Red Rooney: The Last of the Crew Part 33

"What has happened?" asked Kabelaw, in a dazed manner, as she looked at the blood which flowed from her wound.

Nunaga did not answer, but ran to the bear, which was quite dead, and began to drag it off Ujarak. With great difficulty, and by first hauling at its neck and then at its tail, she managed to move it just enough to set the man's head and chest free. The wizard, thus partially relieved, soon began to show signs of returning life. In a few minutes he was able to sit up and drag his right leg from under the bear, but he was much exhausted, and only got it free after great exertion.

"Are you hurt?" asked Nunaga, in a tone of commiseration.

"Not much, I think. I--I am not sure. I feel as if I had been much shaken, and my leg is painful. I hope," he added, feeling the limb with both hands, "that it is not--"

He finished the sentence with a deep groan. But it was not a groan of pain so much as of despair, for his leg, he found, was broken just above the ankle.

It may perhaps require a little thought on the part of those who dwell in civilised lands to understand fully all that this implied to the Eskimo. If it did not absolutely mean death by exposure and starvation, it at all events meant life under extremely uncomfortable conditions of helplessness and pain; it meant being completely at the mercy of two women whom he had grievously wronged; and it meant that, at the best, he could not avoid ultimately falling into the hands of his angry and outraged kinsmen. All this the wizard perceived at a glance--hence his groan.

Now it may not be out of place to remark here that the qualities of mercy, pity, forgiveness, etcetera, are not by any means confined to the people of Christian lands. We believe that, as our Saviour "died for the sins of the whole world," so the Spirit of Jesus is to be found working righteousness among individuals of even the worst and most savage nations of the earth. The extreme helplessness and pain to which her enemy was reduced, instead of gratifying revenge in Nunaga, aroused in her gentle breast feelings of the tenderest pity; and she not only showed her sympathy in her looks and tones, but by her actions, for she at once set to work to bind up the broken limb to the best of her ability.

In this operation she was gleefully a.s.sisted by little Tumbler and p.u.s.s.i, who, having recovered from their horror when the bear fell dead, seemed to think that all succeeding acts were part of a play got up for their special amus.e.m.e.nt.

When the surgical work was done, Nunaga again turned her attention to Kabelaw. She had indeed felt a little surprised that her friend seemed to take no interest in the work in which she was engaged, and was still more surprised when, on going up to her, she found her sitting in the same position in which she had left her, and wearing the same stupid half-stunned look on her face. A few words sufficed to reveal the truth, and, to Nunaga's consternation, she found that her friend was suffering from what is known among the civilised as concussion of the brain.

When the full significance of her condition at last forced itself upon the poor girl, when she came to see clearly that she was, as it were, cast away in the Arctic wilderness, with the whole care of a helpless man and woman and two equally helpless children, besides a sledge and team of dogs, devolving on her she proved herself to be a true heroine by rising n.o.bly to the occasion.

Her first act was to return, with characteristic humility, and ask Ujarak what she must do.

"You must take the dogs and sledge and the children," he answered in a low voice, "and save yourselves."

"What! and leave you here?"

"Yes; I am bad. It is well that I should die."

"But Kabelaw?" said the girl, with a glance at her friend. "She has got the head-sickness and cannot help herself."

"Leave her to die also," said the wizard carelessly; "she is not worth much."

"Never!" cried Nunaga, with emphasis. "I will save her, I will save you all. Did you not tell me that the village of the Kablunets is only two suns from here?"

"That is so, Nunaga."

"Can you creep to the sledge?" asked the girl quickly.

"I think I can."

"Try, then."

The wizard tried, and found that he could creep on his hands and one knee, dragging the wounded limb on the ice. It gave him excruciating pain, but he was too much of a man to mind that. In a few minutes he was lying at full length on the sledge.

"Now, Tumbler and p.u.s.s.i," said Nunaga, "cover him well up with skins, while I go and fetch Kabelaw, but _don't touch his leg_."

She found that Kabelaw could walk slowly, with support, and after much exertion succeeded in getting her also laid out upon the sledge alongside of the wizard. Then Nunaga tied them both firmly down with long walrus-lines. She also attached the children to the sledge with lines round their waists, to prevent their being jolted off. Having thus made things secure, and having cut off some choice portions of the bear for food, she harnessed the dogs, grasped the whip, mounted to the driver's place, brought the heavy lash down with wonderful effect on the backs of the whole team, and set off at full gallop towards the land where Kablunets were said to dwell.

