The Eternal Maiden Part 10

Annadoah, sad and lonely, sat by her lamp. Her igloo was like that of all the others. Inside, so as to retain the heat and carry off the water which dripped from the melting dome of snow, there was an interior tent of seal skin. In a great pan of soapstone was a line of moss, which absorbed the walrus fat, and served as a wick for the lamp.

This emitted a line of thin, reddish blue flame. Over the light, and supported by a framework, was a large soapstone pot in which bits of walrus meat were simmering. By the side of the pot a large piece of walrus blubber hung over a rod. In the heat of the lamp this slowly exuded a thick oil which, falling into the pan below and saturating the moss wick, gave a constant and steady supply of fuel.

Like the other women, Annadoah sat by her lamp day after day. When she could endure hunger no longer she would eat ravenously of the meagre food in the pot. Regular meals are unknown in the arctic--a native abstains from food as long as he can in days of famine, but when he eats he eats unstintedly.

As Ootah entered the low enclosure Annadoah's eyes lighted.

Ootah told her of the bear encounter, and, with the joy of children, they placed bits of the meat in the pot and sat by, delightedly inhaling the odor as it cooked.

Several days later, while they were eating the last remainder of the meat, both heard an uproar outside. They crept from the igloo and discovered most of the village a.s.sembled without.

"Attalaq hath carried off Ahningnetty," one told them.

"He broke into her father's house and seized her with violence!"

Not far away they heard Ahningnetty's screams.

"Attalaq is strong," said one.

"Yea, as a boy did he not kill his brother?" All remembered the brutal encounter of the two brothers years before, when, throwing him to the ground, Attalaq jumped on his brother's body and striking his head with stones beat him to death. Attalaq was a type of the older warriors; unlike his more gentle tribesmen he possessed the atavistic savagery of his forebears of centuries ago when it was customary to abduct brides.

An excited crowd gathered outside of Attalaq's house. Soon Attalaq himself appeared. He was exultant.

"Ha! Ha!" he laughed. "Methinks that is the way to treat a woman!"

Then with swollen-up gusto he told them all about it. Tiring of being alone he determined to carry off Ahningnetty. "A woman's mind is as the wind--it constantly changeth," he said. "Women should be driven as the dogs." Ahningnetty, still weeping, still protesting, came to the door. Attalaq turned fiercely upon her and struck her in the face.

Then he laughed again. The girl screamed.

"Well," he said, turning to her. "I carried thee here--if thou wouldst return thou canst walk back. Eh?" The girl cowered away, but on her face there was the semblance of a pleased expression. The other women regarded her with a tinge of envy.

"'Tis not often in these days a lover careth sufficiently to carry a maid away," said an aged crone.

"In the days of old there were men like Attalaq," said a younger woman, admiringly.

"Where is Papik?" one asked. He was not to be seen.

"Dost thou not wish to return to thy father?" Annadoah asked Ahningnetty, approaching her.

The girl shook her head. Much as she had protested, she was unquestionably pleased by the forcible abduction.

One of the gossips, desiring to impart the unpleasant news to Papik, had gone to his house.

"Papik sits alone," she called, on her return. "And when I told him Ahningnetty hath been carried away by Attalaq, he replied, ''Tis well!

'Tis well!' And then he showed me his hands--they were frozen--frozen!

Verily, he would now be a sorry husband to provide for a wife."

"Papik's fingers frozen!" took up the others. "Unhappy Papik."

"He sobs and weeps--he sobs and weeps," said the old woman. "He saith the dreaded misfortune hath come, and the days of his skill on the hunt are over!"

"Long fingers, short hunt; long nose--short life," remarked Maisanguaq, sententiously.

Attalaq, happy in his conquest, was broad enough to be generous. He declared that Papik should never want as long as he could shoot the arrow. Generous-hearted, many of the others joined in and bits of blubber were soon offered the lonely Papik, as he sat, nursing his frozen members, in his house. The mishap was tragic, for, his hands injured, he had lost not only his skill in the hunt but his ability to protect himself in case of accidents. And from the experience of ages all knew that, sooner or later, he was doomed to a comparatively early death.

During the first period of the night, and after Ootah's first capture, several prowling bears were shot. The howl of occasional wolves was heard in the mountains; then all the bears disappeared, the hunger of the wolves was stilled.

When the third moon rose not a thing stirred outside the igloos. A glacial silence gripped the northern world. In their shelters the natives cl.u.s.tered together, warming one another with their breathing and the heat of their bodies. They lacked the courage even to speak.

