Part 28
Aghast at this disclosure, the little missionary persistently attempted to convince the hunter of his sins, and after a week Milli-ru-ak shot at him--by accident. The bullet passed harmlessly between the white man’s arm and his body, embedding itself in the shaky pulpit he was building at the time. He could see the splintered hole now as he placed his open Bible upon it and reached for the dangling bell-rope behind the pulpit.
The _ding-dong_ that marked the Sabbath day was caught up by the blizzard and carried with the boom of the devil-drum out over the polar wastes. Every Sunday and Wednesday since the completion of the meeting-house the missionary had doggedly rung the first and second bell summoning an indifferent people to listen to the word of his God. Not a soul had ever responded.
He rang the first bell longer than usual. Now that the magic of Ah-king-ah had failed to change the wind, now that the dogs were starving, and the people were eating the last of the moldy seal-meat originally intended for the animals, surely, he thought, they were ready to abandon their ways of darkness for the light of Christianity.
He allowed the bell-rope to fall, and poured a bit of oil from a deflated seal-skin container into the stone lamp in the middle of the floor. When the flame flared up from the moss wick he held his hands over it. Not for himself would he have used any of the precious oil, but he hoped that some curious Eskimo might come and, seeing the fire, spread the news of it in the village. The people might come to him then, since there was no oil in the native igloos--no oil for heating, no oil for melting ice for water, no oil for cooking the moldy seal-meat. Only the medicine-man had oil now.
The dogs outside had quieted, and the voice of Ah-king-ah’s drum alone rode the gale. The little missionary, squatting over the lamp, kept turning his thin, expectant face toward the outside door. He was always looking for it to open, but it never did. Fifteen minutes dragged by before he rose and rang the second bell. In the silence that followed its last clang the _oom-oom_ of Ah-king-ah’s drum mocked him with his failure in the service of his Master.
Across the vapor of his breath the rows of clean new benches reproached him with their emptiness, and from the bare wooden walls frost-pegs on every nail-head pointed at him like accusing white fingers. He turned slowly and, mounting the pulpit, stood, his hands on the open Bible, his blue eyes looking down wistfully on the cheerless room. The smoky bracket lamp behind him threw his shadow, long and grotesque, across the bare benches, as if in pity trying to cover them. The sound of the devil-drum filtered in faint, taunting, but the missionary cleared his throat and, as was his wont, began his lonely Sunday service. His voice, forlorn and strange at first, grew firmer as he proceeded.
At the end he closed his Bible and turned out the light. There was a dispirited sag to his narrow shoulders as he went back to his living room. Today, because death was so near to them all, the Eskimos’ animal-like indifference to him and his message made him feel small and forsaken; made him ache with the terrible longing of the lonely white man for his kind. For a moment he stood uncertain, his breath clouding the cold, stale atmosphere of the igloo; then with the air of one banishing personal weaknesses he shoved his parka hood over his head, drew the long fur about his face, and made his way out through the snow tunnel leading from his door to the open.
The force of the gale struck him flat against a trampled snow-bank where red stains still defied the covering of the wind-blown snow. Not a bone or a piece of fur remained of the dog who had died there an hour before.
The pallor of the arctic noon was filled with frost-dust borne on wind of such velocity that its passing was like the whiz of speeding bullets. Through the fur about his face the man peered at the ice-pack lying like a gray monster below him. Stationary it appeared at first, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the murky light, it became a thing of horrid life, heaving, quivering, forming itself into grotesque shapes with a slowness that was as sinister and relentless as death. Through the blizzard as far as he could see berg was creeping up over berg, grinding, crunching, to heights of twenty, thirty feet, until the masses tottered and crashed down on the other side, sending powdered ice streaming on the gale like ocean spray. The awful, insensate force loosed thus in a strange, unearthly land struck to the missionary’s soul with primeval terror. He felt puny, insignificant, cruelly at the mercy of that tremendous wind which was blowing the ice-pack down from the pole and maliciously grounding it in the shallow waters of the strait. For an instant something primitive in him was near to endowing it with the malevolent personality the Eskimos were even then trying to placate through Ah-king-ah’s drum.
