KABLOONA
◄► Chapter 4 .. I am not a very methodical man, but I had had some notion of rationing my grub according to the number of days I should be out. This was not a procedure compatible with Eskimo life. I could never make them understand the principle of rationing. In the same way, when they saw me make a note of what, in the course of bartering for primitive objects, I had paid for a seal-oil vessel or a native knife, they would roar with laughter.
I must describe Ohudlerk’s igloo. It might be called ‘Stench and Family Life.’ You crawled through the usual porch—the tor-sho, or neck, of the igloo — and when you put your head inside the body of the snowhouse you were assailed by a warm stink that all but strangled you. This noble aroma came from
a niche to the right of the entrance which Rembrandt might have been delighted to paint. It was heaped with the carcasses of skinned and frozen foxes, with quarters of polar bear and
seal all stiff and smeared with frozen blood. This niche has a name: Ne-ke angi-y-uk it is called—or in the parlance of the North, 'The Big Feed.' 3 When anyone at all is hungry—whether a member of the family or another — he has only to bend down from the iglerk beside which the treasure is piled, put out his hand, and having filled his mouth with what he can cram into
it, fling back the rest ..
◄► Odor, but warmth, too, the gentle warmth of the seal-oil lamp kept trimmed by Ohudlerk’s wife, odour, and above all collective life visible in its variety and simultaneity. Ohudlerk
would be sitting in the middle of the iglerk, staring straight ahead with a concentrated gaze while he spun out long sentences, explanations in which he became entangled and lost,
concerning his day's hunting. Nobody would listen to him, yet everybody formed his audience. It is hard to convey the impression of a scene in which everyone was decidedly present and forming part of a whole, yet each sat in a kind of solitude in which he was free to act, to move, to ruminate at will. The old woman crouching beside her lamp would scrape and scrape,
seemingly not listening and yet hearing all that was said, for from time to time she would put in a word of comment.
In a niche on the left sat Kakokto and his young wife: he with a broad Roman face, good features but a little bovine with his low forehead and his hair cut in bangs, forming a sort of ;
skull-cap on his head; she gentle, obviously in love with him although he gave no sign of response to her feeling. Neither of them spoke. She sat sewing hides, plying the strong triangular needle, while he, his hands on his knees, stared into the void.
At the deep end of the igloo the children were at play, naked on the caribou skins and like all children inhabiting a world of their own. The Eskimo young have prodigious vitality, never display the slightest fatigue, and like slum children in our cities,
go to bed only when their elders do. In Ohudlerk’s igloo they would knock against, their grandmother, roll over and over, and when the old woman grumbled they stopped playing, stared at her a moment, and resumed as if she were not there.
From time to time the lamp spluttered. The old woman leant forward and with her misshapen hands fished round in
the blubber for the bits of cotton used as wick, brought them up to the edge, shaped them in her fingers, and then in the silence went on scraping her skins.
I was unlucky at this camp, for the sealing was poor, and when Utak proposed to go north for polar bear I jumped at the chance of activity. Tutiak and Kakokto had gone up earlier in the day, and we expected to catch up with them. By mid-afternoon we saw two black dots far ahead, forced our dogs, and came up with our friends. As evening fell, they ahead and we following, we reached what seemed to be the end of the world,
finis terrae. Before us rose a high bluff sloping down to the surface of the sea at either side; behind this small and hilly island lay the gigantic world of pack ice that is driven down here by
the wind from McClintock Channel to pile up, miles wide, on this promontory of King William Land.
We camped, built a single igloo for the four of us, and disposed ourselves in it. I had got into my sleeping-bag, when Tutiak came through the porch into the opening of the igloo, on all fours, pushing before him an enormous basin filled to the rim with great hunks of seal ..
◄► We made the usual tea, and then ... I do not know what the hour was, but I who had dozed off woke up. Under my eye were the three Eskimos, three silhouettes lit up from behind by the uncertain glow of a candle that threw on the walls of the igloo a mural of fantastically magnified shadows. All three men were down on the floor in the same posture, — on their knees, torsos bent forward with bottoms in air and faces near the ground, motionless except for their greedy hands and their greedier chaps. They were eating, and whether it was that the smell of the seal had been irresistible, or that the idea of the hunt had stimulated their appetites, they had embarked upon a feast. Each had a huge chunk of meat in his hands and mouth, and by the soundless flitting of their arms made immeasurably long in the shadows on the wall, I could see that even before one piece had been wholly gobbled their hands were fumbling in the basin for the next quarter. The smell in the igloo was of seal and of savages hot and gulping. From where I lay their faces appeared to me in profile, glistening with fat and running with blood; and with their flattened crania, their hair covering their foreheads, their moustaches hanging low over their mouths, — at least Tutiak's moustache, — their enormous jaws, they inspired in me so ineradicable a notion of the stone age that I think always of this scene when I read or hear of pre-historic man.
I have seen astonishing things, in remote places and not merely in circuses. In the New Hebrides, for example, I have unpacked my own meat in a circle of cannibals and have seen in their eyes a gleam, that was perhaps more interesting than
comforting. Here, in this igloo, all that I had seen before was now surpassed. There were three men, and there must have been fifty pounds of meat. The three men attacked that meat
with the rumblings and growlings of animals warning their kind
away from their private prey. They ground their teeth and their jaws cracked as they ate, and they belched — Tutiak most wonderfully of all — with, long cavernous fatty belchings as of brutes drowned in contentment. The walls of the igloo were horrid with the ruddy dripping of bloody spittle. And still they ate on, and still they put out simian arms and turned over with
indescribable hands morsels in the beginning disdained and now
become dainties greedily swallowed. And still, like beasts, they picked up chunks and flung them almost instantly down again in order to put their teeth into other and perhaps more succulent bits. They had long since stopped cutting the meat with
their circular knives: their teeth sufficed, and the very bones of
the seal, crackled and splintered in their faces. What those
teeth could do, I already knew. When the cover of a gasoline drum could not be pried off with the fingers, an Eskimo would take it between his teeth and it would come easily away. When
a strap made of sealskin freezes hard — and I know nothing tougher than sealskin — an Eskimo will put it in his mouth and chew it soft again. And those teeth were hardly to be called teeth. Worn down to the gums, they were sunken and unbreakable stumps of bone. If I were to fight with an Eskimo, my greatest fear would be lest he crack my skull with his teeth.
But on this evening their hands were even more fantastic than their teeth. I can still see Tutiak, in a moment of respite, licking the palms of his hands, then sucking each of his fingers, and
finally scraping between the fingers with his snow-knife, slowly, with that concentrated air of a thoughtful animal, — and then beginning over again to eat of the seal. Their capacity of itself was fascinating to observe, and it was clear that like animals they were capable of absorbing amazing quantities of food, quite ready to take their chances with hunger a few days later. It is this, of course, that explains the swollen cannibal bellies of these otherwise powerful primitive men ..
The pack over which we were hunting the polar bear was like nothing I had ever seen in a picture. There was no majesty here, no huge impressive ice-floes, no icebergs resting like high men-o'-war on the water and clearly outlined against a blue sky. Here there was no water, there was nothing but pack ice, — a jumble pale blue and green at the base, built up by a distant and crazy giant and filling all space with its grotesque shapes. This was the surface of the moon, a limitless chaos through which we moved, tiny figures with our toy sleds lighted from the horizon by but half a sun, — for already the season had come when only half the sun appeared above the horizon, swollen, bloated, enormous, and almost entirely decorative, for the light was fast dying out of this source of earthly life. Repeatedly, we would have to cut out a breach in the pack, a passage as through a jungle. The harness of the dogs would catch on the jagged points, the beasts would howl with fear as they were almost impaled, and again and again a sled would hang suspended, like a motor-car over the edge of a bridge, while we dragged and bumped our way through this broken and craggy landscape. You tried to break the point on which the sled hung, and of a sudden the whole thing would give way and down would come the sled, the runners losing each time a little more of their mud, the straps straining and cracking, and the dogs howling with all their lungs. And we ourselves, when the huskies flew off, having smelled the tracks of bear, would run and stumble after, cursing and too breathed to be able to call out and halt the dogs. We were pygmies attempting the labour of giants and coming to nothing but grief. Twice I had slipped with my knee wedged so tightly between blocks of ice that I thought the bones must crack, and I went limping on ..
