Part 11 (2/2)

”They say, that one! they say all,” the boy went on, ”how you want--a die? Shoot? Stab?”

”Shoot.” She smiled again, then, ”But first I do two thing. I sing. I dance. My people alletime so.”

”Ki-ke” (go ahead) came in a chorus when her words had been interpreted.

No people are fonder of rhythmic motion and dreamy chanting than are the natives of the far north. The keen-witted j.a.panese girl had learned this by watching their native dancing. She had once visited an island in the Pacific and had learned while there a weird song and a wild, whirling dance.

Now, as she stood up she kicked from her feet the clumsy deer skin boots and, from beneath her parka extracted gra.s.s slippers light as silk.

Then, standing on tip toe with arms outspread, like a bird about to fly, she bent her supple body forward, backward and to one side. Waving her arms up and down she chanted in a low, monotonous and dreamy tone.

All eyes were upon her. All ears were alert to every note of the chant.

Great was the Chukche who learned some new chant, introduced some unfamiliar dance. Great would he be who remembered this song and dance when this woman was dead.

The tones of the singer became more distinct, her voice rose and fell.

Her feet began to move, slowly at first, then rapidly and yet more rapidly. Now she became an animated voice of stirring chant, a whirling personification of rhythm.

And now, again, the song died away; the motion grew slower and slower, until at last she stood before them motionless and panting.

”Ke-ke! Ke-ke!” (More! More!) they shouted, in their excitement, forgetting that this was a dance of death.

Tearing the deer skin parka from her shoulders and standing before them in her purple pajamas, she began again the motion and the song. Slow, dreamy, fantastic was the dance and with it a chant as weird as the song of the north wind. ”Woo-woo-woo.” It grew in volume. The motion quickened. Her feet touched the floor as lightly as feathers. Her swaying arms made a circle of purple about her. Then, as she spun round and round, her whole body seemed a purple pillar of fire.

At that instant a strange thing happened. As the natives, their minds completely absorbed by the spell of the dance, watched and listened, they saw the purple pillar rise suddenly toward the ceiling. Nor did it pause, but mounting straight up, with a vaulting whirl disappeared from sight.

Overcome by the hypnotic spell of the dance, the natives sat motionless for a moment. Then the bark of a dog outside broke the spell. With a mad shout: ”Pee-le-uk-tuk Pee-le-uk-tuk!” (Gone! Gone!) they rushed to the entrance, trampling upon and hindering one another in their haste.

When Johnny reached the piling ice, on his way across the Strait, he at first gave his entire attention to picking a pathway. Indeed this was quite necessary, for here a great pan of ice, thirty yards square and eight feet thick, glided upon another of the same tremendous proportions to rear into the air and crumble down, a ponderous avalanche of ice cakes and snow. He must leap nimbly from cake to cake. He must take advantage of every rise and fall of the heaving swells which disturbed the great blanket winter had cast upon the bosom of the deep.

All this Johnny knew well. Guided only by the direction taken by the moving cakes, he made his way across this danger zone, and out upon the great floe, which though still drifting slowly northward, did not pile and seemed as motionless as the sh.o.r.e ice itself.

While at the village at East Cape Johnny had made good use of his time.

He had located accurately the position of the Diomede Islands, half way station in the Strait. He had studied the rate of the ice's drift northward. He now was in a position to know, approximately, how far he might go due east and how much he must veer to the south to counteract the drift of the ice. He soon reckoned that he would make three miles an hour over the uneven surface of the floe. He also reckoned that the floe was making one mile per hour due north. He must then, for every mile he traveled going east, do one mile to the south. He did this by going a full hour's travel east, then one-third of an hour south.

So sure was he of his directions that he did not look up until the rocky cliffs of Big Diomede Island loomed almost directly above him.

There was a native village on this island where he hoped to find food and rest and, perhaps, some news of the Russian and Hanada. He located the village at last on a southern slope. This village, as he knew, consisted of igloos of rock. Only poles protruding from the rocks told him of its location.

As he climbed the path to the slope he was surprised to be greeted only by women and children. They seemed particularly unkempt and dirty. At last, at the crest of the hill, he came upon a strange picture. A young native woman tastily dressed was standing before her house, puffing a turkish cigaret. She was a half-breed of the Spanish type, and Johnny could imagine that some Spanish buccaneer, pausing at this desolate island to hide his gold, had become her father.

She asked him into an igloo and made tea for him, talking all the while in broken English. She had learned the language, she told him, from the whalers. She spoke cheerfully and answered his questions frankly. Yes, his two friends had been here. They had gone, perhaps; she did not know.

Yes, he might cross to Cape Prince of Wales in safety she thought. But Johnny had the feeling that her mind was filled with the dread of some impending catastrophe which perhaps he might help avert.

And at last the revelation came. Lighting a fresh cigaret, she leaned back among the deer skins and spoke. ”The men of the village,” she said, ”you have not asked me about them.”

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