The Walrus Hunters | Page 6

which Cheenbuk belonged. It was a narrow inlet which ran up into a small island lying some distance off the northern shores of America, to discover and coast along which has been for so many years the aim and ambition of Arctic explorers. How it came by its name is not difficult to guess. Probably in ages past some adventurous voyagers, whose names and deeds have not been recorded in history, observing the numbers of walruses which scrambled out of the sea to sun themselves on the cliffs of the said creek, had named it after that animal, and the natives had adopted the name. Like other aborigines they had garbled it, however, and handed it down to posterity as Waruskeek, while the walruses, perhaps in order to justify the name, had kept up the custom of their forefathers, and continued to sun themselves there as in days of yore. Seals also abounded in the inlet, and multitudes of aquatic birds swarmed around its cliffs.
The Eskimo village which had been built there, unlike the snow-hut villages of winter, was composed chiefly of huts made of slabs of stone, intermingled with moss and clay. It was exceeding dirty, owing to remnants of blubber, shreds of skins, and bones innumerable, which were left lying about. There might have been about forty of these huts, at the doors of which--or the openings which served for doors--only women and children were congregated at the time we introduce them to the reader. All the men, with the exception of a few ancients, were away hunting.
In the centre of the village there stood a hut which was larger and a little cleaner than the others around it. An oldish man with a grey beard was seated on a stone bench beside the door. If tobacco had been known to the tribe, he would probably have been smoking. In default of that he was thrown back upon meditation. Apparently his meditations were not satisfactory, for he frowned portentously once or twice, and shook his head.
"You are not pleased to-day, Mangivik," said a middle-aged woman who issued from the hut at the moment and sat down beside the man.
"No, woman, I am not," he answered shortly.
Mangivik meant no disrespect by addressing his wife thus. "Woman" was the endearing term used by him on all occasions when in communication with her.
"What troubles you? Are you hungry?"
"No. I have just picked a walrus rib clean. It is not that."
He pointed, as he spoke, to a huge bone of the animal referred to.
"No, it is not that," he repeated.
"What then? Is it something you may not tell me?" asked the woman in a wheedling tone, as she crossed her legs and toyed with the flap of her tail.
Lest the civilised reader should be puzzled, we may here remark that the costume of the husband and wife whom we have introduced--as, indeed, of most if not all Eskimo men and women--is very similar in detail as well as material. Mangivik wore a coat or shirt of seal-skin with a hood to it, and his legs were encased in boots of the same material, which were long enough to cover nearly the whole of each leg and meet the skirt of the coat. The feet of the boots were of tough walrus-hide, and there was a short peak to the coat behind. The only difference in the costume of the woman was that the hood of her coat was larger, to admit of infants and other things being carried in it, and the peak behind was prolonged into a tail with a broad flap at the end. This tail varied a little in length according to the taste of the wearer--like our ladies' skirts; but in all cases it was long enough to trail on the ground-- perhaps we should say the ice--and, from the varied manner in which different individuals caused it to sweep behind them, it was evident that the tail, not less than the civilised skirt, served the purpose of enabling the wearers to display more or less of graceful motion.
"There is nothing that I have to hide from my woman," said the amiable Eskimo, in reply to her question. "Only I am troubled about that jump-about man Gartok."
"Has he been here again?" asked the wife, with something of a frown on her fat face. "He is just as you say, a jump-about like the little birds that come to us in the hot times, which don't seem to know what they want."
"He is too big to look like them," returned the husband. "He's more like a mad walrus. I met him on one of the old floes when I was after a seal, and he frightened it away. But it is not that that troubles me. There are two