◄► And still no bear! Tracks, yes, as wide as my two hands; but that was all. I was not made for this sort of chase. I was completely fagged out. Weariness and absence of physical control and equilibrium induced in me a surge of foul temper, and as I stumbled and limped on I thought of the absurdity of continuing to look for bear in this stupid, petrified, and undoubtedly endless and fantastical chaos.
But my Eskimos would not give up. They would pile up blocks of ice against an iceberg, dig their way to the top with the help of their knives, and there, pulling out telescopes bartered at the Hudson’s Bay post, would stare long and carefully in every direction. Baboons with telescopes, I said scornfully to myself; and in a way I was not too unjust, for the seriousness with which they gazed had something exceedingly comic. But the comedy was not rich enough to amuse me (what comedy
would have been?). I was concerned for my knee, my fingers were still frost-bitten, and I was drowning with weariness. All the strength that was left in me I put into cursing the Eskimos and calling out to them, who were beyond the carrying power
of my voice, in my language, which they could not understand, — shouting that I did not give a fig for their polar bear, that they were hunting a needle in a haystack, that if they went on instead of back we should have no sleds to return on, for already the sleds had been battered and damaged by this terrain. (This last was so true that I had to sling my two cameras round my neck, front and back, for safety.) As well plead with the wind. It was a long time before they came down from their perch muttering to one another, and we continued a trail on which I felt we were dwarfs in an African veld, until, night beginning to fall, they decided to turn back.
That journey homeward in darkness was an unrelieved agony. I was cold; I was freezing; not only in the flesh, but my soul was frozen. As I sat on the swaying and creaking sled the cold became an obsession, almost an hallucination, and soon I was in a delirium of cold. I was haunted by a single image: before me was a wall, immense and blank, like a wall in a film. I was walking along that wall and looking for a door into it which I could not find. It was The Wall of Cold. If I could collect my thoughts, and remember the Open, Sesame! I should
be saved, for beyond that wall was warmth.
◄► My brain had shrunk to the dimensions of a dried raisin.
Stubbornly, painfully, almost maliciously, it clung to a single thought, made room for no other image: 'I am cold!' I was not cold as people Outside are cold. I was not shivering. I was in the cold, dipped into a trough where the temperature was thirty degrees below zero and where I turned and rolled over and over in search of a non-existent issue. And from time to time I would shake with anger: 'If it is written that I shall see a fire again, I shall warm myself, I shall warm my self!' The four words filled
my mind; I whispered and muttered them again and again, like an oath of vengeance. "It's no good arguing with me," I mumbled. "I won't listen to any one: I shall warm myself, warm myself with fury. I shall put my legs into the flames, and if they sizzle I shall not draw them out. That will teach them!"
On we went. I had become something other than a human body. I was a lump, a thing shrivelled up and inert. The sled bumped and quivered, and in my mind there was no question but that we should never make camp. I am sure that if any one had said we should. I should have argued with him hotly: ‘'Don't talk nonsense. Of course we are not going anywhere. Besides, we're all mad." Rage and cold were the two pillars of my delirium, supported now and then by a vain sarcasm. "And what was it you were going to do out on that ice pack, you idiot!" At one moment I felt that I could beat myself with anger; and in another moment I burst out laughing at my own imbecility. Then a glimmer of hope would enter : "If only I can concentrate hard enough, I am sure I can wipe out this cold simply by ceasing to think of it."
How long this went on, I cannot say. Time had fled, and for me there was no difference between a minute and an aeon. I went out of my head, probably. Then, of a sudden, without transition, even I could see the lights of the camp a hundred yards away. Like a ghost, I stepped into reality ..
◄► PART II
The Post .. CHAPTER ONE
Twenty-five men, women, and children made up the entire
population of King William Land, a territory ten thousand
miles in extent. A Texan or an Australian would not think it at
all remarkable, perhaps, but for a European the notion of this
sparsity was hard to get used to.
I had now seen more than half the inhabitants of the island,
and here at the Post I should see them all before my frost-bitten
fingers were sound again and I could once more take the trail.
Not only they, but Eskimos from the mainland and from other
islands, too, would come through the Post in time, for this rude and none too spacious shack, with its little stove, its wash-basin standing on the comer of a table, its box of tools rusting in the
porch; this Post cut off from all the world, with no sending wire¬
less, no boat, no sled nor dogs of its own, where twelve pencils
formed part of the annual re-stocking and there was not even a flint for my pocket lighter; this outpost set down in the remotest
comer of desolation, represented to the Eskimos of the whole
Central Arctic the sum of the white man’s civilization— a storehouse of wealth, a seat of luxury, the capital not only of their
world but of his ..
◄► All of these Eskimos came to the Post at least once a year, and
some came a good deal oftener, though it cost them a month on
the trail to come and go again. Mostly, they came to trade; but
there were many who arrived only in order to visit. Probably
because of their isolation, perhaps because the difficulty of life
in this harsh land lends especial price to conviviality, the Spirit
of Visiting is a goddess more highly esteemed among the Eskimos
than among any other people I know. They need no reason to
start out: that the impulse to visit has suddenly come over them is reason enough.. In a moment they have lashed their sled, they
are off in a blizzard; they travel ten days, fishing and hunting
on the wav to keep themselves alive; and on the evening of the
tenth dav, when night has long since fallen and the Post Manager is huddling fay the stove and thinking "what filthy weather!"
they pull in with a great barking of dogs and swishing of whips,
hav in g pushed the loaded sled desperately with all their strength
up the slope of the ridge upon which the Post is built. Snorting
and puffing in the darkness, they shuffle into the Post and sit
down in the outer room reserved for them.
The Post Manager, torn from his musings or his magazine,
goes out to speak to them.
'Have you brought many foxes?" he asks the head of the family.
"No fox," the Eskimo answers.
"And what have you come for?"
"Pollak-pak-tunga," says the Eskimo with a wide grin. (I am
visiting.)
Of course they will have said to themselves that there will be
other Eskimos round the Post; and the prospect of a feast in
another man’s igloo will have been enough to persuade them to
drop what they were doing — fishing or trapping — and be off
instantly in obedience to this strongest impulse in their existence
— visiting. Let the fox be as plentiful as it may, let the fish run
as never river has seen fish run; once the idea of visiting has
entered the Eskimo consciousness, nothing can displace it. And
great as the adventure is for those who visit, it is no less an event
for the visited. In summer the newcomer plants his tent, in
winter he builds his igloo; and in the morning, when the Post
Manager looks out, the lonely shack has become a camp, the
sole igloo has been surrounded by three more of these white*
mushrooms; and the trotting between tent and tent, between
igloo and igloo, the feasting here or there, is one of the very deep
sources of Eskimo joy.
◄► In May or June, when, though winter is not over and the sea
is still frozen solid (صلب) , the air is clear and one can see (بصر) for miles, the arrival (وصل) of a sled provides a spectacle that goes on for two hours.
Everybody is out to watch (نظر) its progress (صار) , and never Breton sailor
nor Nantucket widow stared (حدَّق) at incoming ship with a gaze more
intense .. (دقَّق النظرَ) ..
For one thing, a sled on the frozen sea is the smallest (صغر)
object in the world, smaller even than a boat seen from the air as
it crosses the ocean. It is microscopic, and I mean by this that it
is not related to anything human. Its movements, its changes of
position, are perceptible only by the half-hour .. (إِدراك / das Erreichen ) .. Its load may be two or three .. (قاس) .. feet high; its length will be, say, fourteen feet: what are such dimensions against a sweep of fifty miles? ..