“God, Father,” he prayed with sudden, panicky earnestness, “change the wind!”
_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom_, reverberated the devil-drum.
Far out on the pack, where death was certain, a dark thing moved. It drew nearer the village, a great bull walrus scouting vainly for leads of open water that meant life to the small herd wallowing along in its wake. The scout rolled its three thousand pounds from side to side over the moving ice, dexterously fastening its tusks into the base of each berg and pulling itself to the top. On the pinnacle it reared still higher on its flippers, sniffing the air, tusked head swaying, short-sighted eyes trying to pierce the thick atmosphere. A moment of decision, and through the stridor of the elements a bellowing grunt rumbled deep and lone, signaling the advance of the herd. The valiant creature wallowed on from point to point of vantage, progressing through the zone of constant and terrible danger with a courageous dignity that won admiration even from the hungry missionary, who saw it as food, heat, life itself.
Opposite the village the walrus escaped the buckling of the ice by a hair’s-breadth, and drawing itself up to the peak of a moving berg, paused longer than usual to toss its mighty tusks in nervous apprehension of a new danger. Just as the berg began to topple it sensed the presence of human beings, and sent its wild trumpetings to warn the herd. The gallant animal, too late to take any thought for itself, plunged recklessly. A patch of black in the gaping angle between two floes, a slow closing of the frigid trap, and a long-drawn despairing roar wove itself through the hissing of the wind and the booming of the devil-drum. As it died away, the ice was marked by a seeping red stain.
The herd, panic-stricken at the loss of their leader, flung themselves forward to destruction, leaving crushed bodies to mark a spotted trail of death across the ice-field.
The last terror-driven creature was disappearing in the haze of the blizzard when a bent Eskimo battled his way down from the _kashim_ to the edge of the heaving ice. He sheltered himself in the lee of a floe, looking long at the evidences of tragedy before him. Three wolf-dogs, scenting the blood, came out from under the snow and sat on their haunches to send their hunger-cry keening through the glimmering twilight. Starving though they were, neither man nor beasts dared venture over the few feet that lay between them and the meat tantalizing them on the creeping ice.
“O God, Father, change the wind!” prayed the missionary.
_O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom_, propitiated the devil-drum of Ah-king-ah.
II
When the white man saw the Eskimo, he started. Then tightening the hood of his parka against the stinging ice-dust, he began creeping cautiously away toward the sound of the drum. With every backward glance he quickened his progress. At last he would be able to enter the tunnel of the _kashim_ while the guard was absent from his post; for though the missionary’s presence had been tolerated in the igloos, he had never yet succeeded in forcing his way into the council-house. He had convinced himself that once in the _kashim_, where he could address the assembled village, he could persuade them to abandon their heathen incantations and fling themselves on the mercy of God.
He pressed forward eagerly toward the open jaws of a whale which formed the entrance to the tunnel. Despite his haste, he came to an abrupt halt inside the passage. A queer cross of driftwood lay there, warning strangers against entering the _kashim_ while the medicine-man was performing the weird mysteries of his calling.
The missionary’s hesitation was banished by his zeal, and a moment later he caught up a club from the stack of hunting implements near the opening and began to feel his uneven way along the icy stones of the tunnel. Half a dozen steps plunged him into darkness where every movement of his feet roused wolf-dogs driven to shelter by the storm. They leaped, savagely snarling their hatred of the disturbing white, and the missionary, knowing that one misstep would send him sprawling under their slavering jaws, laid about him with a club, beating a way through the starving animals.
