Part 7 (1/2)

Meanwhile, beginning in the early morning of our steadily darkening days, other male members of the tribe pursued game. Others again followed a routine of scouring of the villages and collecting all the furs and game which had been caught. The women of the tribe, in almost every dimly lighted igloo, were no less industrious. To them fell the task of a.s.sisting in drying the fur skins, preparing dried meat and making our clothing. Throughout the entire days they sat in their snow and stone houses, ma.s.ses of ill-smelling furs before them, cutting the skins and sewing them into serviceable garments. This work I often watched, pa.s.sing from igloo to igloo, with an interest that verged on anxiety; for upon the strength, thickness and durability of these depended my life, and that of the companions I should choose, on the frigid days which would inevitably come on my journey Poleward. But these broad-faced, patient women did their work well. Their skill is quite remarkable. They took my measurements, for instance, by roughly sizing up my old garments and by measuring me by sight. Garments were made to fit snugly after the preliminary making by cutting out or inserting patches of fur. Needles among the natives are indeed precious.

So valuable are they that if a point or eye is broken, with infinite skill and patience the broken end is heated and flattened, and by means of a bow drill a new eye is bored. A new point is with equal skill shaped on local stones. With marvelous patience they make their own thread by drying and stripping caribou or narwhale sinews.

Were it not for their extraordinary eyesight, such work, under such conditions, would be impossible. But in the dark the natives can espy things invisible to white men. This owl-sight enables them to hunt, if necessary, in almost pitch darkness, and to perform tedious feats of hand skill which, in such dim light, an alien would bungle. I noticed, with much curiosity, that when the natives inspected any photograph or object which I gave them they always held it upside down. All objects, as is well known, are reflected in the retina thus, and it is our familiarity with the size and comparative relations of things which enables the brain to visualize an object or scene at its proper angle.

This strange, instinctive act of the natives might form an interesting chapter in optics.

Meanwhile, busy and interested in the beginning of our various pursuits, the great crust which was to hold down the sea for so many months, closed and thickened.

During the last days of brief suns.h.i.+ne the weather cleared, and at noon on October 24 everybody sought the open for a last glimpse of the dying day. There was a charm of color and glitter, but no one seemed quite happy as the sun sank under the southern ice, for it was not to rise again for one hundred and eighteen days.

Just prior to the falling of darkness, with that instinctive and forced hilarity with which aboriginal beings seek to ward off an impending calamity, the Eskimos engaged in their annual sporting event. It is a curious sight, indeed, to behold a number of excited, laughing Eskimos gathering about two champion dogs which are to fight. Although the zest of betting is unknown, the natives regard dog fights with much the same eager excitement as a certain type of sporting man does a c.o.c.k encounter. Sometimes the dogs do not fight fairly, a number of the animals bunching together and attacking a single dog. Dogs selected for the fight are, of course, the best of the teams. A dog which maintains his fighting supremacy becomes a king dog, and when beaten becomes a first lieutenant to the king.

After the forced enthusiasm of this brief period of excitement, the Eskimos begin to succ.u.mb to the inevitable melancholia of nature, when the sun, the source of natural life, disappears and darkness descends.

A gloom descends heavily upon their spirits. A subtle sadness tinctures their life, and they are possessed by an impulse to weep. At this season, hour by hour, the darkness thickens; the cold increases and chills their igloos; the wind, exultant while the sun s.h.i.+nes, now whines and sobs dolorously--there is something gruesome, uncanny, supernatural, in its siren sorrow. Outside, the snow falls, the sea closes. Its clamant beat of waves is silenced. Sea animals mostly disappear; land animals are rare. Their source of physical supply vanished, the Eskimos unconsciously feel the grim hand of want, of starvation, which means death, upon them. The psychology of this period of depression partly lies, undoubtedly, in this instinctive dread of death from lack of food and the natural depression of unrelieved gloom. Moreover, there is a grief, born of the native superst.i.tion that, when the sea freezes, the souls of all who have perished in the waters are imprisoned during the long night. Too fierce is the struggle of these people with the elemental forces to permit them, like many other aboriginal peoples to be obsessed greatly with superst.i.tions. Although their religion is a very primitive and native one, it is usually only at the inception of night that they feel the appalling nearness of a world that is supernatural. As the last rim of the sun sank over the southern ice, the natives entered upon a formal period of melancholy, during which the bereavements of each family, and the discomforts and disasters of the year, were memoralized.

I shall never forget that long, sad evening, which lasted many normal days. The sun had descended. A sepulchral, gray-green curtain of gloom hung over the chilled earth. In the dim semi-darkness could be vaguely seen the outlines of the igloos, of the heaving curvatures of snow-covered land, and the blacker, snake-like twistings of open lanes of water, where the sea had not yet frozen. Sitting in my box-house, I was startled suddenly by a sound that made my flesh for the instant creep. I walked to the door and threw it open. Over the bluish, snow-covered land, formed by the indentures and hollows, stretched dark-purplish shapes--t.i.tan shadows, sepulchral and ominous, some with shrouded heads, others with spectral arms threateningly upraised.

Nebulous and gruesome shreds of blue-fog like wraiths s.h.i.+fted over the sea. Out of the sombre, heavy air began to issue a sound as of many women sobbing. From the indistinct distance came moaning, crooning voices. Sometimes hysterical wails of anguish rent the air, and now and then frantic choruses shrieked some heart-aching despair. My impression was that I was in a land of the sorrowful dead, some mid-strata of the spirit world, where, in this gray-green twilight, formless things in the distance moved to and fro.