(to measure / قاس ) take its origin from (foot / ساق) .. ? ..
The Eskimo standing on shore beside you has seen it, of course, long before
you have seen it ..
The Eskimos acquired, by long experience, the capacity to (know /درى) ~ (sense/شعر) sth. .. Their knowing (دراية), that is, their consciousness (شعور) is nearly infallible! ..
_ Wilhelm Hauff - Said Schicksal .. Die Karawane war schon den grössten Teil des Tages im gemächlichen Schritt fortgezogen, als man dunkle Schatten am fernsten Ende der Wüste bemerkte .. (dunkle Schatten / dark shadows ) ~ (black dots ) .. Die einen hielten es für Sandhügel, die anderen für Wolken, wieder andere für eine neue Karawane, aber der Alte (The old man) , der schon mehrere Reisen gemacht hatte, rief mit lauter Stimme, sich vorzusehen, denn es sei eine Horde räuberischer Araber im Anzug ..
_ What is it called when you understand something? .. It is called (diraya / دراية) ..
_ The old man (درى ) ~ understood, recognized, erkannte, The meaning of the dark shadows. Because he has (experience, Erfahrungen) gemacht ..
The (د) of (درى / know) and (سيد / gentleman ) originate from the (د) of (black / اسود) ..
_ Continuation .. He speaks of it, you raise your telescope, and
you whisper to yourself, ‘By Jove! He may be right . "A sled?"
you say to him; and the rumbling assent comes up out of his
belly, "A-oo-dlar!" ..
_ (A-oo-dlar! Coming!) signify (knowledge, information) = (diraya / دراية) .. And knowledge reflects experience! ..
_ (rumbling) = صر .. (assent) = صرح, erklären, kundtun, bekanntgeben .. suggesting (صرح) originate from (صر / rumble ) .. (ح) has the same origin as (ح) of (حلق) = the gullet, der Schlund, die Kehle, die Gurgel, the œsophage, die Speiseröhre, le gosier, la gorge / throat, mouth ..
_ (سر or أسر / rejoice ) could originate from (صرح) with omission of (ح) ..
_ bestehen auf, beharren auf, (صر or أصر) meaning (persevered, persisted in, intended) is close to (حرص / motivate, impel, drive ) .. Hence a connection arise between (صر) and (persevering, Beharrlichkeit ) ..
_ (signify) means (is an indication of, zu erkennen geben, besagt, kennzeichnet) ..
_ Continuation .. with an emphasis of conviction, which itself comes out of his very being. As animals are guided
by the scent, so he knows unquestioningly, intuitively, that this
is a sled.
There is an inner quiver of recognition, invisible to the
white man but unmistakable for the man who feels it .. (recognition ~ دراية) ..
You are
free to go back indoors, for that dot (بُقْعة) will not have grown bigger
in less than half an. hour, and it may be two hours before it takes
recognizable shape and is finally discernible (بَيِّنٍ) as a sled ..
◄► With the passing of time you can make out that it is a thing on.
the move, a black (اسود) object being pulled by an invisible thread (خيط),
first across the horizon and then down from horizon towards
where you stand. Probably there are three or four sleds, but as
they all run in the same track, what you see is a single undulating ribbon of black. Now they pick up speed, they are close
enough for the sharp-eyed natives (دقَّق النظرَ) to tell who the drivers are;
and before you are aware (إِدراك) of it they are only two hundred yards
off and have made port (نزل) ..
Of a sudden the camp comes alive. There is a scurrying as if
a giant foot had come down on a human ant-hill. Had Gjoa
Haven been suddenly attacked by an enemy, the agitation
would not be greater. Out of every igloo, like rabbits out of
their holes, tumble and fly children and women. The women look like animated Christmas trees with the little fur tails bobbing all over their costumes as they run. In no time at all the
bay is black (اسود) with people .. (سَادَ / herrschen) originate from ( سَادَ : اسوَدَّ : blacken )? ..
The Eskimos have this extraordinary characteristic — twenty
of them give you the impression of a hundred, lending magnificent confirmation to the words of Degas in criticism of another
painter: "You make a crowd with five heads, not with fifty." .. (صر ) could mean a crowd, a troop, a packet, a purse .. I
have arrived in seal-camps at night and seen Eskimos swarming
in every direction, crawling into and out of igloo porches, putting out hands and more hands to be shaken, crowding into my
igloo in such numbers that there was scarcely room to raise a
mug of tea to one's lips; — and counting them the next morning
I have discovered that this populous cantonment numbers
eighteen souls.
Here by the Post they were as many and as agitated as insects.
There a sled is being unloaded, yonder is another being escorted
in. Here are men standing before the harnessed dogs, calling to
them to pull up to a given point, and before that has been done
the same men have run to greet the sled behind. It is like an
army parade in Paris on the Fourteenth of July: you have not
seen the Dragoons past your post of observation before the
Tanks have arrived, or the Marines, and you cannot make up
your mind to which to give your attention. Most remarkable of
all is the attitude of the newcomers, for all this aid and, enthusiasm is received by them with cold impassive faces ..
(a person that leads, master, lord, ruler, sovereign) ~ (سَيِّد / gentleman, monsieur, important man) .. (gebieten, zu bestimmen haben, das Regiment führen) ~ (سَادَ الرَّجُلُ) .. And (walten / سَادَ / herrschen) originate from ( سَادَ : اسوَدَّ ) ..
◄► If you are an Eskimo, possessed of the Eskimo’s self-respect,
you will be concerned to arrive with dignity. There is an eti¬ quette of arrival which you will not fail to observe. Like all
etiquette, these forms deceive nobody, but it is necessary to go
through them. You may be — and everyone will know it— the
veriest ne’er-do-well. Your dogs may be scrawny and mangy,
and you may have had all the trouble in the world, puffing and
lashing them with the whip, to get them to pull you into camp.
No matter: you must make your entrance seated unconcernedly on the sled, driving your team as if you had never left the box
from the time you started. Another thing. You must have
stopped behind the ridge, and there, out of regard for form, have
effected a transformation. Your sled must look shipshape when
you pull in — sled-cover smooth and tightly relashed; and you
yourself, your rough and practical boots stowed away and hand¬
some impractical ones pulled on in their place, must drive in,
nonchalantly smoking a cigarette and looking neither to right
nor to left. Even when you are in, you must display no pleasure
at the sight of your friends, no impatience to shake their hands,
exchange smiles with them, call out to them. Your sled is surrounded; friends are pushing it forward from behind while
others are leading your dogs on ahead; but you must wear a
sober and concentrated air. And once you have got down from
the sled, you must rush immediately over to your dogs and chain
them up, as if they were ferocious beasts, without appearing to
notice anyone. Then, when all this has been done, you may
turn round, lower your eyes like a modest conqueror, and con¬
descend to smile and shake hands.
It was one of these spring arrivals that stirred up an effervescence round the Post such as I had hitherto not seen. Two sleds
had been sighted and a third was said to have broken down
some distance way. In due time the visitors pulled in; and Utak
and Ohudlerk constituted themselves a committee of welcome
— Utak because ever since that murder he had been making a
special effort to display himself a genuinely helpful and sociable
fellow, and Ohudlerk for the simpler reason that he smelled
caribou and was looking forward to a feast. They came and went",
snorted and puffed, guided the dogs and helped to unload; and
in a few minutes the whole transient population of Gjoa Haven,
surrounding the newcomers, had trooped into the Post and were
standing round like children at a party, g rinning and chattering
and laughing. It is the custom that on their arrival at the Post
newcomers are always given a ‘mug up’ — generally a thick soup, biscuits, and as much tea as they will drink. As a meal the
thing is a joke to the Eskimo appetite; but it is flattering to eat
in the white man’s house, and it would be impolitic to complain
of the hospitality of a man out of whom one expected to get
great things shortly, in exchange for a few fox-skins. There we
were, Gibson and I, transformed into cafe waiters; and when it
was over we said to each other with a laugh, ‘The restaurant
did good business today.’
