Grenfell: Knight-Errant of the North

In the clear sunlight the shaft flashes whistling from the throwing stick, the barb strikes, and the seal goes down in a welter of blood-stained foam. At the end of the harpoon line is a bladder—and as the bladder dances away over the surface, sometimes bobbing out of sight, Papik is after it like a hound chasing a rabbit.

The bladder is to the barbed harpoon what the fisherman's float is to the baited hook.

When the seal comes up, furious to attack and punish the hunter, it first tears the bladder in pieces—then it makes at the kayak.

But Papik is calmly ready. He has a lance with which he takes careful aim.

The seal comes on, bent double to hurl itself forward with all its might. It seems strange that a creature usually so gentle can show such ferocity.

The lance is flung. It goes through the seal's mouth and comes out at the back of the neck. The seal shakes its head violently, but it is doomed.

Papik's second lance strikes through a flipper into the lungs.

The seal is still alive as he comes close. Papik stabs it with his long knife, and it ceases to struggle at last. The seal is a creature that clings to life a long, long time. He ties the seal to the stern of the kayak, rearranges his apparatus, coils his rope, puts his lances in their place, and is ready for another. If he is in luck, he may paddle homeward with four seals, and even more, in his wake.

If a storm comes before he gets to the shore, his watermanship is severely tested. He fights not only to bring his boat and himself through the tumult of the waters: he means to save every one of those carcasses wallowing along behind.

In the midst of his hard fighting with the waves, which turn him over and roll him about, as he stubbornly rights himself after each capsizing and hurls himself through the next curving green hillside of water, he comes upon a helpless comrade.

Ordinarily, the second man, Patuak, could bob up again and go on, like stalwart Papik.

But Patuak's jacket worked loose at the rim of the body-hole of the kayak. The water rushed in. Now he is water-logged. He will lose his boat, his seals, his life, unless Papik can save him.

Is Papik tempted to think only of himself and leave Patuak to his fate? If he is, it does not appear in what he does. He runs his kayak alongside that of his friend: he puts his paddle across both boats, and if he cannot bring in both kayaks, with such help as Patuak is able to give, he may even carry Patuak lying across the prow of his own boat.

It is easier to drown a seal than to drown an Eskimo.

The women stand on the rocks, shielding their eyes with their hands as they gaze eagerly seaward—just as the women of Nantucket stood on the roofs of the houses in olden times watching and waiting for the whaling-fleet.

At the first sign of the approaching hunters a cry goes up: "They are coming!"

Then they begin to count.

They thank their own idea of Heaven when they find that—seals or no seals—their men are coming back in safety.

If a man is towing seals, they shout his name with joy—and after it put the word "kaligpok," which means "towing."

The women haul in the boats, rub noses with their husbands to show their affection, and proceed to prepare the feast of raw blubber.

After that feast the men tell the story of the day's work—without boasting, but with touches of humor that send the listeners off into ringing peals of laughter.

The story-telling is a part of the seal-hunt. The phrases are straight-flung as a seal-lance.

"When the time came for using the harpoon, I looked to it, I took it, I seized it, I gripped it, I had it fast in my hand, I balanced it"—and so on. The audience, mouths agape, misses no word. It is the nearest thing the Eskimos have to motion pictures—and what a motion picture the whole of the seal-hunt is! No wonder the hunter lolls back like a lord, and lets himself be waited on, a conquering hero.

The old men feel their youth renewed as they sit and listen to these wonder-tales. In their turn, they are moved to tell how they met the walrus in fair fight and overcame him. Perhaps the dreaded tusk went right through the side of the boat and wounded the hunter. But there are no friends like Eskimo friends for a man in such a plight. They killed the walrus—they dined off the meat—and the tusks are kept to this day to show for it. A skin canoe against a walrus—that is a battle indeed. The younger men know what it means: and the old man is comforted by the remembrance of what he used to be.

They are patient people, the Eskimo, and they need all the patience they have. An Inspector sent a boat-load of Eskimo to a fiord to get some grass for his goats.

They were gone a long time, and he wondered what had become of them.

