An old Scot once prayed, "O Lord, send down to Thy worshippin' people at this time the savin' grace o' continuance." Only one man has less need to pray that prayer than the Scot himself, and that man is the Eskimo. The Indian eats and sleeps as his wife works, but while there is spear-head to fashion or net to mend, the clever hands of the Eskimo are never idle. Thrifty as a Scot, ingenious as a Yankee, every bit of the little property that he has is well kept. You find around this igloo no broken sled-runner, untrustworthy fishing-gear, nor worn-out dog-harness. Civilisation has nothing to teach this man concerning clothing, house-building, or Arctic travel. Indeed, one may hazard the opinion that the ambitious explorer from the outside, if he reach the Pole at all, will reach it along Eskimo avenues with this man as active ally and by adopting his methods of coping with Northern conditions.
On account of the malignity of nature, it is rare that an Eskimo attains the three score and ten Scriptural years. Few, indeed, live beyond the age of fifty-five or sixty. If his life is short, it is happy. This pagan has grasped a great truth that his Christian brother often misses, the truth that happiness is not a luxury, but the highest of all virtues, a virtue filling the life where it originates and spreading over every life it touches.
There is about this Mackenzie Eskimo a certain other-worldliness which we insistently feel but which is hard to describe, and to us his generosity is sometimes embarrassing. At Peel River a band of Kogmollycs met us, carrying on board pieces of their ivory-carving. One man exhibited a watch-chain containing fifteen links and a cross-bar, all carved from a single piece of ivory. He wanted thirty-five dollars or the equivalent of that for his work, saying that it represented the leisure hours of two months. The engineer tried to make him lower his price, but with a courteous smile he shook his head, and the carving was dropped back into artikki recesses. Afterwards, with the air of a shy child, the clever carver came to me and offered me the chain as a gift. It was probably a difficulty of articulation rather than a desire to be scathing which induced this man subsequently to refer to the one who tried to beat down his price as "the cheap engineer."
Surprised at the magnificent physique and unusual height of this little group, one of us began measuring the chest expansions, length of limbs, and width of shoulders of the men and women we were talking with, while the other of us jotted the figures down in a note-book. Many of the men were over six feet tall, and none that we measured was under five feet nine inches. One young giant, Emmie-ray, was much interested in our researches. The whalers call him "Set-'em-Up," for his name bears the convivial translation, "Give us a drink." "You going to make better man, you get Outside—make him like Emmie-ray?" As Emmie-ray pursues the tenour of his Arctic way, hunting the walrus, standing, a frozen statue, with uplifted spear over the breathing-hole of the seal, to the end of the chapter he will think of himself as being used for a stimulating Delineator-pattern in the igloo of the white man.
Forty years ago, when Bishop Bompas came across a band of these people, instead of being awed at the appearance of a white man, they took him for a son of Cain! Their tradition was that, in the early history of the world, an Eskimo murdered his brother and fled to the inhospitable parts of the earth. The bishop, coming to them from the unknown south, must be a direct descendant of the outlaw, with his hands red with a brother's blood.
Circling the ocean-edge from Siberia, without doubt this people came originally from Asia, as the Chipewyans did before them and the Crees before that, the more newly arrived in each case pressing their predecessors farther away from the food-yielding ocean. The Anglo-Saxon estimates all habitable land by his ell-measure, fertility of the soil, its ability to yield turnips, potatoes, and flax, and forty-bushel wheat. The measure of desirability of range of northern tribes has another unit—blood, and flesh, and fish. Your Eskimo and Chipewyan and Cree cares not a potato-skin for your waving fields of grain, your apple-orchards and grape-vines. What he is after is blood and blubber and good dripping flesh; these his soul craves in the night season. These peoples who made their way into the continent by the open door at the north have come down through the years toward the habitat of the white man, not because they loved him, but because a stronger tribe has pushed them back from Arctic flesh-pots.
At the Mackenzie mouth we enjoyed the companionship of that courteous Eskimo gentleman, Roxi, and heard the story of his last winter's larder, but not from his lips. At the beginning of the season Roxi had whale-meat and fresh walrus, and also flour that he had earned from the whalers. In a characteristic burst of generosity he gave the greater part of this to needy members of other tribes who had had poor hunts and who found themselves at the beginning of the Long Night with empty Mother Hubbard cupboards. The Eskimo winter has many mealtimes, and Roxi had but a poor idea of the higher mathematics. Long ere the darkness of the Great Night relaxed its overbearing blackness Roxi got very hungry, and he had no food. Life is dear, even on the edge of things. So into the silence Roxi crept and dug down through the ice and frozen sand to the skeleton of a stranded whale killed three years before. All the sustaining flesh had been eaten from it more than a year ago, but the dried tendons were still there. By chewing these assiduously and picking bones already bare, this generous soul kept life in his body. As I heard the story, the last words of the gallant Sidney dying in agony on Zutphen's field that another's thirst might be quenched came across the ocean from another age and a far land, "Thy necessity is greater than mine." Britain's heroes, men of the finest mould, manifest on the shores of many seas.
Inherited tastes in foods, like inherited creeds, are mainly a matter of geography, or of history, or of both. An Englishman had preceded us to the Arctic, going in in 1907, and the story of his food discrimination still lives in tepee of the Cree and Eskimo topik. The North is full of rivers, the cold bottle is always at your disposal, and generally, if you are any shot at all, you can get the hot bird. But this son of a thousand earls, or of something else, wouldn't eat owl when owl was served, though he would eat crow. Now, eating crow is to most a distasteful task, and the guides questioned the Englishman regarding the gastronomic line he drew. "Aw!" replied he, "No fellow eats owl, you know. Never heard of the bweastly bird at home, but crow ought to go all right. The crow's a kind of rook, you know, and every fellow eats rook-pie."
Having put the seal's body into his own body and then encasing his skin in the seal's, the cheery Eskimo strides the strand, a veritable compensation-pendulum. The seal is so much an integral part of this people that if a geologist were to freeze a typical Eskimo and saw him through to get a cross-section he would have in the concentric strata a hybrid of Husky and seal. Holding up his transverse section under the light of the Aurora, the investigator would discover an Arctic roly-poly pudding with, instead of fruit and flour, a layer first of all of seal, then biped, seal in the centre, then biped, and seal again. This jam-tart combination is very self-sustaining and enduring. Deprived of food for three days at a stretch the Eskimo lives luxuriously on his own rounded body, as a camel on his hump.
Reading an Arctic bill-of-fare in southern latitudes may give one a feeling of disgust and nausea, for it is all so "bluggy." You feel differently about it at 70º North. You put prejudice far from you, comfort yourself with the reflection that raw oysters, lively cheese, and high game are acquired tastes, and approach the Arctic menu with mind and stomach open to conviction. It is all a matter of adjustment. Because raw rotten fish is not eaten in Boston or in Berkeley Square there is no reason why it should not be a staple on Banks's Land.