All of them, I say, had crowded in. Some were eating, others
looking on; but those who merely stood and looked on were as
gay as those who ate, for there are few joys to the Eskimo heart
as great as welcoming visitors. They filled the benches and sat
on the floor, and each time that one of the guests sent forth a
happy and rumbling regurgitation, the others laughed delight¬
edly and pronounced the Eskimo syllable of assent and affirmation — a long-drawn-out eh-eh-eh! — that was like a cheer, like
applause. Tutiak stood in their midst, and until two o’clock in
the morning he went on talking, most of the time to himself, for
it is an Eskimo habit to soliloquize endlessly in the presence of
others.
Finally they all got up, grinned, and were off, leaving the air
and the teacups filled with caribou hair.
"Off to bed, are they?" I said to Paddy. "Not at all," he said; "they are going to eat."
I went out of doors, and saw that Paddy was right. At three
o’clock in the morning they were unpacking rotted fish from
their sleds in preparation for a feast.
Next day Utak went out to pull in the sled that had broken
down, while Ohudlerk, with his more practical sense, had
offered to go after the caribou meat which the newcomers
admitted having cached a few miles away.
◄► The visitors were staying with Utak upon his repeated in¬
sistence. In three days Utak would have no grub left and would
come whining to the Post Manager for a little tea or coal-oil.
6 Miki4uk ,’ — ‘Just a little,’ he would beg. But today this meant
nothing to Utak. The social sense was stronger than the sense of self-preservation, and among these Eskimos the man who distributed the greatest largesse was the man held in highest
esteem.
Tutiak had this article of the Eskimo code constantly in mind
— but from the receiving end. He was down on the bay, tom-
codding in the wind in a temperature of thirty-five degrees
below zero — the tom-cod is a wretched fish, all mouth, and a
man had to be poor indeed to want it — when he saw the file of
Eskimos walking towards the Store, the Niu-va-vik. Up the
ridge he came on the run, and here he was in the Store, lecturing
to the newcomers on each article and explaining its use. On
and on he went without drawing breath, saliva dribbling from
his mouth, his chuckles drawing laughter from the others,
pointing with his coarse finger to this and putting a hand on
that as he spoke, and stressing each time, with a "tam-na-lo" —
"this thing here" — the object he was talking about. At the Post,
Tutiak’s instinct always told him when food was coming, and
nothing in the world could have made him leave before he was
given a bowl of soup and a mug or two of tea. Having gulped
these down, he wiped his moustache with the back of his hand
and vanished — as always among the Eskimos, without a word
of thanks.
Trading at a Hudson’s Bay post is a struggle in which two
mentalities, the White and the Eskimo, meet and lock. In the
end each is persuaded that he has won the match —the white
man because in this barter he has got his "price," and the Eskimo because he is convinced of having got something for nothing.
Your Eskimos turn up with sacks of foxes and signify that
they want to trade. "The trading is done at the Store, which
stands some forty yards off from the Post proper. You lead
them out and as they troop over the snow there is a good deal
of strangled laughter. What a great farce this is! Once again
they are going to do the white man in the eye, and once again the white man is not going to know what has happened to him.
All those wonderful things that fill the Store are to be theirs for
. a few foxes. What can the white man want with foxes? In the
igloo, a fox-skin will do as a clout, but even to wipe things with,
the ptarmigan makes a better rag. It isn't possible that the
white man should have so many things that need wiping!
One by one, like Arabs into a mosque, they file into the Store,
wives and children at their heels. And though they have been
inside before, each time that they see these treasures they stand
stock-still, silent, stunned. The Manager's house, the igloo-pak,
is wonderful enough; but it is nothing beside the Store. To
people for whom a rusted file is a treasure— Amundsen speaks
of Eskimos travelling six hundred miles to get a few nails — this
is the holy of holies. Here are whole boxes of nails, whole rows
of iron files. They raise their heads and see fifty tea-kettles
hanging from the ceiling almost within reach. Dazed, excited,
they look at one another. The notion that thanks to a few tufts
^ of frozen fur they are going to possess these gleaming treasures
is too much for them. It sends them off into brief gusts of
nervous laughter. And what an amazing being this white man
is! Not only does he have all these pots and kettles that you see,
but every year a new lot arrives. He must have, buried in his
distant country, immense caches of pots and kettles. And the
calico! And the tins of tobacco standing in rows on the shelves
like divinities, motionless and magnificent!
Meanwhile the white man has gone round back of the counter
and is examining his books. Virtually all of these Eskimos are
in debt to him, and he smiles from his side the counter as if he
expected that old debts were now about to be paid off and new
ones contracted.
◄► The first Eskimo, the most important among them, comes
forward. He is impressed. He had forgotten the magnificence
of the Store, and although it had been discussed again and again
in the igloo, the reality is much more dazzling than all that had
• ' been remembered or imagined. He sets down a sack upon the
floor, and as he unties the knot the room is filled with murmured commentaries. He opens the sack, hauls out something vaguely
white and shapeless, and sets it on the counter where it knocks
hollowly with the sound of wood. This is a fox. I do not believe
that most women in Paris or New York would give very much
for a fox as it looks when it is put down on the counter of an
Arctic store — grimy, yellowy white, covered with frozen blood.
The white man stands smiling while the Eskimo hunts round
in Ms mind. Finally, in a firm voice the Eskimo announces:
"Ot-chor-lo!" (Coal-oil.)
"Ta-mar-mik?" the White Man asks. (A whole fox worth?)
"Eh-eh" says the Eskimo, signifying yes.
The white man disappears for a moment and returns with
one or two tins of fuel, which he passes over the counter. He
disposes of the first fox, and the Eskimo brings forth another.
All this has been carefully planned in advance. The poorest
foxes are presented first; for if the white man should take it into
his head to insist upon the payment of an old debt, it will not
be the best skins that will be lost. But the white man seems not
to be thinking of the debt and is still smiling across the counter.
"Ti-pa-ko," says the Eskimo this time. (Tobacco.)
"Ta-mar-mik?" the white man repeats.
This repetition of "the whole fox worth?" bothers the Eskimo.
He is seized by a vague fear, dares no longer affirm himself, and
says finally in a meek voice:
"Napi-dlu-go." (Cut in two.)
Here is a problem he had not foreseen. What is he going to
take for the other half of the fox? He looks at the ceiling and murmurs:
'Noruna? (I don’t know.)
Suddenly an object on a shelf brings something to mind, and
he points:
"Tam-na-lo!" (That thing there.) ..
◄► The trading goes on, and each time that the white man shoves
a fox under the counter the Eskimo learns that that fox has been
exhausted. So long as it remains on the counter, it continues to
possess purchasing power.
The first three or four foxes axe easily bartered. There are the
things the Eskimo cannot do without— coal-oil, tea, tobacco,
rice, flour. But by the time they have reached the fifth fox, the
Eskimo is lost. Not for want of rehearsal, Heaven knows. He
and his wife have talked over this trading twenty times in their
igloo, have exhausted every inch of every fox; but he cannot
remember. He has forgotten, and you feel the void in his mind.
Fortunately, his wife is there, the toes of her boots at his heels,
murmuring to him and nudging him. Awkward and undecided,
he turns towards her, and she, her eyes shrewd and provocative
in a face framed by the furry wolf-skin hood, prompts him.
"Calico!" she says. "A cooking pot!" Her eyes gleam as only
the eyes of primitive women can gleam.
Ah, yes, he had forgotten. The pot. Two plates. A mug for
the child. Three packages of needles. How could he have for¬
gotten! And with this, ideas come to him. This! And this!
And that! 5 He points everywhere at once, fearful lest these new r
ideas suddenly escape him.