When at last they returned, he asked them why they remained away so long. They told him that when they got to the place where he told them to go, they found the grass was too short. So they had to sit down and wait until it grew. Their time was of no value. And they had their orders to obey!

The world owes it to these brave people not to take from them their birthright to their few possessions in the far places where they dwell.

VII

LITTLE PRINCE POMIUK

There was an Eskimo boy named Pomiuk who lived in the far north of Labrador, at Nachoak Bay. Pomiuk had the regular sea-and-land training of the Eskimo boy. In summer his family lived in a skin tent, in winter they occupied an ice igloo. It is a fine art making one of those rounded domes—the curving blocks must be shaped and fitted exactly, so as to come out even at the top.

Blubber in a stone dish supplied light and heat. If the air got too thick, father could thrust the handle of his dog-whip through the roof. Nobody bothered about bathing on Saturday night, and nobody minded the smell of rotten whale-meat for the dogs. In an atmosphere that would stifle a white man, Pomiuk and his brothers and sisters throve and laughed and had the time of their lives. Pomiuk had his own whip of braided walrus hide, and even when he was little the dogs respected him and ran forward when he shouted "oo-isht!" turned to the right at "ouk!" and stopped and sat down panting when he shouted "ah!"

When Pomiuk was ten years old a ship came on a strange errand. Pomiuk's family and their friends were fishing for cod. But when the strange ship dropped anchor, they flocked to it shouting in their own tongue "Stranger! stranger!" When they learned why it came they were amazed.

An Eskimo interpreter who came with the white men from the south explained that what they wanted was to take the Eskimo to that far-off land called America, where at a place called Chicago most wonderful things were gathered together in huge igloos for all the world to see. They wanted the Eskimo to come themselves and to bring with them their boats and dogs, their sleds, their tools, their clothing, and the things with which they hunted whales and seals and polar bears. In fact the white men could not pretend to show the world anything very remarkable, unless such clever people as the Eskimo brought their things with them.

The men from the south urged and flattered and argued till a number of the Eskimo let themselves be persuaded. The Eskimo had no idea of the trouble and disaster they were letting themselves in for, or they never would have started. The beautiful fairy-tales told by the white men inflamed their imaginations. They had always been very well pleased with their own white, cold world of whales and seals and kayaks—those canoes in which they are as much at home as the fish in the sea. But here was a chance to travel, and see marvels, and come home and rouse the envy of those who had not dared. It was too good a chance to miss. They would return rich men, and have nothing to do but brag about their adventures for the rest of their lives.

Pomiuk's father didn't care to go. But he was broad-minded. It was a big sacrifice for him to part with his wife and son, for it is the teeth of the women that must chew the sealskins to make them pliable for shoes and clothes: it is the fingers of women that do all the sewing. But Pomiuk's mother could show the helpless white women how to make skin boots, and Pomiuk could teach the paleface men and children to use the dog whip as he used it every day. If the Eskimo brought back money enough to buy many things at the nearest trading-post, the time spent on the long southward trek would not be wasted. The Eskimo, unlike the northern Indian, is a good business man, counting his puppies after they are born and his fox-skins before he spends them.

So the Eskimo sailed away from their own coast, with a gnawing homesickness at heart, though their lips were silent about it: and when they got to Chicago the life was strange with hideous sight and sound, and altogether unbearable: and they longed to get away from it to the sea and the ice and behold again their northern lights, which to the Eskimo are the spirits of the dead at play.

But there they were cooped up behind a stockade, like creatures at the zoo, to amuse the crowd, and be giggled at and poked toward as if they were some newly imported breed of monkey. An Eskimo likes as little as any other human to have fun made of him.

Worst of all, they lived in the white man's houses, and found the four walls instead of the "wide and starry sky" intolerable. A snow house has its own kind of stuffiness—the smell of whale-blubber and seal-oil to Eskimo nostrils is a sweet perfume. To be cooped up in a bedroom, and expected to sleep on a mattress with pillows, is pure torture.