Day by day their supply of food had run low. Day by day they decreased their portions; their cheeks sunk, hunger burned in their eyes. To save the precious fuel they burned only one lamp in their houses; they were unable to sleep because of the intense cold. Finally their food gave out. From his store Ootah silently doled out allotments until starvation confronted him. One by one the dogs were eaten. And this caused a dull ache, for the men loved their dogs only a little less than they did their wives and children. The quaking fear of the long hours slowly gave way to a dull lethargy. In their igloos, where single lamps smoked, they sat, and to keep up their circulation and to prevent themselves from falling into a coma, they rocked their bodies like things only half alive.

The black days and black nights slowly, tediously, achingly pa.s.sed.

One day was like another--one night seemed to mark no progress of time.

Only the children, to whom parents gave the last bits of food, showed some animation. They played listlessly with one another. For toys they had crude carvings of soapstone--tiny soapstone lamps and pots with which they made pitiful mimicry of cooking. The little girls played with crude dolls just as do little girls in more southern lands--but they were grotesque effigies, made of skin roughly sewn together. The boys found brief zest in a game which was played by sticking ivory points in a piece of bone, hanging from the roof of the igloo, and which was perforated with holes. Finally, as the night wore on, the children lost interest in their games, and with aching stomachs, lay silent by the fires. Starvation steadily claimed its toll. Death, slowly, surely, laid its grim and terrible hands upon that pitiful fringe of earth's humanity on the desolate star-litten roof of the world. One by one a stark body would be carried from an igloo into the black, bitter cold silence without and buried under blocks of snow. And above, intense and incandescent, the Pole Star--that unerring time mark of G.o.d's inevitable and unerring laws--burned like an all-seeing, sentient and pitiless eye of fire in the heavens.

Annadoah lay upon her couch of furs. Her face was thin, and white as the snows without. The flame in her stone lamp was about to flicker into extinction.

Ootah, entering the igloo, sprang quickly to her side. Her breath came very faintly. He seized her hands. He breathed on her face. He opened her ahttee and rubbed her little b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He felt something very strange, and wonderful, stirring within him. And with it a ghastly fear that the thing he loved was dying.

Into the lamp he placed the last meagre bits of remaining blubber.

Then he again set to chafing the tender little hands. Cold and hunger had wrought havoc upon Annadoah. Ootah's heart ached.

Finally her eyelids stirred. Her lips parted. A smile brightened her face. Ootah leaned forward, breathlessly. Her lips framed an inaudible word:

"Olafaksoah . . . Olafaksoah . . ." She opened her eyes. The smile faded. "Thou . . . ?" she said.

"Yea, Annadoah, I have brought thee food," Ootah said. It was his last.

"I hunger," she breathed. "It is very cold . . . I was in the south . . . where the sun is warm . . . it is very cold here."

Eagerly he pressed her hands. She drifted again into a stupor and for a long while was silent. Ootah's warm panting breath finally brought blood to her cheeks.

"Thou art so big . . . and strong . . ." she smiled again. "Thy arms hurt me . . . as the embrace of _nannook_ (the bear). . . ." Her smile deepened . . . her breath came more quickly. "Oh, oh, it is pleasant . . . here . . . in . . . the south."

"Annadoah!" Ootah's wail of hurt recalled her.

Her eyes sought the igloo wonderingly.

"Thou?" she repeated, dully. "Yea, it is cold here. I am hungry . . .

Are there not _ahmingmah_ in the mountains, Ootah? Didst thou not tell me there were _ahmingmah_ in the mountains . . . why do not the men of the tribe seek the musk oxen in the mountains?"

With a sudden start Ootah remembered having told Annadoah of the herd he had found in the inland valley--it was strange, he thought, he had not remembered the herd before. And it was stranger still that now she should remind him. But the improbability of ever reaching the game, the obvious impossibility of such a journey at this time of winter, had prevented any such suggestion.

"Many musk oxen are there in the mountains," he said, soothing her hands. She drew them away. "And thou art hungry . . ."

"I am hungry," she replied, faintly.

After he had given her the last bit of meat he left her igloo. Above him the stars burned, the air was clear and still. Not a thing moved, not a sound was heard--the earth was gripped in that unrelenting spell of wintry silence. Above the imprisoned sea the January moon was rising and for ten sleeps--ten twenty-four hour days--it would circle about the horizon of the entire sky. Already the sky above the sea was bright as a frosted globe of gla.s.s, and pearly fingers of light were stealing upward over the interior mountains.

"She is hungry," Ootah repeated over and over again. "And the tribe starves . . . and there may be _ahmingmah_ in the mountains." Behind him they loomed, gigantic and precipitous. That such a journey meant almost certain death he knew; but that did not deter him in the resolve to essay a feat no native had ever dared in many hundreds of years.