Fortunately, the ice was smooth most of the way, for jolting was not only injurious to poor Kabelaw, but gave the wizard great additional pain. It also had the effect of b.u.mping Tumbler and p.u.s.s.i against each other, and sometimes strained their las.h.i.+ngs almost to the breaking point.

At night Nunaga selected as comfortable a spot as she could find under the shelter of the Greenland cliffs, and there--after detaching the children, re-dressing Ujarak's leg, arranging the couch of the semi-conscious Kabelaw, and feeding the hungry dogs--she set up her lamp, and cooked savoury seal and bear cutlets for the whole party.

And, not withstanding the prejudices with which fastidious people may receive the information, it is an unquestionable fact that the frying of seal and bear cutlets sends a most delicious influence up the nose, though perhaps it may require intense hunger and an Eskimo's digestion to enable one to appreciate to the full the value of such food.

These labours ended, Nunaga put the little ones to bed, made the wizard and Kabelaw as comfortable as possible for the night, fastened up the dogs, and, spreading her own couch in the most convenient spot beside them, commenced her well-earned night's repose. The first night her bed was a flat rock; the second, a patch of sand; but on both occasions the cheery little woman softened the place with a thick bear-skin, and, curling up, covered herself with the soft skin of a reindeer.

And what were the thoughts of the wicked Ujarak as he lay there, helpless and suffering, silently watching Nunaga? We can tell, for he afterwards made a partial confession of them.

"She is very pretty," he thought, "and very kind. I always knew that, but now I see that she is much more. She is forgiving. I took her from her home by force, and would have made her my wife against her will--yet she is good to me. I have been harsh, unkind, cruel, sulky to her ever since we left home--yet she is good to me. I have torn her from all those whom she loves, with the intention that she should never see them again--yet she is good to me. She might have left me to die, and might easily have gone home by herself, and it would have served me right, but--but she is good to me. I am not a man. I am a beast--a bear--a fox--a walrus--"

As the wizard thought thus, a couple of tears overflowed their boundaries, and rolled down the hitherto untried channel of his cheeks.

Do you think, reader, that this line of thought and emotion, even in a savage, was unnatural? Is not the same principle set forth in Scripture in reference to far higher things? Need we remind you that it is "the _goodness_ of G.o.d which leadeth thee, (or any one else), to repentance?"

As it is in the spiritual world, so is it in the natural. At the time of which we write the same grand principle was powerfully at work in Nature. "Thick-ribbed ice," which the united forces of humanity could not have disrupted, was being silently yet rapidly dissolved by the genial influence of the sun, insomuch that on the evening of the day after Nunaga had been compelled by circ.u.mstances to a.s.sume command of the expedition, several sheets of open water appeared where ice had been expected, and the anxious charioteer was more than once obliged to risk the lives of the whole party by driving out to sea on the floes--that being better than the alternative of remaining where they were, to die of starvation.

But by that time they were not far distant from the Kablunet settlements.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

SPRING RETURNS--KAYAK EVOLUTIONS--ANGUT IS PUZZLED.

Why some people should wink and blink as well as smirk when they are comfortable is a question which might possibly be answered by cats if they could speak, but which we do not profess to understand.

Nevertheless we are bound to record the fact that on the very day when Nunaga and her invalids drew near to the first Moravian settlements in Greenland, Ippegoo slowly mounted a hillside which overlooked the icy sea, flung himself down on a moss-clad bank, and began to wink and blink and smirk in a way that surpa.s.sed the most comfortable cat that ever revelled on rug or slumbered in suns.h.i.+ne.

Ippegoo was supremely happy, and his felicity, like that of most simple folk, reposed on a simple basis. It was merely this--that Spring had returned to the Arctic regions.

Spring! Ha! who among the dwellers in our favoured land has the faintest idea of--of--pooh!--words are wanting. The British poets, alive and dead, have sung of Spring, and doubtless have fancied that they understood it. They had no more idea of what they were singing about than--than the man in the moon, if we may venture to use a rather hackneyed comparison. Listen, reader, humbly, as becometh the ignorant.

Imagine yourself an Eskimo. Don't overdo it. You need not in imagination adopt the hairy garments, or smear yourself with oil, or eat raw blubber. For our purpose it will suffice to transport yourself into the Arctic regions, and invest yourself with the average intelligence of an ordinary human being who has not been debased by the artificial evils that surround modern civilisation, or demoralised by strong drink. In this condition of happy simplicity you draw near to the end of an Arctic winter.