While they were on the exhibition stand, in the torrid heat, they had to wear those heavy clothes of furs and skins which the ladies said looked so picturesque. They knew how the polar bear felt in his cage away from his ice-blocks. The food the white man ate with relish was such queer stuff. They longed for that delicious tidbit, the flipper of a seal. How good the entrails of a gull, or a fox's stomach would have tasted! But the white men seemed to think that coffee, and watermelon and corn on the cob, and ham and eggs, and the pies their Eskimo mothers never used to make were good enough for them. Except for the warm blood of the seal, the Eskimo ordinarily has no use for a hot drink.

Several of the older Eskimo wilted away like flowers, and died. They were buried and forgotten; and when the dogs died they were buried and forgotten too: there was about the same lack of ceremony in the one case as in the other.

But little Pomiuk through thick and thin was the joyous life of the party. They worked him hard, because he amused the visitors. The visitors would throw nickels and dimes into the enclosure, and as the coins flickered in the air Pomiuk would lash out at them with his thirty-five foot whip. If he nicked the coin it was his. Then he would laugh—a very musical laugh, that could be heard a long way off. He was a jolly, friendly little soul, and he wore a smile that hardly came off even when he slept.

But there came a time when even happy little Pomiuk could not smile.

One day as he leapt high in the air, agile as a Russian dancer, to bring down one of those spinning coins with his whip, he fell on the boards, his hip striking a nail that stuck out.

His mother ran to pick him up. His face was twisted with agony.

He tried to stand, for her sake, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back in her arms, weak as a baby. What was she to do? The men who ran the exhibit had not kept their promises. Pomiuk was the chief bread-winner for them all. The coins he had nicked with his whip were most of what they had to spend.

With this money they sent out and got a so-called "surgeon" who did not know his business, but took the money just the same. He patched up poor "Prince" Pomiuk so that the boy was worse off than before.

The Fair closed: the Eskimo were stranded. If that had happened on a sea-beach at home, they would have known what to do: they would have laughed—for they are merry people, like our southern negroes—and they would have killed sea-birds with stones and made their way alongshore. But to be stranded in Chicago is another story. God knows how a few survivors of the band found pity in men's hearts, and straggled back to their home at Nachoak Bay.

Pomiuk's wound never healed—he could not run about, nor walk, nor even stand. His mother had to carry him everywhere. In Newfoundland the fishermen and the sealers, desperately poor as they were, took them into their bare cabins, and gave them bread and tea taken from the mouths of their own hungry children.

Dr. Frederick Cook, creation's champion liar, did a golden deed for which the Recording Angel should give him a good mark in the Book of Life. He made room for several of the Eskimo on his journey to the Labrador coast: and fishing-schooners took the rest of the survivors.

Imagine how happy Pomiuk was, in spite of the pain in his hip, when he thought of crawling back into the mouth of his own snow house again, and rubbing noses with his father once more!

But when the mother and the child were put ashore at Nachoak Bay—they were told that the father's spirit was at play with the rest among the northern lights. In this world they would not see him again. He had been murdered while his wife and child were in Chicago.

It was at that dark hour that Dr. Grenfell came into his life.

Grenfell found the poor little boy, who had earned so much money, and brought so much glory to his tribe, lying naked on the rocks beside the hut. The mother had married again, and gone off "over the mountains" with the other children, leaving her crippled son to the tender mercy of the neighbors. It was indeed a "come-down" in the world for a "prince," whose father was a "king" among his fellows. It was deemed best to send Pomiuk south on the little hospital steamer with the Doctor. The Doctor could fix him up, if anybody could, and moreover—this was the clinching argument—he was "no good fishing." So the next day found Pomiuk bound south, clasping his only worldly possession—a letter from a clergyman of Andover, Massachusetts. There was a photograph with it. If you asked Pomiuk what he had there, he would turn on that magic smile and show you the picture, and say: "Me love even him."

The minister who wrote the letter sent money for the care of the poor "Prince." Next summer Grenfell saw him again, and the child laughed as he said, "Me Gabriel Pomiuk now." A Moravian missionary had given him the name. They had made him as comfortable as possible at the Indian Harbor hospital: his own disposition made him happy. He had been moved from the hospital to a near-by home, and he hopped about on crutches as gayly as though he could run and play like the other children.