In the end he has gone too far, and when he leaves the Store,
dragging behind him a wooden box filled with treasures, he
senses vaguely that many of these shining objects are of no use
to him. Oftener, however, it is simply that he no longer wants
those things which, a moment ago, he was unable to resist.
And then a second stage of trading begins — that between the
natives themselves. And since in their eyes nothing possesses
intrinsic value, but the value of an object is great or small
accordingly as they desire or disdain it, a handsome dog-collar
may be swapped for a clay pipe, or a half-sack of flour for a red
pencil. A needle thus becomes worth a whole fox, a worn strip
of leather has the value of a lamp. And what is most curious is
that no Eskimo will ever say to you that he has been had in a
trade. It is not that his vanity forbids such a confession, but that
this can never occur to him. He wanted what he got in the
trade; soon after, perhaps, he ceased to want it; but between the
two his primitive intellect will not allow Mm to establish any
relationship. Nor is this phenomenon peculiar to Eskimos. In the South Sea islands I have known natives to do sixty
miles through the bush and across rivers in order to trade for
matches they furiously desired because the matches had red
heads.
Everything about the Eskimo astonishes the white man, and
everything about the white man is a subject of bewilderment for
the Eskimo. Our least gesture seems to him pure madness, and
our most casual and insignificant act may have incalculable
results for him. Let but a Post Manager say to an Eskimo,
"Here is a package of needles for your wife,’ and he will have
started in that obscure consciousness, which I hesitate to call a
mind, a train of questions and ruminations that may lead anywhere. The free gift is unknown among the Eskimos: better yet,
it is incomprehensible to them. Had the white man' said, ‘Lend
me your wife in exchange,’ the Eskimo would have understood.
An exchange is normal; a gift passes his understanding. It sets
his thoughts going. It is amoral. He will not thank the white
man. He will go back to his igloo and ruminate. "Since the
white man has given me these needles," he will in effect say to
himself, "it must be that he does not want them; and if he does
not want his treasures, why should not I have them?" From that
day forth, this Eskimo will be a different man. He will begin
by despising the white man, and soon he will plan cunningly to
exploit him. Since the white man has proved himself a fool,
why not? So the Eskimo becomes a liar and a cheat. A single
generous impulse on the part of the white man has started the
moral disintegration of a native.
◄► There is no learning to know the Eskimo through an exchange
of ideas. Properly speaking, the Eskimo does not think at all.
He has no capacity for generalization. He cannot explain himself to you nor can he explain his people. When you have lived with his people you discover that each incident observed, each
event m which you have participated, adds something to your
knowledge of them; and if you do not end by knowing them through and through, it is because time is not long enough and
chance has not put in your way all the significant gestures of
their primitive yet extremely ceremonious existence.
One day, for example, Utak brought another Eskimo into the
Post, a slack and shiftless ne’er-do-well, a man perpetually
destitute. He had arrived from ten days off to trade — a single
fox. We were in mid-December and the man had not yet got
round to mudding his runners, so that his wretched sled was
next to useless. One mile out from the Post he had dropped a
caribou skin, had not missed it (proving he could not count
up to four); and when, later, 1 told him that I had picked it up,
He forgot to come to my quarters to fetch it. Each year this man
and his wife had a child; and as his wretched wife had no milk,
each year without fail the child died. But they, the man and
his wife, did not die. There was always an Eskimo to lend them
a snow-knife, another to repair their sled for them on the trail,
a third to house them because the man could not build a possible
igloo. And never — it was this that was so admirable — never would you have heard a single impatient or angry word spoken
about these two. Of course they were teased a bit at night in the
igloo, and great tales were told of the man’s comical futility;
but they were unfailingly taken care of. The others would say,
"He couldn’t get here because of his sled 5 : they would never say,
"The man doesn’t know how to get over a trail . 5 When tools
were lent him and he broke them, nobody complained. He
spent a couple of days at the Post and was about to start out
again when, at the last minute, Utak arrived running. Could
the Post Manager "lend" Utak a snow-knife? The ne’er-do-well
had just broken the one Utak had let him have. And this was
said without bitterness, indeed with a laugh that showed all
Utah’s teeth. It was too bad! Of course he hadn’t done it on
purpose, so no one could hold it against him.
There were Eskimos who had no food. No one said of such
a man, "He was too lazy to do any trapping." What people said
was, "He did not trap this season." Why he should not have
trapped was nobody’s affair. I remember the case of a native
who had an ample cache of fish and was well provided against
the winter. While he was at the Post, two Eskimo families
camped at his cache. Being without grub they opened it and
lived on it; and when he arrived, the cache was empty. Pity!
But it couldn’t be helped.
◄► Many people imagine that the sun is necessary to human
happiness and that the South Sea islanders must be the gayest,
most leisurely and most contented folk on earth. No notion
could be more falsely romantic, for happiness has nothing to do
with climate: these Eskimos afforded me decisive proof that
happiness is a disposition of the spirit. Here was a people living
in the most rigorous climate in the world, in the most depressing
surroundings imaginable, haunted by famine in a grey and
sombre landscape sullen with the absence of life; shivering in
their tents in the autumn, fighting the recurrent blizzard in the
winter, toiling and moiling fifteen hours a day merely in order to get food and stay alive. Huddling and motionless in their igloos through this interminable night, they ought to have been
melancholy men, men despondent and suicidal; instead, they were a cheerful people, always laughing, never weary of laughter.
◄► A man is happy, in sum, when he is leading the life that suits
him; and neither warmth nor comfort has anything to do with
it. I -watched these Eskimos at the Post. This house, you would
say, ought to mean to them the zenith of well-being and re¬
laxation: they had warmth, they had biscuits, they had tea, and
no one asked them to work or pay for these blessings. But look
at them! They are dull, sullen, miserable. Physically, they
seem shrunken, their personalities diminished and extinguished.
Instead of laughing, they brood; and you see them come in,
take their seats on the bench and remain like sleepwalkers, expressionless and spiritless, waking just barely enough, when you
pass, to give you a polite smile and then relapse into blankness.
But open wide the door, fling them into the blizzard, and they
come to. They wake up suddenly; they whistle; their women
scurry about, their children crack the triumphant whip, their
dogs bark like mad: an impression of joy, of life, fills the
environs of the Post, In no time at all they have disappeared:
the tempest — their cherished tempest of the Arctic — has blown
them over the ridge like so many leaves.
For the white man, who knows other skies and other climates,
this land is more often than not lugubrious. He lives here shut
out of his lost Paradise, waiting and hoping to be transported
back to what seems to him, now that he is here, an Eden. But
the Eskimo, it goes without saying, knows nothing better to hope
for. All this is normal to him; and indeed everything in his
existence is normal. What will come will come: he knows pretty
well in advance what it is that will come, and nothing either
astonishes or saddens him. "It is cold!" he will say to you; but
he will say it with a grin, out of politeness, because you are a
white man and this is not your country. Utak repeated that
Una-i-kto in my igloo, less because it was cold than because there was something shameful for him in staying with the white man
instead of going off to hunt with the others.
*
It had seemed to me for some days that Kakokto’s wife had
been looking sulky. I mentioned it to Paddy at supper one
evening, and a moment later I said to him:
"That fellow from Adelaide Peninsula, Kukshun: what’s he
hanging round here so long for?"
Paddy smiled. "You know," he said, "you’ve hit on something. She’s upset because of him. Kakokto and Kukshun have been exchanging wives, and as usual the wives were not consulted. Lady Kakokto does not find Kukshun to her taste; a little briny, shall we say? It’s put her out of sorts. She’s one of
the few women round here who is in love with her husband. Kakokto doesn’t care specially about her, and he’ll lend her to anybody who asks for her. For one thing, it’s a tradition that has to be observed; for another, friendship has its obligations."
He went on to explain that the exchange of wives was
common among the Eskimos. It is not, as with certain other
primitive peoples, a token of hospitality. I myself had been re¬
ceived in the South Seas by chiefs who, in the way of welcome,
had offered me a daughter or had begged me to choose a companion. among the women of the village. This was different,
was a simple matter of sociability, a courtesy not to be refused
between friends or visitors. Among hunting partners_the
Eskimos often hunt in pairs —it was automatic, a relief from
the monotony of existence.
