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QUIQUERN.

_r Rudyard Kipling. [Concluded.) 11. 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 in my house," she said, as the little bone-shod sleigh squeaked and bumped behind them in the awful, silent Arctic night.

" My house is your house," said Kutukoi " 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, whore it never freezes and the fat reindeer trot up when you call. Through the village peoplo were shout, ing:—" The tornait have spoken to Kotuko. They will show him open ice. Ho will bring us tho seal again." Their voices wore soon swallowed up by the cold, empty dark, and Kotuko and tho girl shouldered close together as they strained on the pullingropo or humoured the sleigh through the broken 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 Tuktugdjung 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 sharpedged drifts; but those two knew exactly tho turn of the wrist that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock, tho jerk that ucatly lifts it out of an ice-track, and the exact strength that goes to the few quiet strokos 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 to her ermine hood blew, across her broad, dark face. The sky above them was on intense velvety black, changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon, where the great stars burned like street lamps. Prom timo to time a greenish wave of tho Northern Lights would roll across the hollow of the high heavens, flick liko 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 all tipped and laced with strange colours—red, copper, and bluish; but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bitten grey. The floe, as yea 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 j saw-like edges of ice carved by the snow that flies before the wind, and sunk pita where thirty or forty acres lay five or six feet 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 Ton-legged White Spirit-Bear himself; but in spite oif 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 liko 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 " halfhouse," a very small snow hut, into which thoy would huddle with the travelling lamp, and try to thaw out the frozen seal-meat. When they hod 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 fireballs 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 tornaq 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 untrust-1 [ worthy. They had trapped nothing, and J

seen no trace of game since they had left the village; their food would not hold ont ' for another week, and there was a „i« coming. A polar storm will blow for ten days without a break, and all that while if is certain death to be abroad. Kotuko laid up a snow-house large enough to take in th hand-sleigh (it is never wise to bo separate! from your meat), and while ho was Bhapina the last irregular block of ice that makes the keystone of the roof he saw a Thing looking at him from a little cliff of ice haW a mile away. The air was hazy, and the thing seemed to bo forty feet long and ten feet high, with twenty feet of tail and & shapo that quivered all along the oufclin es The girl saw it too, but instead of crying aloud with terror, said quietly : " That _ Qniquern. What comes after ?"

"He will speak to mc," said Kotuko, but the snow-knife trembled in his hand ash* spoke, because however much a man tn&v believe that he is a friend of strange and ugly spirits he seldom likes to bo taken quite at his word. Quiquern is the phan. torn of a gigantio toothless dog without any hair, who is supposed to live in the far north, and to wander about the country jugfc before things are going to happen. They may be pleasant or unpleasant things, bu6 not even the sorcerers caro 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 piece* above their heads, but the sense of a foot.

thick snow wall between themselves and the wicked dark was great comfort. Tho gnle 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 seals' meat, and watched the black soot gather on the roof for seventy-two long hours. Tho girl counted up tho 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 big seal-lanco and his bird-dart. Thero was nothing else to do. "We shall go to Sedna soon—very soon," the girl whispered. "In threo days we shall lie down and go. Will your tornaq do nothing ? Sing her an angekok's song to mako 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 tho two kneeled staring into eaoh 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 Bleigh, and after straightening it 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 littlo —the loast little jar in tho worldthen vibrated steadily for a few seconds, came to rest and vibrated again, this time nodding to another point of the compass. "Too soon 1" said Kotuko. " Somo big floe has broken far away outside." The girl pointed at the rod and shook her head. "It is a big breaking," she said. " Listen to the ground-ice. It knocks." When they kneeled this time they heard the curious muffled grunts, and knockinga 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 had travelled through a little horn a weary distance away.

"We shall not go to Sodna lying down," said Kotuko. "It is a 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 the edgo of the far reaching land-ice that stretches from Bylot's Island to the west. Also, the strong curront which sets 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 Bamo timo that tho swell and heave of the storm-worked sea was weakening and undermining it. What Kotuko and tho, girl had been listening to were the faint echoes of that fight thirty or forty miles away, and the tell-tale little rod quivered to the shock of it. Now, as the Inuit say, when the ice once wakes after it 3 long winter sleep there is no knowing what may happen, for solid floo-ice changes shape almost us quickly as a cloud. The gale was evidently a Bpring gale sent out of time, and anything was possible.

Yet the two wore 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 Btill on ■ them. When they left the hut after the gale, the noiso on the horizon was steadily growing, and the tough ice moaned and buzzed all round tbem. " It is still waiting," Baid 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 alwayß 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 .!j 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 alraoat drowned the ripping sound of sheets of packice being 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 flow 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 from the offing, the. waves breaking white round them, and advanced on the floe like an old-time fleet ' under full sail. But a berg that seemed ~, ready to carry the world before it would ,_,' ground helplessly in deep water, reel ovef • and wallow in a lather of foam andmudi ~, and flying frozen spray, while a muoh -£. smaller and lower ono would rip and rids into the flat ice, flinging tons of ice oneith_> -' ->,

lt de and cutting a (rack a mile long before it was stopptd. Sonic fell like swords, shearing a raw-edged canal tnrough tlv.-------floe: and others, falling on haul ice, could not break through it. bat r.phntcred into a shower of b'.vicvs. wcg.img gC orc? of tour, apiece, that whirled and girled amung the husmno..:*. 0:h-r. again, rose up bodily out of the water w.icn they shoaled, twisted ::a though in join, and fell solidly on their sidw while the sea threshed over their should-.-. r.\ This trampling and crowding and Lending nndbut-k'sir.g and arching <»f the ice into every ])o.*sihie shape was p.-in:: <«'. as f.ir ar. the cyi, could reach all zilont: tin.' north line of the iloc. From where Kotuko and the- girl were, the confusion looked no more an :;nca?y rippling crawling r.K>vtuie:it under the horizon, but it came toward.-, them each moment, and they could hear far away to landward a heavy booming, a'; it might have been th« boom of artillery through a log. That showed tint that iior- way. being jammed home again*'" the iron clifls of Uriel's Inland, tho land to tl'.e southward, behind them.