But malignant disease in his hip was sapping his strength, just as the ants of Africa will eat away a leg of furniture till it is a hollow shell, and one day the whole table or chair falls crashing. His strength was ebbing fast. Suddenly he became very ill: he was put to bed, with high fever, and was often unconscious. In a week he was dead. But that little generous, courageous life was the foundation-stone of Dr. Grenfell's noble orphanage at St. Anthony, put up with the pennies of American children, where I had the pleasure of telling dog-stories to smiling Eskimo boys in the summer of 1919. Gabriel is the angel of comfort: and this small Gabriel has left behind him the comfort of fatherless homes in Labrador for ages yet to be.

Dr. Grenfell says that on the night of his passing the heavens were aflame with the aurora. It was as though little Prince Pomiuk's father had come to welcome him, and they were at play once more in the old games they knew.

VIII

CAPTURED BY INDIANS

In the lonely interior of Labrador in midsummer an old man sat on the rocky ground with a ring of Indians about him.

He was "Labrador" Cabot of Boston. Year after year he had gone to Labrador to visit the Indian tribes and study their ways. He could talk the Indian language and understand what they said to him.

"What's the matter with your leg?" asked the Chief, a big, strong fellow with keen eyes. "Can't you walk? We must get started if we want to find the deer."

"I think I must have broken my leg when I slipped and fell on the rocks," answered Mr. Cabot.

He made an effort to rise and stand, but sank back helplessly.

A curious, evil grin spread across the red man's face.

"You're sure you can't walk?"

Mr. Cabot shook his head.

"What will you do?"

"One thing is sure," said Mr. Cabot, "I'll have to stay with you if I'm to get out of this place alive."

"We can't let you keep us back," answered the Indian. "We might leave you here with a fire and something to eat."

"And what would I do after the fire went out, and the food was gone?"

The Indian shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know."

"Can't some of your men make a litter of boughs and carry me?" pleaded Mr. Cabot.

"They could if they wanted to," answered the Indian, coldly. "But I don't think they want to."

"Haven't we always been friends?" urged Mr. Cabot.

"I suppose so."

"Haven't I been here summer after summer, and helped you, and given medicine to sick people?"

The Indian picked up handfuls of sand and threw them on the fire. "Yes, and you were always writing in a little book. Maybe when you went away from here you told lies to the world about us. Who knows?"

Mr. Cabot was puzzled. Was this the friendly, peaceful Chief he knew before he had the misfortune to fall and hurt his leg?

In spite of the pain he was suffering, he tried to talk calmly and not show that he was afraid of being left behind. "Why have you turned against me?"

"What do you mean?" the Indian chief answered.

"A little while ago you seemed like my friend. Now you are willing to leave me here where there are no fish, and the deer do not come, and the mosquitoes are worse than any wild animals. What is the meaning of all this?"

"I will tell you," the Indian answered, very slowly. "You must pay us for what a white man did to us."

"What do you mean?"

"Listen, and you shall hear.

"Last year, we had fox furs—very many and very fine. We had risked our lives: we had starved and frozen to get them. All over Ungava we had tracked and trapped in the wilderness.

"Then—see what happened. A trader came among us. He had much money. It was not like any money we had seen before, but he said it was a new kind of money. And he would give us more of it for our furs than any man had given us before.

"He gave us much to drink. We had a feast, and dancing. The trader gave handsome presents to our wives. Beads and bright cloth for dresses. He gave us tobacco, and whiskey.

"When we did not know what we were doing, he bought our furs. He bought them all. He gave us this new, strange money and much of it. Then he went away. We fired guns in the air to honor him. We shook hands with him. We thought he was our friend. We promised to be friends with him as long as sun and moon endured.

"He smiled, and waved, and went away—and we, we had nothing of him but the money. It was paper, all of it, very bright and new and green, with printed marks on it we could not read.

"Some shook their heads when he had gone, and said, 'No, no, brothers. We should not have taken this green paper and given him those furs.'

"But others said, 'Look what he has paid us! We are all rich men. The price is better than we ever had before!'