Between husbands, meanwhile, there was never any question
of compensation. On the other hand, a "well-bred" bachelor
whose friend accorded him this courtesy would expect to make
ms friend a little gift as a token of appreciation. The lady the
object of the courtesy, was as little compensated as consulted.
Among, other articles of the code there was one that was abso-
miely rigorous: the privilege of disposing of the lady belonged
exclusively to the husband. The man who made his request directly of the wife committed a grave infraction of the code
and serious trouble would certainly ensue.
To ask an Eskimo to lend you his wife is a thing so natural
that no one will hesitate to put the question in a crowded igloo
within hearing of half a dozen others. It does not so much as
break the thread of conversation, and the husband will say yes
or no, according to his momentary mood, with entire casualness.
The rest takes place as casually as the demand itself. Evening
comes, conversation in the igloo will be running on about the
usual topics — hunting, fishing, dogs, sleds. There will be tea
and laughter; and when the moment arrives to go to bed — a
moment indicated by certain signs such as the dying of the
candle, the exhaustion of the tobacco tin, the prodigious jaw-cracking yawns, a happy digestion—the husband will slip
peacefully into his krepik , his deerskin bag, while his wife lets
herself down into yours. And the presence of the husband in
the same igloo need not intimidate you; he knows nothing of
jealousy and is asleep before you have settled yourself in the
company of his wife.
◄► It is inconceivable to the Eskimo that we do not do the same.
One of my friends, a Hudson's Bay Post Manager, was about
to be married; his fiancee was on her way to join Mm at his
Post. He was very popular among the Eskimos, and Ms forth-coming marriage was a great subject of comment among them. A native said to Mm:
"When your wife is here, will you trade her with the other
white men?"
"We don't do that," the Post Manager said with a laugh.
"Why not?" asked the astonished Eskimo. "There's no harm,
in it. A wife doesn't wear out. When I get mine back she is
always as good as she was before."
It might seem from this that the native woman lived altogether in a state of abject inferiority to the male Eskimo, but this is not the case. What she loses in authority, as compared
to the white woman, she makes up, by superior cunning, in
many other ways. Native women are very shrewd, and they
almost never fail to get what they want. Take Utah’s wife, for
example. It was because of her that we always got away late
on the trail. It was because of her that, instead of going off
sealing with the others, Utak came down to build his igloo near
the Post where she might cajole us who were white men into
making her little presents. When Utak went to the Store to
trade, Unarnak was always at his heels, and it was comical to
see that crab-like pigeon-toed shuffle of hers as she stood never
at his side but only behind him, turning as he turned, backing
up as he backed up, coming forward as he came forward, hidden
behind her man until the moment when she put her head round
and murmured to him those calculated suggestions which in the
end always made her share of the barter greater than he had
intended. And it was only after they had got back to the igloo,
that, each time, Utak saw he had once again been done in the
eye by his wife.
It was a perpetual joy to watch this comedy, this almost
wordless struggle in which the wife — and by no means Utak’s
alone, but all of them — inevitably got the better of the husband.
With the skill of actresses, the wives played their parts; and
with the candour of provincial audiences, the husbands were
taken in. There does not exist an Eskimo woman untrained in
the art of wheedling, not one unable to repeat with tireless and
yet insinuating insistence the mention of what she wants, until
the husband, worn down by her persistence, gives way. Heaven
knows, there was nothing subtle about the manoeuvre, and I
marvelled each time that men so clever in the rest of their
existence an almost strictly material existence, it is true —
should be so dull of wit, so definitely idiotic in the matter of
handling their women.
◄► Women were behind everything in this Eskimo world. If one
native abandoned a given group in order to go off and live with
another, you could be sure it was done at the instigation of his
wife. If a couple suddenly grew into a triangular household, you were virtually certain that it was the wife and not the
husband who had dictated the choice of the permanent friend.
And if, one day, that triangle was reduced to a couple again as
the result of a murder, there was never any doubt but that it
was the wife who had plotted and prompted the murder. But I
have a story to tell you . . .
My story is of Ekaluk who came out of the porch of the igloo
one morning and looked round.
Little plumes of snow were running before the wind over the
plain and powdering the earth with a fine layer of white.
Nothing else stirred. Near by, two puppies lay asleep on the
snow. The igloos were hushed and seemingly deserted. The
men had gone off to fish through the ice of a lake whose un¬
broken surface stretched into infinity. All these things the young
man saw with an eye quick to seize details in this vast landscape.
And he saw, too, receding in the distance, a dark form that he
knew to be Ohokto, hurrying on foot to his fishing. Watching
him, there dropped into Ekaluk's mind the words spoken a half-
hour before by Kanaiok, his mistress and Ohokto’s wife: "Why
don’t you do it? Now is the time!"
This was not the first time that Kanaiok had urged him to
do it. In the beginning, Ekaluk had taken her into his sleeping-
bag as a matter of desire and convention, in the common way
of neighbouring Eskimos. Ohokto had of course not taken it
amiss; and besides, he was no longer young. But things had not
stopped there: Ekaluk had ended by taking a fancy to the
young woman — in Eskimo fashion, naturally; not out of love,
but simply because he wanted a woman to himself. And he had
come to live in their igloo. Still Ohokto had said nothing. He
had merely grown more silent. Now Ekaluk had got it into his
head that Kanaiok would make him a proper wife. He liked
her. She could sew skins wonderfully. She was an excellent
housewife, for there was always tea and baneks in her igloo.
And Kanaiok, for her part, found Ekaluk’s body more agreeable than her husband’s. It was less intelligent, but it was younger,
warmer.
Like most Eskimo women, Kanaiok was both clever and per¬
sistent, and she soon achieved a complete ascendancy over this
young, simple-minded, and violent lover. "Why not?" she would
urge. "Do away with Ohokto, and we’ll go off to another camp
and live together. I’ll sew you the handsomest clothes in the
world, and your igloo will be the one that all men will most
willingly visit."
Ekaluk was not bright. He had no words to say what he felt.
But these things troubled his mind. More and more violently
he desired this woman for himself alone. And Kanaiok gave
him no peace, harassed him ceaselessly; and when Ekaluk,
angered by her persistence, flew into a rage and beat her, she
would be silent for several days. Then she would begin again:
Doubtless Ekaluk was a coward; she had thought him a man.
Since this was how he was, she would say no more. As a matter of fact, if you wanted a man, a real one, there was Ohokto; and indeed she was lucky to be his wife.
This sort of mockery worked on Ekaluk. It was a spur in the side of the young animal (he might have been twenty-two years old). And this morning he had made up his mind to do the
rhino; as soon as he got the chance — for an Eskimo never kills
face to face, but always from behind. He would stab Ohokto
from behind. Already he could see himself doing it. Kanaiok
knew what was going through his mind. She had been quick to
flatter him, to cajole him this morning; and when Ohokto had
left, she, snuffing with elaborate casualness the wick of the seal-
oil lamp, had whispered a quantity of things into Ekaluk’s ear.
All this was stirring confusedly in Ekaluk’s mind as he went
forward to his sled, turned it right side up, and harnessed his
dogs. Ohokto had not been out of sight ten minutes when
Ekaluk’s sled was gliding down the declivity that led to the lake.
He knew he was going to kill, but he knew not how. A mind
like his could make no plans in advance. He knew merely that
when the occasion offered itself, he, a hunter and an Eskimo, would seize it. All that he was sure of was that this was the day
when the thing would be done. Kanaiok’s voice rang in his ears,
and of a sudden his blood began to beat in his chest. He
whipped up the dogs, and they, seeming to understand, trotted
rapidly through the grey air. Already a silhouette was visible
on the ice. it was Ohokto.