"Thi" lii™. never been before," said Kotuko, staring fituphlly. " This is not the time. How can the lloe break now ?"

" Follow that !" the girl cried pointing to the Thing half-limping, half running distractedly before them. They followed f.tlffring at thf hand-sleigh, while nearer and nearer c.nnie the roaring march of the ice. fit last the fields round them cracked and starred in every direction, and the cracks opened and Knapped ii!:o the teeth of wolves. But where the Thing rested, on a mound of old and scattered ice blocks some fifty feet high, there war no motion. Kotuko leaped forward wildly, dragged 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 upwards and outwards ; making the Inuit sign for land in the shape of an island. And land it was that the eightlegged, limping Tiling had led them tosome granite-tipped, .sand-beached islet off the coast, "hod and sheathed and masked with ice so that no man could have told it from the Hoc, but, at the bottom solid earth, and no shifting ie 2. The smashing and rebound of the iloes as they grounded and splintered marked the borders of it, and a friendly shoal ran out to the northward, turning aside the rush of tho heaviest ice exactly as a plough-chare turns over loam. There was a danger, of course, that some heavily-squeezed ice-field might shoot up the beach and plane oh" the top of the islet bodily, but that did not trouble Kotuko and the girl, v/Jieu they made their snow house and began to cat, 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 bask wards and forwards.

Behind her shoulder, crawling into the hut crawl by crawl, there were two heads, one yellow and one black, that belonged to two of tho most sorrowful and ashamed dogs that ever you saw. Kotuko the clog 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 tho plaited copper wire of Kotuko's collar, and had drawn tight, so that neither dog could got at the trace to gnaw it apart, but v.a3 fastened sidelong to his neighbour's neck. That, with the freedom of hunting on their own accounts, must have helped lo 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 1"

Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his arms, yellow and black together, trying to explain how they got their senses back again. Kotuko ran a hand over their ribs, which were round and well clothed. " They have found food," ho 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 throats, and there was a beautiful battle in tho 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 tho 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, bit on the horizon there was a vast red glare, and that was tha light of the sunken sun. It was moro like hearing him yawn in his sleep than soeing him rise, and the glare only lasted for a few minutes, but it marked the turn of the year. Nothing, they felt could alter that.

Kotuko found the dogs fighting outside over a fresli 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 Tvith the floating ice.

It was good to cat seal-liver again; to fill the lamps recklessly with blubber and watch the flame blaze throe 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 livos, for they feared what might have happened in their village. The weather was as pitiless as ever; 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 already for use and hurried back to their People. The dogs showed them the way as soon as Kotuko told thorn what was expected, and though there was no sign of a landmark, in two days they were giving tongue outside Kadlu's village. 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 answered, and when he called the roll-call of the village name by name, v ery distinctly, there were no gaps in it.

An hour later the lamps blazed in Kadlu's house, snow-water was melting, the pots Were beginning to simmer, and the snow- was dripping from the roof as Amoraq made ready a meal for all the villace, 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 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 them

selves. A dog who has once gone mad and recovered, tho Inuit say, is safe against all further attacks.

"So the t.,r;i.tq did not forget us," said Kotuko. " The storm blew ; the ice broke, and the seal swam in behind the fish that wore frightened by the storm. Now the .mow rcal-hoies „ vo not two days' distant. Let the good hunters go to-morrow and bring back the sea! I have speared—twentylive seal buried in the ice. * When we have eaten those we will all follow the seal on the iloe."'

" What do you do *" ! said the village sorcerer, in the same sort of voice as he used to Kadlu, the richest of the Tununiriniut. Kotuko 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 she could bring nothing to the housekeeping.

Amorr.q 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 ass sailors use—the finest dowry ever given on the far edge of tiie Arctic circle, and the girl from the North bowed her head down to the very door. " 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 towards Kotuko when the ice would have crushed his bone 3. My song drew the seal in behind the broken ice. My body lay still in the quaggi, but my spirit ran about on the ico 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 helped himself to yet another lump of boiled meat and lay down to sleep with the others, in the warm, well-lighted, oil-smelling house. Now Kotuko, who drew very well in the Inuit style, 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 Netelling 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 Holsen, who was afterwards a sailor 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 Olson sold the ivory to a Cingalese jeweller who sold imitation sapphires. I found it under some rubbish in a house at Colombo, and have translated it from one end to the other.

Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP18960104.2.6

Bibliographic details

Press, Volume LIII, Issue 9305, 4 January 1896, Page 2

Word Count
4,211

QUIQUERN. Press, Volume LIII, Issue 9305, 4 January 1896, Page 2

QUIQUERN. Press, Volume LIII, Issue 9305, 4 January 1896, Page 2

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