There is, I believe, in the heart of every man, an instinctive respect for sorrow. With m.u.f.fled steps, I left the igloo and paced the dreariness of ice, treading slowly, lest, in the darkness, I slip into some unseen creva.s.se of the open sea. A strange and eerie sight confronted me. Along the seash.o.r.e, bending over the lapping black water, or standing here and there by inky, open leads in the severed ice, many Eskimo women were gathered. Some stood in groups of two or three. Bowed and disconsolate, her arms about them, with almost every hundred steps, I saw a weeping mother and her children. Standing rigid and stark, motionless graven images of despair, or frantically writhing to and fro, others stood far apart in desolate places, alone.

The dull, opaque air was tinged with a strange phosph.o.r.escent green, suggestive of a place of dead things; and now, like the flutterings of huge death-lamps, along the horizon, where the sun had sunk, gashes of crimson here and there fitfully glowed blood-red in the pall-like sky.

To the left, as I walked along, I recognized Tung-wingwah, with a child on her back and a bag of moss in her hand. She stood behind a cheerless rock, with her face toward the faint red flushes of the sun. She stood motionless. Big tears rolled from her eyes, but not a sound was uttered.

To my low queries she made no response. I invited her to the camp to have a cup of tea, thinking to change her sad thoughts and loosen her tongue. But still her eyes did not leave that last distant line of open water. From another, I later learned that in the previous April her daughter of five, while playing on the ice-foot, slipped and was lost in the sea. The mother now mourned because the ice would bury her little one's soul.

A little farther along was Al-leek-ah, a woman of middle age, with two young children by her side. She was hysterical in her grief, now laughing with a weird giggle, now crying and groaning as if in great pain, and again dancing with emotions of madness. I learned her story from a chatter that ran through all her anguish. Towanah, her first husband, had been drawn under the ice, by the harpoon line, twenty years ago. And though she had been married three times since, she was trying to keep alive the memory of her first love. I went on, marveling at a primitive fidelity so long enduring.

Still farther along towards the steep slopes of the main coast, I saw Ahwynet, all alone in the gloomy shadow of great cliffs. Her story was told in chants and moans. Her husband and all her children had been swept by an avalanche into the stormy seas. There was a kind of wild poetry in the song of her bereavement. Tears came to my eyes. The rush of the avalanche, the hiss of the wind, the pounding of the seas, were all indicated. And then, in heart-breaking tones, came ”blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh, under the frozen waters,” and other sentiments which I could not catch in the undertone of sobs.

Cold s.h.i.+vers began to run up my spine, and I turned to retreat to camp.

Here was a scene that perhaps a Dante might adequately write about. I cannot. I felt that I, an alien, was intruding into the realm of some strange and mystic sorrow. I felt the sombre thrill of a borderland world not human. These women were communicating with the souls of their dead. To those who had perished in the sea they were telling, ere the gates of ice closed above them, all the news of the past year--things of interest and personal, and even of years before, as far back as they could remember. Almost every family each year loses someone in the sea; almost every family was represented by these weeping women, overburdened with their own naive sorrow, and who yet strangely sought to cheer the souls of the disconsolate and desolate dead.

Meanwhile, while the women were weeping and giving their parting messages to the dead, the male members of the tribe, in chants and dramatic dances, were celebrating, in the igloos, the important events of the past year.

Inside, the igloos were dimly lighted with stone blubber lamps. These, during the entire winter, furnish light and heat. The lamp consists of a crescent-shaped stone with a concavity, in which there is animal oil and a line of crushed moss as a wick. Lighted early in the season, for an entire winter, these lamps cast a faint, perpetual, flickering light.

Shadows dance grotesquely about on the rounded walls. An oily stench pervades the unventilated enclosure. In this weird, yellow-blackish radiance the men engage in their fantastic dances. Moving the central parts of their bodies to and fro, they utter weird sing-song chants.

They recite, in jerky, curious singing, the history of the big events of the year; of successful chases; of notable storms; of everything that means much in their simple lives. As they dance, their voices rise to a high pitch of excitement. Their eyes flash like smoldering coals. Their arms move frantically. Some begin to sob uncontrollably. A hysteria of laughter seizes others. Finally the dance ends; exhausted, they pa.s.s into a brief lethargy, from which they revive, their melancholia departed. The women return from the sh.o.r.es of the sea; they wipe their tears, and, with native spontaneity, forget their depression and smile again.

While I was interested in the curious spectacles presented, the sunset of 1907 to me was inspiration for the final work in directing the completion of the outfit with which to begin the conquest of the Pole at sunrise of 1908. Fortunately, I was not handicapped by the company of the usual novices taken on Polar expeditions. There were only two of us white men, and white men, at the best, must be regarded as amateurs compared with the expert efficiency of Eskimos in their own environment.

Our food supply contained only the prime factors of primitive nourishment. Special foods and laboratory concoctions and canned delicacies did not fill an important s.p.a.ce in our larder. Nor had we balloons, automobiles, motor sleds or other freak devices. We did, however, I have said, have what was of utmost importance, an abundance of the best hickory and metal for the making of the sleds upon which our destinies were vitally to depend.

FIRST WEEK OF THE LONG NIGHT

HUNTING IN THE ARCTIC TWILIGHT--PURSUING BEAR, CARIBOU AND SMALLER GAME IN SEMI-GLOOM

VII