Ohokto was on his knees over a hole in the ice, in the customary posture. In front of Mm three heavy blocks of snow
formed a rampart against the wind. He was kneeling on a bed
of crashed ice over which he had spread his caribou-skin.
Ohokto was motionless, a statue of immobility. Eskimos are
able to kneel like this for hours without the slightest movement,
without the least fatigue, watching the fish pass slowly to and
fro under the ice as in a dream. Only the left hand is in motion,
the hand that does the jigging and rises and falls with the
regularity of the tick-tock of a clock while five or six feet under the ice the decoy—fins made of bone — flutters in the same
rhythm. Within reach of the right hand lies the great three-pronged harpoon, ready for the kill.
Ohokto is motionless. The wind may veer, the blizzard may
come, nothing will budge Ohokto. His is the patience of the
hunter, and his concern with the kill is so concentrated that nothing can distract him from it. He does not so much as turn
his head when Ekaluk draws near.
The easiest thing in the world to do is to stop one’s dogs:
they seem always ready to rest. A whispered "Hoo!" will cut
them short and turn their heads towards the driver. Ekaluk has
stopped his team at about fifty yards from the hole, instinctively
concerned not to frighten the fish. He strokes them with Ms
whip, and they lie down. The whip is then slipped under the
straps along the sled.
For an Eskimo, there is nothing so automatic as to pick up
one’s snow-knife at the moment of getting off a sled. Ekaluk’s
knife is in his hand as he goes towards Ohokto. A blizzard has
come up, and Ekaluk moves at the centre of a whirling wall of ’
mow through which he can see a bare hundred feet. Probably there are other natives out on the lake, but in this wall of snow Ekaluk is as good as invisible to them — and besides, what he is up to is his own affair.
◄► As he walks slowly forward towards his still motionless friend,
a gleam of consciousness pierces his brain. He is about to kill
Ohokto from behind. Two strokes of a spear in the ice will
make a hole down which he can send Ohokto; and if ever the
police come — they never come in the winter — clever the man
who can find a body under eight feet of ice!
Now the thing is very clear in Ekaluk’s mind. But at the
moment when he stands over his friend, Ohokto straightens up
and murmurs mysteriously:
"Angi-y-uk." (Big ones.)
Big fish! After days of harpooning fish so small that they
were not worth bringing in, so that Ekaluk had preferred to
spend his hours with Kanaiok in the igloo! And now the big
fish are back! It must have been the new moon last night that
brought them.
It was at this moment that Ekaluk forgot the purpose of his
coming and forgot the murderous knife in his hand. He knelt
without a word beside Ohokto, who had returned to Ms knees
as soon as he had spoken, and side by side the man who had
been about to kill and the man who had been about to die
peered together above the hole. One after another they speared
great fish, violently red of flesh; and it was as if the fish had been
sent to save Ohokto from murder.
Ekaluk had forgotten; for Ekaluk was first of all a hunter, and
fish or seal spoke louder to Ms instinct than woman or murder.
Frozen instantly, hard as wood, the fish were piled on Ekaluk’s
sled, the dogs were on their feet, and the sled was away.
Neither man spoke. The Spirit of Fishing filled them both,
each for himself. From time to time Ekaluk would call out to
his dogs, or Ohokto would jump down from the sled to release
a tangled trace and quickly remount again. They had crossed
the great lake called Kakivok-tar-vik and were nearing the
camp when by one of the recurrent miracles of the Arctic the mind suddenly shifted, tlie grey veil vanished from the air, and.
the sinking sun was revealed — a sun of mercy.
And then Ekaluk remembered. Two hundred yards ahead,
Kanaiok was waiting for him, prepared to leave with him. His
dogs were already slowing down; and at the moment when they
stopped dead he stepped behind Ohokto and sank the snow-
knife into ills back. Ohokto toppled over like a sack of grain.
Lying in his heavy overcoat on the ground, his short arms
motionless, he looked like a grotesque dead doll. Ekaluk ran
past the dogs, struck his harpoon into the snow, and crawled on
all fours into the porch.
I said to Gibson one day, "What would happen if I asked one
of these Eskimos for his wife?" "Very likely he'd let you have her."
"Without a word? Without any — er — bargaining about it?"
"Oh, quite! In the first place, it's done. And then, you see, it's something of an honor. The fact that
out of them all you, a white man, picked her, would make the rest think more highly of her. And so far as the husband goes, of course he'd expect something in exchange. These people never actually give anything to anybody. They lend things, they help one another along; but
whether it's a wife or a dog or a pocket knife, it's always either a direct swap or a claim on die other fellow in the future."
"And , suppose 1 asked for her several days running?"
"That wouldn’t upset him. He might say to you, “Tomorrow:
1 want her myself tonight. 55 But the chances are that you could
have her. And her husband and the rest would sit round in the
igloo, laughing and chatting about you. The husband would be
congratulated upon having made a rich friend. Probably he
would let the others talk on while he dreamt of the things he’d
get out of you.
"As a matter of fact, 5 Paddy went on, Tve known Eskimo
women to come and ask to sleep with white men off their own
bat. There were three of us at the Post one night, a trapper
called Dave, a Major who had stopped there on an inspection
tour, and me. We were all abed in the same room, towards
midnight, the Major and I reading by candlelight and Dave
dozing off in his comer, when suddenly the door opened and a
woman came in. She and her husband were, working for me
round the Post. She shut the door, squatted down, and just sat.
Nobody said anything for a while, and I was wondering vaguely
what she was up to, when Dave, who had been woken out of
his doze, said rather peevishly, “Ask her what the devil she
wants! 55 I was the only one who could make himself under¬
stood, so I said, “What do you want? 55 She pointed to Dave in
his comer, and said, “This one. 55
"Dave’s father was a Scotch dominie and he didn’t go in much
for that kind of thing. When 1 explained, he yelled, “Tell her
to get out of here! I shan’t have anything to do with the slut! 55
and he got up, grabbed a tin of tobacco, handed it to her,
shoved her out of the door, and went back to bed muttering I
don’t know what.
◄►
"The Major and I jollied him about his sex appeal, asked him
what his secret was, and that was -all there was to that.
"Next night, at about the same hour, the door opened again,
the woman came in, and again she just squatted down and
stared. This time it was me she was after. I let her know
135
that the thing was impossible, and she left without saying
anything.
‘In the morning, as I started out to the Store, her husband
came up to me and asked what the matter was? What was
wrong with the Kabloona? His wife had twice proposed herself
and twice been turned down. Maybe she was too old? Well, he
had a daughter. Too bad, she was three hundred miles off, but
later in the season she’d be along. He was sorry his wife didn’t
appeal to us.’
★
Now 1 began to understand. Utak had paid me a visit the
day of Paddy’s story. I had thought he had come to beg a
length of rope, but I saw 7 now that he was scratching round for
a way to propose Ms wife to me. I hadn’t caught on, and he
had slipped out as soundless as a mouse. And he wasn’t the
only one. All the Eskimos had been low in grub for about a
week past. One after the other, they had been coming into the
Post, sitting on the bench in the outer room just where they
could be seen through the open doorway from our inner room,
saying nothing but waiting to be spoken to. Each had sat out
Ms hour or two with characteristic patience and immobility,
and, seeing that nothing was coming of it, had left. Probably
each had said to himself, on leaving, ‘Next time, perhaps.’
My curiosity was aroused. I began to wonder. I reminded
myself virtuously that I was in a sense shirking my duty. If not
the primary, then at least the secondary reason for my being
here was to study the nature of the Eskimo. AH the anthropo¬
logists that I had read seemed to attach prodigious importance
to the sexual life of primitive peoples (perhaps because the
sexual relations of the civilized peoples yielded a greater fund
of psychological'than of biological data) . Was this not a legiti¬
mate department of investigation for me? But my difficulty was
a curious one: it was not to resist temptation, but to be tempted.
I said as much to Paddy, and he smiled.
