14 Arctic Adventure (7 page)

‘Well, what’s the matter with that?’ said Zeb. ‘It’s a pretty good picture of me, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Hal. ‘It’s the picture of a thief and a killer. I picked it up in the cache. You should be arrested for attempted murder. But since you’re only a half-wit, we’ll just give you a good spanking.’

‘Spank me?’ yelled Zeb. ‘Do you think I’m a baby?’

‘That’s just what we think. Heave ho, boys.’ And all three, Hal, Roger and Olrik, grabbed Zeb, laid him face down over a snowbank, and gave him such a hard beating that Zeb would never forget it as long as he lived.

‘What did he do?’

The question was asked by one of the Eskimos who had gathered to see the spanking.

‘Just tried to kill us,’ Hal said. ‘Stole our food from the cache.’

‘He should go to prison for that.’

‘He doesn’t know any better,’ said Hal.

‘Empty up here?’ said one man, tapping his head.

Hal nodded. He noticed that the Eskimo who had just spoken was on crutches. One foot was gone.

‘What happened to your foot?’

‘I ate it.’

‘You’re joking,’ said Hal.

‘It was no joke,’ replied the Eskimo, a fine-looking fellow, strong, and taller than most of his people. ‘You know,what a bad place it is —up there on the ice cap. I went for days without one scrap of food. My right foot froze solid. There was no feeling in it at all. I couldn’t give it the snow rub — the wind had blown away the snow. If I didn’t do something, gangrene would crawl up my leg and kill me. So I took my snow knife and chopped off my foot.’

‘Wasn’t that very painful?’

‘I didn’t feel it at all. All I knew was that I would die if I didn’t get something to eat. So I ate my foot.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ said Hal. ‘My hand froze. If there hadn’t been snow to warm it I might have done what you did. By the way, where did you learn English?’

‘In school. We had to learn Danish and English.’

‘And the Eskimo language?’

‘We learned that from our parents.’

‘So you speak three languages!’ said Hal. ‘You’re way ahead of me. I speak only one.’

The idea that an Eskimo could be smarter in any way than a Yank was hard to believe.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, forgetting that an Eskimo never gives his name. A man close by said, ‘His name is Aram.’

Hal shook hands with Aram. ‘What do you do now?’

Aram said, ‘I teach in the school that used to teach me. I’m lucky. I get a good salary and my folks are rich. All I lack is one foot.’

There was one thing a man on crutches could not do. He could not help build an igloo. Hal had been working while talking and with the aid of Olrik, Roger, and the Eskimos, the new snow home was ready for use.

‘Aram, you will be our first guest. Come into our palace.’

Roger went in with them, but Olrik said, ‘You must excuse me. I’ve got to get my dogs home and feed them.’

Hal, Roger and Aram sat down on the double thickness of caribou hide that covered the ground. How good it was, after all the danger and agony of the desert of ice over which they had travelled.

‘Many people have starved to death up there,’ Aram said.

Hal said, ‘The only food we found was lichen, and we couldn’t keep it down.’

‘I know a man’, said Aram, ‘who ate his trousers, made of caribou hide. And another who ate his sealskin mittens. And two men who had to eat their dogs. And one who ate his sleeping bag. And a party ate the walrus hide that they had wrapped around the runners of their sledge. And one ate his boots, and went on barefoot over the ice until his feet froze. And two men ate the fleas and lice that they picked off their dogs. And one ate his own clothes made out of animal skins. And one kept alive seven days by eating those little animals you call lemmings, along with leather scraps and bones.’

‘How could anybody eat bones?’ Roger asked.

‘You should try it some time,’ said Aram. ‘It can be done if your teeth can stand it. Inside the bones there is marrow and it is good food. If you can’t break the bones with your teeth you can crush them between two rocks.’

‘I ate a couple of mice,’ said Hal, ‘but I didn’t like them any more than they liked me.’

‘You were lucky’, Aram said, ‘that your dogs didn’t eat each other.’

‘They weren’t quite that hungry’, Hal said, ‘because we cut up a walrus hide into pieces so small that they swallowed them without chewing. I had heard that they lie in the stomach for days before they are completely digested. So the dogs did a little better than we did.’

‘If you eat your dogs,’ said Aram, ‘you are apt to come down with a disease called trichinosis and it will kill you.’