During eight months or so you have been more or less shrivelled-up, petrified, mummified, by frost of the most intense and well-nigh intolerable description. Your whole body has frequently been pierced by winds, the const.i.tuents of which seemed to be needles and fire. Shelter has been one of your chief subjects of meditation every day--ofttimes all day; unwillingness to quit that shelter and eagerness to return to it being your dominant characteristic. Darkness palpable has been around you for many weeks, followed by a twilight of gloom so prolonged that you _feel_ as if light were a long-past memory. Your eyes have become so accustomed to ice and snow that white, or rather whitey-grey, has long since usurped and exclusively held the place of colour in your imagination, so that even black--a black cliff or a black rock cropping up out of the snow--becomes a mitigated joy. Your ears have been so attuned to the howling blast with interludes of dead calm and variations of rending icebergs and bellowing walrus accompaniments, that melodious harmonies have fled affrighted from your brain. As for your nose--_esprit de marrow fat_, extract of singed hide, essence of lamp-smoke, _eau de cuisine_, and de-oxygenised atmosphere of snow-hut, have often inclined you to dash into the open air, regardless of frost and snow, for purposes of revivification. Imagine all these things intensified to the uttermost, and prolonged to nigh the limits of endurance, so that genial ideas and softening influences seem to have become things of the long-forgotten past, and _then_ try to imagine a change, compared to which all the transformation scenes of all the pantomimes that ever blazed are as a tomt.i.t's chirp to a lion's roar, or a--a--Words fail again! No matter.

But don't give in yet. Try, now, to imagine this sudden transformation wrought, perhaps, in a few days to the slow music of southern zephyrs, bearing on their wings light, and heat, and suns.h.i.+ne. Your ear is surprised--absolutely startled--by the sound of trickling water. Old memories that you thought were dead come back in the trumpet of the wild-goose, the whistling wing of the duck, the plaintive cry of the plover. Your nose--ah! your nose c.o.c.ks up and snuffs a smell--pardon!-- a scent. It is the scent of the great orb on which you stand, saturated _at last_ with life-giving water, and beginning to vivify all the green things that have so long been hidden in her capacious bosom.

But it is to your eye, perhaps, that the strongest appeal is made, for while you throw off one by one the garments which have protected you for so many months, and open up body and soul to the loved, long-absent, influences of warmth, and sound, and odour, your eye drinks up the mighty draughts of light--light not only blazing in the blue above, but reflected from the blue below--for the solid ice-fields are now split into fragments; the swell of old Ocean sends a musical ripple to the sh.o.r.e; great icebergs are being shed from their parent glaciers, and are seen floating away in solemn procession to the south, lifting their pinnacles towards their grandparent clouds, until finally reduced to the melting mood, and merged in their great-grandparent the sea. Imagine such visions and sensations coming suddenly, almost as a surprise, at the end of the stern Arctic winter, and then, perchance, you will have some idea of the bounding joy that fills the soul on the advent of Spring, inducing it to feel, if not to say, "Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord."

_This_ is Spring! The Eskimos understand it, and so do the dwellers in Rupert's Land; perchance, also, the poor exiles of Siberia--but the poets--pooh!

Far down below the perch occupied by Ippegoo lay a little sandy bay, around which were scattered a number of Eskimo huts--rude and temporary buildings, meant to afford shelter for a time and then be forsaken.

This was the bay which Angut, Okiok, Simek, Red Rooney, and the others had reached in their pursuit of the wizard when the ice broke up and effectually stopped them.

As it was utterly impossible to advance farther with dog and sledge, they were compelled to restrain their impatience as best they could, and await open water, when they might resume their journey in kayaks.

Meanwhile, as there was a lead of open water to the northward as far as they could see, the youth Arbalik had been despatched with a small sledge and four of the strongest dogs along the strip of land-ice, or "ice-foot," which clung to the sh.o.r.e. His mission was to reach the village, and fetch Nuna, p.u.s.s.imek, Kunelik, Sigokow, and his own mother, in one of the oomiaks or women's boats when open water should permit.

It was while our Eskimos were thus idly waiting for their wives, that the before-mentioned southern Eskimos arrived, and met them with every demonstration of friendliness and good-will.

These men, who had been forced to make a long, difficult detour inland after the ice gave way, were not a little pleased to find that the ice-foot to the northward was still practicable, and that the Eskimo village was so near. Of course they told of their meeting with Ujarak's sledge, which rendered inaction on the part of the pursuers still more unbearable. But they were all men who could accept the inevitable with a good grace, and as they knew it was impossible to advance without kayaks and oomiaks, they awaited the return of Arbalik as patiently as possible. Meanwhile they made themselves agreeable to the new arrivals, whose hearts they gladdened by telling them that their friends in the north had plenty of narwhal horns and bones and walrus tusks and sinews to exchange for their wood and iron.