‘Not very dainty, .these Eskimo women, are they?’ he agreed.
136
THE POST
*ying
band
fc was
erself
ill, he
F, but
lidn’t
it the
3eg a
id for
id he
( t the
out a
:o the
they „
‘oom,
Lt OUt
lility,
bably
, 5
>.
inded
[f not
being
ropo-
tance
e the
fund
egiti-
y was
pted.
preed.
And he added with the noble simplicity that builds empires:
‘It’s that stink of caribou about them that I can’t go. 5
He was silent a moment. 4 What puzzles me, though, is their
husbands, 5 he went on. £ X remember — never mind who and
where it was — a chap came by once who had trapped along
the River too long to be bothered by these things, and he
traded one of these women. We had her to breakfast next
morning — 5
But X had better tell the story in my own way, since it gave
rise to reflections in my mind with which it became rapidly
entangled.
The woman had been waiting in a corner like an animal, her
eyes, as usual, fixed on the floor. The white man beckoned to
her and she arrived at table with that crab-like* pigeon-toed
walk — the most graceless and inhuman gait in the world. Once
in her chair she crouched there, motionless until the white
man encouraged her, urged her to eat and drink. Slowly she
stretched forth a hand, picked up a spoon — and the spoon
fell out of her hand. The white man had to pick it up for
her.
A music-hall ape, one of those simians who unfold their nap¬
kin, eat, drink, smoke cigars, is infinitely more adroit than an
Eskimo at a white man’s table. Here was a human being that
could not hold a spoon in its hand; therefore it must be that
even to hold a spoon properly wants generations of heredity.
Here was a creature as helpless at table as the white man was
helpless in a blizzard. These hands that were so skilful with the
circular Eskimo knife when a great fish was to be cut up; these
hands that knew almost of themselves how to transform tough
hides into comfortable clothes, that plied the needle with
such swiftness and deftness, could not even butter a slice of
bread.
As they sat at table, the husband came into the outer room,
followed by a friend. The white man glanced at the husband
through the open doorway: not a sign, not a gesture, betrayed
his interest in the situation. The woman herself was unper-
137
THE POST
turbed. She went peacefully on biting into her bread without
so much as a nod to her husband. When the white man, putting
the bread back in its box, passed the husband, the Eskimo smiled
amiably, as always, and in his smile there was not the least
reference to the situation. And when his wife rose from table
and rolled herself a cigarette at the tobacco box, he did not
throw 7 her even the most furtive glance. She, for her part, was
still shy with the white man; and when his eyes met hers she
smiled gently with that Eskimo smile which is not even amia¬
bility but urbanity.
Breakfast ended, she got up and joined her husband and his
friend in the outer room. In a moment all three were laughing
gaily, there was certainly not a word said about what had
happened. The three natives had begun to play a game — two
would hide something in the room, and the third would have to
find it. They played like this for an hour, laughing and giggling
like little children.
'k
I went to bed that night still thinking of Gibson's story.
What, I wondered, could have been the thoughts of that hus¬
band tranquilly sitting in the outer room? Was he indifferent?
Was his mind totally blank? Was he cynical? Again and again
I was to be baulked in my understanding by the 20,000 years of
evolution — or is it more? — that separate the Eskimo and me.
When I witnessed an event, when I participated in a fact, I, as
a civilized, or at least evolved European, found it impossible not
to dwell upon that fact, to attempt to interpret it. Doubtless the
Eskimo never attempted to interpret, to understand. The thing
was there — and that was all. The man of Neanderthal and the
man of Rockefeller Centre must' of necessity view and value
things each in his own way. Here sits a human being in one
room while in another room sit his wife and a passive, a most
casual, lover. And what does he do? He laughs. About what is
going on in the other room? Not at all. He laughs because it is
fun to play at hiding things with a friend.
J 39
◄► ◄►
He Is not jealous, then? No. And the reason may be that
jealousy is a function of the sense of individual property; and he
has this sense, if at all, in the very faintest degree. You enjoy
his wife? What harm can come to him of that? If what you
intended was to take from him his wife, deprive him of this
essential human and social factor {not property), that would be
serious and he would not hesitate to kill you. But to lie with
her? Not only is that no deprivation, but it allows him to lie
with other women — and that is extremely agreeable.
It goes without saying that I am far from proposing that the
sexual ethics of the Netsilik should be adopted by, or could be
adapted to, Western Christendom. Nor am I unaware that it
Is not necessary to be a feminist to ask, 'But what of the status of
Eskimo women?* Their status, parenthetically, suits them well
enough; and I have indicated here and there in these pages that
they are not only the mistresses of their households but also, in
most Eskimo families, the shrewd prompters of their husbands 5
decisions. However, it is not about this that I want to speak.
What I believe worth saying Is that Eskimo mores are the direct
reflection of the material circumstances in which they live.
Epithets like 'cynical 5 and 'indifferent 5 are here totally out of
place. Eskimo life is materially the hardest life lived by any
people on earth. Necessity certainly commands and probably
explains every phase of Eskimo manners. Nature, such as It is
in their world, permits no appreciable degree of refinement,
and this because it allows no significant degree of leisure. The
Eskimo eats enormously because he must eat enormously to
keep warm. He knows no pleasures of the palate, unless It be
an occasional bit of rotted meat, which he likes because it is a
sort of condiment and tickles the palate. Having nothing else
to do evenings in the igloo, his sexual life is intense — and it
would be an error to Imagine that cold slowed up this life. He
is, again of necessity, communistic in his attitude to property,
not precisely charitable but certainly ready to share all he has
with Ms kind; and because there is never a time when he may
not be the one to benefit by this singular economics, he is
140
always ready to share with others his wife, his snow-knife, his
cache of fish.
★
An apparition at the Post pulled me up one day with a shock
of amazement. I am as well aware as the next man that sexual
aberration knows no geography and no chronology, that
inversion is a phenomenon observable in ancient as in modem
times, in primitive as in civilized societies. Yet it was not in my
thoughts that I should one day see a homosexual Eskimo; and
if 1 put this man in my notebooks, and write about him now, it
is not because of his aberration but because he was, in his re¬
pellent way, a singularly comic and glittering figure, at once
loathsome and fascinating.
There was never such a master of pantomime as this in¬
finitely strange, perpetually agitated, and yet extraordinarily
self-possessed rogue who dropped in one afternoon from Back’s
River and was off again the next day. He seemed to take it for
granted that neither Gibson nor 1 would understand his speech,
for immediately on coming in he began to display his talent as
mime, and he did it with obvious relish. He had no need of
words: face and hands sufficed him to paint for us his four days
on the trail. He had mn out of tea on the second day, and he
wrote in sign language a poem of the brewing and drinking of
his last cup. He had started with only a little coal-oil; and in a
moment he was coaxing the last drop of oil out of an invisible
tin, aping marvellously—how he did it I do not know—the
very tin itself, showing us with his hands what emptiness was.
He simulated the mangy dogs trotting with lowered heads and
flopping ears, their rumps convulsed and tense with fear , of the
whip. He acted out for us the sled bumping and scraping over
the pack ice for want of mud on its runners. Forgetting himself
momentarily, he would speak rapid words, but his pantomime
went faster than his words, and he would fasten his eyes on your
face with the shrewdness and the childish self-satisfaction of an old
actor, as if saying, ‘Don’t you admire the way I am doing this?*
141
KABLOONA
Another thing: he looked exactly like portraits of Louis XIII;
and not only did I sketch him, but fearing that my drawing
might be the fruit of my imagination, I photographed him; and
it was Louis XIII to the life who stared at me from the negative.
A narrow strip of beard that looked half natural and half make¬
up, ran down Ms chin, and he was either all curtsies and scrap¬
ings, bowing forward with rounded back to leer at you while his
hands went dismayingly over your person and he murmured over
the beauty of your clothes, or he would straighten up abruptly,
stick out his chest, and posture stiffly as if posing for his portrait.