‘That’s the last thing we would do, eat our fine huskies,’ said Hal.

Aram said, ‘Another thing that can kill you is sweat. Running along, you are apt to sweat. The sweat turns to ice. Your whole body is encased in ice like a suit of armour. At first it’s painful. Then it becomes comfortable and you get drowsy as the circulation of your blood slows down. And then you die.’

Hal said, ‘Aram, what would you say is the most dangerous thing on the ice cap? Is it the bear, or the wolf, or what?’

‘No,’ said Aram. ‘The most dangerous thing is man. Many crimes have been committed on the ice cap. There are no police up there. The fellow called Zeb nearly finished you off.’

Hal laughed. ‘Well, he didn’t succeed. And I’ll bet his backside feels so bad now that he’s sorry he tried. Now, let me serve you something a little better than mice, lice and old boots.’

He took a pan from the little stove and filled three bowls with a rich, delicious soup he had bought at the Thule eating place.

They relaxed in the cosy igloo and Hal murmured, ‘Home, Sweet Home.’

Aram took them to see his parents.

‘They are very good people,’ he said, ‘but you mustn’t mind their old-fashioned ideas. They never went to school. They live in the farthest north where people have not changed their ways in a thousand years.’

Hal and Roger went with him to the airport, where Aram kept a small plane. Boarding it, they flew past Thule and on to the shore of the polar sea. There was nothing between this land and the North Pole.

Here, at the edge of the world, the igloos were better built. Farther south the art of igloo building was dying out since so many Eskimos now lived in stone and sod houses.

Aram took them to a beautifully built igloo with a large window made of a sheet of transparent ice.

The boys were warmly received by Aram’s father and mother. They did not speak English, but Aram translated everything they said.

‘An old man is happy that you have come to see him,’ said the father.

Roger was puzzled. He asked Aram, ‘Who is the old man he speaks about?’

‘Himself,’ said Aram. ‘Eskimos are very modest.

They think it is rude to say ‘I’ or ‘me’. So they speak as if they were talking about someone else.’

The mother spoke and her voice was very low and sweet.

‘My mother,’ said Aram, ‘wants you to know that an old woman is surprised that you have come so far to see people who are not worth bothering about. And she asks if you would like some fresh blubber. Say yes.’

Hal nodded and smiled. ‘Tell her that her visitors would be delighted to have some fresh blubber.’

Roger objected. ‘Hey, what are you getting us into? Blubber is the fat that animals up here have under their skin to keep out the cold. Who wants to eat a chunk of stinking fat?’

‘You do, tough guy,’ said Hal. ‘Be polite, or we’ll kick you out. Smile and bow.’

Roger smiled and bowed. He didn’t do it too well. He took the blubber and tried not to wrinkle his nose in disgust as he swallowed the greasy stuff as quickly as possible.

Aram’s mother was delighted. She said gently, ‘An old woman who is no good would be proud to have a son like this one. He is half Eskimo already.’

The father said, ‘An old man thinks you must be very happy to get away from your country where it is so hot and there is no snow for a sledge.’

Roger wanted to say, ‘Baloney!’, but Hal replied, ‘Yes, in New York all summer we don’t have one bit of snow. And it’s so hot we have to turn on what we call ‘air conditioning’ to cool the house.’

The old folks shook their heads sadly. Father said, ‘An old man thinks you were very lucky to come here. In your country you don’t even have the North Pole.’

Hal said, ‘I’ve heard that the Eskimos never punish their children. How do you make them behave? Surely you spank them once in a while.’

The old man turned to Aram. ‘Were you ever spanked?’

‘Never,’ said Aram. ‘Perhaps I should have been.’

‘No,’ said the old Eskimo. ‘Striking a child just puts an evil spirit into him. The air is full of evil spirits trying to get into us.’

‘He means ghosts,’ Aram smiled. ‘The Eskimos believe that everyone who dies becomes a ghost and tries to do mean things to the living. If anyone gets sick, it’s an evil ghost that is making him sick. So they think. There is no doctor up here —only the medicine man. He sells you all sorts of things that are supposed to keep off the ghosts. Perhaps they will show you some of them.’

He spoke to his parents. At once they began to lay out all the things they had bought from the medicine man — they called him a shaman — and the boys were bewildered by the vast numbers of things that the shaman had insisted they must have to keep off bad ghosts.

