ermigit, go, harness the
dogs."
Norrak rose with a bound, and dived into the tunnel. Ermigit, although
willing enough, was not quite so sharp. As he crawled into the tunnel
and was disappearing, his father sent his foot in the same direction, and,
having thus intimated the necessity for urgent haste, he turned again to

his wife with a somewhat softened expression.
"Give me food, Nuna. Little food has passed into me since yesterday at
sunrise. I starve. When I have eaten, you shall hear words that will
make you dream for a moon. I have seen,"--he became solemn at this
point, and lowered his voice to a whisper as he advanced his head and
glared again--"I have seen a--a--Kablunet!"
He drew back and gazed at his wife as connoisseurs are wont to do
when examining a picture. And truly Nuna's countenance was a
picture-round, fat, comely, oily, also open-mouthed and eyed, with
unbounded astonishment depicted thereon; for she thoroughly believed
her husband, knowing that he was upright and never told lies.
Her mental condition did not, however, interfere with her duties. A
wooden slab or plate, laden with a mess of broiled meat, soon smoked
before her lord. He