He advanced blindly until a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel guided him to the opening in the floor of the _kashim_ above. With a gasp of relief, he clutched the ladder that led upward, and mounted. He was not observed as he thrust his head into the dim room, hot and rank with ammoniacal smells and the reek of close-packed bodies. Miak, the witch-woman, huddled in one corner, tending the wick of the medicine-man’s stone lamp. It’s smoky light barely revealed the skin-covered shelf about the walls where hunters, stripped to the waist, sat cross-legged and cross-armed, their Mongolian faces set in earnest concentration. On the floor below them squatted the women, the old men, and the quiet children, naked as fishes.
All eyes were on Ah-king-ah, the medicine-man--Ah-king-ah who had successfully defied the Christianizing efforts of two former missionaries. Many were the tales told of the man’s cunning and strength not only among the Eskimo tribes, but among the whalers and the white traders of the arctic. In the Season of the Sun, when the tribes assembled on In-ga-lee-nay for the yearly Festival of the Whale, it took Miak, the witch-woman, three days to sing all the runes of his magic. Mightiest and richest shaman of the high North was Ah-king-ah, and great in the eyes of the Innuits, was the singing of Miak. So strong were his words of enchantment, he could plunge a hunting-knife through his vitals and dance with his necklace of bird-claws dangling from the point behind. So marvelous were his chants of wizardry that the sound of them formed kayaks, which took him far to the moonless land, where spirits of departed ivory-hunters yielded up their secrets to him. Ah-king-ah had the spirit of a crow. Ah-king-ah was a son of the wind. Ah-king-ah flew to the moon on the rays of the ice-blink. Once he flew to Siberia and challenged Nan-kum, the one-eyed shaman of the Chuckchees, to battle for the supremacy of the North. Had not all the village seen them fighting over the strait one morning--two great black crows whose raucous screams sent chills to the hearts of the bravest hunters? Mightiest shaman of the North was Ah-king-ah. With his beak he had wrenched off the leg of Nan-kum and flung it to the ice, cawing triumphantly, while the cripple flapped away defeated to Asiatic shores. Had not Milli-ru-ak found the leg where it fell, and was it not the leg of a man? And did not hunters returning from Siberian tundras report Nan-kum hobbling about on one leg ever after? Great indeed was Ah-king-ah, the medicine-man, and greater still would he be when he had changed the wind that was bringing famine to In-ga-lee-nay; greater and richer, for his price would be half the fruits of the village hunt for the space of six hunting moons.
The missionary’s eyes fell upon Ah-king-ah, half crouching in the middle of the floor. He was six feet tall, and nude except for a short, transparent garment made of the intestines of seals and trimmed with the crimson beaks of sea-parrots. He was beating upon the sacred devil-drum and chanting runes treating of the secret things of spirits, while his slim, naked feet made weird passes and performed strange, halting steps. With every movement his superb brown body rippled beneath the transparent shirt, setting all the beaks clattering in measured cadence. Behind him sat his three apprentices, swaying their naked bodies as they thumped the floor with sticks adorned with wolf-tails and gull-wings.
A sudden, sinuous motion, and Ah-king-ah was facing the west. The drum began a soft, rolling accompaniment to his rising, long-drawn croon. The tawny torsos of the hunters, moving to and fro from the hips, caught the light in zigzag waves.
Ah-king-ah’s tones grew louder, the tempo of the drum quickened, and its sound swelled until it became the voice of the wind, the thunder of crashing seas, the expression of nature in all her moods of fury. Swaying bodies responded. The people began to shout, to vent queer cries in unison, urging the shaman to greater efforts, deeper magic. Excitement grew until it was a very frenzy of earnestness that increased the heat of the _kashim_ and started the sweat on the sixty bodies packed there. The reek of them was sickening, the deluge of sounds deafening.
Suddenly everything stopped. Ah-king-ah grew rigid. While the jade and amber beads dangling from the plugs in his lower lip quivered into life, his dark face took on the look of a demon. He flung out his arms, raised his chin, and sent an intonation soaring through the din of the gale.