A seal’s eye to fend off the evil eye.

A rabbit fur against frostbite.

A bear’s claw to keep off the evil spirit called lightning.

An ermine’s tail against the wild dance of devils in terrible storms.

A caribou tooth to avoid starving. (‘Just what we needed when we had no food,’ said Hal.)

The paw of a wolverine to keep you from going crazy.

The head of a fox so no one could play tricks on you.

The ear of a deer so you could hear well.

The skin of a lemming against sickness.

And many more.

Surely the cloud of ghosts that were supposed to fill the igloo had no chance to do harm so long as they were held off by all these ghost-stoppers.

No wonder the shaman got rich, selling these worthless objects to people who trusted him and believed everything he said.

‘Every month when the moon is great,’ said the old man, ‘the shaman goes up to see the man in the moon who will tell him what to do next.’

The mother gathered up a large pan of food. She said, ‘An old woman will take this to our neighbour, who has nothing to eat.’ She went out, and came back presently with an empty pan.

When had the boys from Long Island seen anyone take a good dinner to a neighbour?

Never.

No matter how ignorant these people were, their hearts were true and kind.

They would not let the boys go without feeding them well. Meat was served to each of them. It was raw and it was rotten. And it smelled.

The mother said, ‘We have been keeping it a long time. Now it is ripe and ready to eat. Some white people cook it. That spoils it. An old woman hopes you will like it.’

Roger’s stomach almost threw up its blubber. The odour of the rotten meat made him want to hold his nose. His hand started to go up, but Hal caught it in time.

‘It won’t kill you,’ he said. ‘Eat it, and like it.’

‘I’ll bet you’re not going to eat yours.’

‘Watch me,’ said Hal.

He put a gob of it in his mouth. His face took on an expression of utter agony. He sneezed, and his delicious meat sprayed out all over the caribou floor. The old woman at once cleaned it up, and put it back on Hal’s plate.

Roger laughed until he thought he would burst.

Hal began to apologize. ‘It’s nothing,’ said the mother, Aram interpreting. ‘You’re just not used to it. I did the same thing when someone gave me cooked meat.’

Hal and Roger downed the meat. It stayed down. They were very proud of themselves.

A young man came in. He seemed very unhappy.

‘Something awful has happened. My wife had a baby.’

‘Is that awful?’ Aram’s mother said.

‘No. The awful thing is this —the baby has no teeth. It’s our first baby. Should we throw it away? How can it eat without teeth?’

‘Your wife will nurse it,’ said Aram’s mother.

‘But it would be bad for it to grow up without teeth. I think we will throw it into the sea. Perhaps the next baby we have will have teeth.’

He was just going out when the old man called him back.

‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said. ‘Look at Aram. He had no teeth.’

‘No teeth? It’s strange that he is still alive. How does he get along without teeth?’

‘He has teeth now. Show him your teeth, son.’

Aram bared his teeth.

‘How did he get them?’ said the worried young father. ‘Some people put caribou teeth in their mouth.’

‘Those didn’t come from any caribou. And he didn’t have them when he was born. But they grew up later.’

‘That doesn’t make sense. You’re just trying to comfort me. Our baby wasn’t born without hands. He wasn’t born without a nose, or without ears. He has legs, and ten toes. He’s all there-except teeth. That’s bad-and you can’t tell me it’s good. I think I’ll dump the brat.’

‘You’ll do no such thing,’ said Aram’s mother. ‘Just be patient. The teeth are there, but they haven’t come up yet. Give them time. It’s your wife you should be thinking about just now —not your baby. I will go and see if she is all right.’

She looked at Hal and Roger. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps you will come again.’ And she was gone.

Hal looked out through the ice window to-the polar sea.

‘Just think,’ he said, ‘the North Pole is right over there.’

‘I can’t see it,’ said Roger.

‘Neither can I. It’s seven hundred miles away. Peary spent years trying to get across that 700-mile stretch by dogteam. He didn’t get there until 1909. The first man to get to the North Pole.’

‘Now you can get there in two hours,’ said Aram.

‘You don’t mean it,’ Hal said. ‘No dogs could cover seven hundred miles in two hours. Besides, the sea is all broken up by drift ice. And there are wide lanes of water between the floes.’