"The old, wise men said, 'How do you know that it is more, when you do not know how much it is?'

"So, night and day, there was talking to and fro—along the trail by day, around the camp-fire when the sun had set.

"It soon came time for us to send men down to Rigolet, on Hamilton Inlet, there to buy at the Hudson's Bay store the things that we would need in the winter time.

"We sent twelve of the strong young men in their canoes to get the things and bring them home to our tents. We were happy when we thought of all the guns and tobacco, all the flour and the fine clothes so much money would buy.

"They went: and they were gone many days, while we waited in one fixed place for them, and in our minds spent the money many times over."

Then the Indian paused. He was squatting on his haunches, and puffing at his pipe. Mr. Cabot's leg was giving him much pain, but he was too proud to ask the Indian to do anything for him.

The Indian's face grew very stern as he remembered. His tone became as hard as the expression of his face. He looked at Mr. Cabot and clenched his fist. "When our men came to the storekeeper, they walked all about the store. 'I'll take that fine dress,' said one. 'Give me that shotgun,' said another. 'I will have this bag of tobacco,' said a third. Some took flour, and some chose bright ornaments for their wives, and others took candy, and one man got a talking-machine. Some chose the best clothes in the store. They also took much food of every kind, and ammunition for the guns.

"They made great piles of the things on the floor, to take them to the canoes.

"Then they brought out their money to pay for all these things.

"'What is that stuff?' said the storekeeper.

"'That? It is our money. It is what a trader paid us for our furs.'

"'What was his name?'

"'That we do not know. We did not ask. We do not care who buys from us; all we care is that he buys. One man's money is as good as another's.'

"Then the storekeeper laughed in their faces. And he said: 'You have been fooled. You have been fooled as easily as little children. Do you know what this "money" is that you have given me?'

"'No,' they said.

"'It is not money at all,' he told them. 'It is nothing but labels from beer bottles. You cannot have those things you have piled up on the floor. I will take them back and keep them here until you bring me real money for them.'

"Then they said to him, 'But it is all we have. We cannot go back to our people with nothing.'

"He said: 'I cannot help that. It is no fault of mine.'

"They wanted to fight—but it would do no good to kill the agent or drive him away. There would be no one from whom to get things another year.

"'You ought to have brought your furs to me. I would have given you real money for them,' said the agent.

"They went away very sorrowful. After many days they came back to us again. We were very glad when we saw them coming—but we wondered that their canoes were not piled high with the things we had told them to buy.

"When we heard their story we were very sorrowful. We talked about it a great deal. We said, 'What shall we do?'

"Then we made up our minds. This is what we decided. We said: 'The next white man that comes among us we shall hold. We shall not let him go until he pays to us a sum of money, seven hundred dollars, equal to that which we have lost. Since he is a white man he or his friends must make up to us that which we have lost at the hands of a white man.'

"So now you see—you are the man. And it is you that must pay back to us the money."

"But I haven't seven hundred dollars."

"Then you must promise that you will pay it, or get your friends to pay it. These many years you have come here among us. We will trust you for that. It is much that we should trust you—when it is one of your own people who brought such suffering and loss upon us."

"But this is an outrage!" said Mr. Cabot. "I never did anything to you but good. You know that."

"Yes, we know that," said the Indian, gravely. "But we shall leave you here unless you pay. You cannot find your way out alone—even if you could stand and walk upon your broken leg. We shall not carry you from here unless you pay the money. Is that not so?"

He turned to the others, who had not said one word all this while: they had been merely looking on and listening.

"Yes," they said. "He has spoken for us all. As he has said, we shall do. You shall be left here, if you do not pay."

"The Great Spirit has given you into our hands," the Chief declared. "When you came to us this summer again, we said among ourselves that he had sent you. We did not know that he would cause you to break your leg. We were going to keep you even if this had not happened. Now the Great Spirit has caused this hurt to happen to you. We see, by this, that we were not mistaken. He sent you to us as surely as he sends the fish or the deer when we have need of food. It is for you to choose, if you will pay, and go on with us to the coast—or refuse to pay and be left here in the wilderness to die."