“Thou, Almighty Devil----”
“Stop!” The small figure of the missionary catapulted to the middle of the room, one arm outstretched, one thin finger extended. “Stop, blasphemer!” he shouted, lost to all sense of danger in the fervor of his religious indignation. “Servant of Satan! son of Belial! wouldst thou anger God by thy sacrilege?” His pale eyes flashed in his twitching face, his accusing fingers trembled. “God alone is mighty! God alone is good! Oh, poor deluded ones,”--he turned pleadingly to the stunned and wondering people--“shut your ears to the evils of this sorcerer! Turn to the true God, and the blizzard will die, and you shall have meat!”
In the smoky light the astonished expressions on the dark faces changed. They grew sullen, grew threatening, in a silence that was pregnant with hostility. One wolf-step brought Ah-king-ah close to the white man, who became dwarfed and insignificant beside the powerful Eskimo. Ah-king-ah’s voice rang deep and mellow and supremely exalted after the thin, excited tones of the missionary.
“The white man has spoken, my brothers. But--did we of In-ga-lee-nay ask him for this God whom he says we insult? The white man has broken in upon us. He has crossed the sign that warns all strangers from our council-house. He has spoken. Listen now to Ah-king-ah and compare the wisdom of our tongues.” He paused until the murmur of approval went around the hunters’ shelf. “Well ye know that our people have lived on In-ga-lee-nay for ten times a thousand moons, happy in the customs of the ancient ones. Well ye know that our island and the waters about our island have ever been the abode of plenty, the breeding-place of birds, the dwelling-place of land-creatures, the home of sea-creatures. In all the land of the Innuits no village has been so favored by the spirits. In no village but thine could a man sit in his doorway and shoot enough seals to give a feast.”
The hunters grunted assent and gravely nodded their heads above their folded arms.
“Yea, my brothers, in the old time ye were happy. Your bellies were rounded and well filled. Skins of oil hung from your ceilings, and oil in plenty burned in the lamps of your igloos. This was the happy way of life under the wise laws of your fathers.” Ah-king-ah shifted his drum from one hip to the other and resumed with quickened utterance:
“Then comes this white man from the South. Uninvited, he pushes his way into your igloos with the words of his God. He comes with the ringing of the bell that is bad medicine in the ears of the almighty devil, tossing in his hands the ivory ball of the world. Then, my brothers, from the Place of Winds strange evils have come upon you. Why? Why, my brothers?”
He allowed a moment’s silence before he leaned forward and whispered slowly in a way that left the room ringing:
“The--almighty--devil--is--angry--with--you!”
In the hush that followed, the sound of the blizzard seeped in through the thick walls. Ah-king-ah suddenly flung himself upright, and continued in a voice that gathered volume as he proceeded:
“The almighty devil is angry with you for harkening to new words. Behold, your bellies grow flat against your backs. Your igloos grow cold. Your dogs consume each other. Oh, hear the words of Ah-king-ah, my brothers, whom the spirits have taught concerning these things of mystery.” The shaman wheeled, and with a quick, accusing finger transfixed the missionary. “It is because of this white man and his ringing bell that the devil is angry!” he shouted. “Wherefore, I say, let this white man take his God back to his own kind--back to the land of his fathers!” The words rose to a shriek. “Let him take his God back to the land of his fathers!”
The muttering of the crowd broke loose in a yelling frenzy as men, women, and children took up the cry. In the seething, sweating mass of humanity the missionary’s protests were lost; but the dauntless little man wrested himself from the hands of the medicine-man’s apprentices, snatched the drum from the great Ah-king-ah himself, and leaped to the now empty shelf of the _kashim_.
“Wait! Wait!” he commanded. His fist banged the devil-drum, which none but a shaman might touch on penalty of death. The very magnitude of the sacrilege bludgeoned the people into an aghast silence. “For the sake of your starving women and children, listen to the words of the white man’s God. In the Book of which I have told you it is written: ‘Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do!’ Oh, poor benighted ones, pray to God for help, and He will answer. For two months ye have watched Ah-king-ah with his devil tricks trying to change the wind. His words are a lie within his mouth! His sorceries are an abomination to the Lord. His----”
A lightning movement, and Ah-king-ah had snatched the drum to him.
