The incident of Mertuk's wifely heroism, herein told in detail, is drawn from an unpublished diary of Mr. Henry W. Dodge, mate of the schooner United States, then wintering under Dr. Hayes at Port Foulke.[30]
The sketch of the childhood of this heroic and interesting woman is based on various passages of explorers and writers familiar with the incidents of Etah life.
Among the forceful and friendly natives of Etah sixty years since, in the days of Kane, was Shung-hu, famed equally for his qualities as a man and for his daring as a mighty hunter. He especially displayed his skill in the successful pursuit of the polar bear, whether on land along the coast, on the fast ice under the frowning snow-cliffs of Humboldt Glacier, or on the moving ice-floes of Smith Sound. Apart from his alert action and dignified bearing, his person was notable through his ample whiskers, on chin and on lips, which age and exposure had already softened by their silvery coloring. Indeed, he was the only full-bearded native in the nation, as is related by Hayes, whose distressed and starving boat party was only able in the last extremity to reach the Advance through the aid of the Angekok Kalutunah and his comrade Shung-hu.
Among the much-loved children of Shung-hu was a daughter, Mertuk, whose mother's name is unknown, but she doubtless had that deep affection and tender care for her daughter which are common traits of these iron women of the Etah coast.
Nature and necessity had made the family lead a life of constant wandering, and so the child shared the seasonal and oft irregular journeys along the shut-in, narrow coast-land between the great Humboldt Glacier and the sea-beaten cliffs of Cape York. It was always a journey for food—birds and bears, deer and seals, walruses and narwhals, as time and good-fortune dictated.
Carried by her mother, little Mertuk travelled in true native fashion, thrust naked and feet foremost into the back part of the ample seal-skin hood. There she rode in warmth and comfort, safely seated astride of a soft, rounded walrus thong, which passed under the arms of the mother and was made fast around her neck.
Mertuk thus grew and throve, happy and healthy, under conditions which to boys and girls of our own country would have seemed impossible of endurance. Sometimes the tiny child would be thrust out in a temperature in which mercury would freeze solid, and with laughter felt the biting, stimulating cold that only made the hood more welcome as a home-nest. It was the way of the wild, which must be followed in this country of sunless winters and of blinding blizzards, which every brave Inuit loved.
To this Eskimo maiden the whole world was made up of a few score men, women, and children of the igloos, of a dozen kinds of birds in the air, and on the cliffs; of white hares, bluish foxes, and reddish deer on land; of smooth seals, white whales, horned narwhals, and big-tusked walruses in the sea; and last but by no means least the enormous amphibious, sharp-clawed bear whose glistening, yellowish-white skin furnished material for the furry garments in which her father Shung-hu was always clothed.