“We do not know this man’s God, and we do not want to know Him!” The shaman’s mighty voice extinguished the missionary’s. “Let the white man take his God back to the land of his fathers!” The rumble of the drum began, and the shaman’s feet resumed their weird passes. Again and again he repeated the words. His rhythmic chanting and the booming of the drum woke the mob spirit in the people. The yelling crowd that surged threateningly toward the missionary was led by Milli-ru-ak, who leaped to the shelf and crooked his avid fingers about the white man’s throat.
“Stop, my brothers!” The medicine-man’s authoritative voice rang out. He had ceased his capering, and there was a light of apprehension in his wary eyes. “Milli-ru-ak, lay thy hands off! It is not well that the people of In-ga-lee-nay do violence to such as he, for well ye know how the long arm of the white man’s law reaches even from the South, where the sun sinks under the world, to the North, where the water ends. Have ye forgotten the fate of the three medicine-men, Sautock, Beelack, and O-tock-tock in the year of the Red Death? They did but bind the man O’Ryan until his spirit fled--the strange man O’Ryan, who swung the little cup of smoke before his God, and wore the long garment of a woman, with a cross about his neck. Remember my brothers, how in the Season of the Sun there came high chiefs from the South, mighty in anger, and with stars on their breasts glittering like the fishes’ scales? Remember how they hanged Sautock, Beelack, and O-tock-tock high on the slope back of the village? Have ye the minds of children that ye can forget the long moons their bones rattled in the chains as the east wind lipped them? I, Ah-king-ah, to whom spirits whisper, tell ye it is not well that we do violence to a white man,”--he woke again the rumbling rhythm of the drum--“but let him leave us in peace to practice the ways of our fathers. Let him take his God back to his own land!”
“Yea! Yea!” The people took up the words in a clamoring chorus, while the shaman’s three apprentices seized the protesting missionary and carried him to the opening in the floor. One of them placed his feet on the ladder. The other two pressed him down rung by rung until he found himself on the floor of the tunnel, where the eyes of starving dogs menaced him.
He stood uncertain for a moment while the _oom-oom_ of the devil-drum rolled in his ears. Then blindly he groped and beat his way along the slippery passage.
“Oh, Thou, Almighty Devil--” The propitiatory chant of Ah-king-ah followed him out into the blizzard.
Darkness had already fallen. The malicious wind flung ice-dust like splintered glass through the fur about his face. He shut his eyes against the sting of it, and stumbled forward, a small, forlorn figure in the polar night. A gust flung him into a drift, and he crawled on his hands and knees until he encountered a dog asleep under the snow. He rose hastily, shivering as the roused animal’s howls set all its mates wailing their hunger in the blackness.
Back in the chill emptiness of his igloo he swayed toward his bunk and, dropping on tense knees beside it, began to pray.
III
Day after day the blizzard continued unabated. The supply of moldy seal-meat dwindled, vanished. The people began eating the walrus-skin coverings of the oomiaks. They chewed the hide dry because there was no oil for cooking except in the house of the medicine-man. The thin-faced children and babies suffered mutely, sucking on sealskin ropes, on thongs of snow-shoes, on anything that contained a bit of nourishment. The dogs, with uncanny prescience, left the habitations of their masters for the heights back of the village. There in the graveyard, where the iron chains still clanked a warning against the hanging-posts of Sautock, Beelack, and O-tock-tock, the gaunt beasts riddled the sepulchers and fought like werwolves over what they found. Not even Milli-ru-ak, the greatest hunter on In-ga-lee-nay, could battle his way up through the blizzard to shoot at them for food.
Hunger gnawed at the stomachs of the people and marked their faces with hollows, yet there were no lamentations, no visible evidences of despair. After the fatalistic manner of their race they waited patiently, stoically, for a change of weather--or for death.