NA-HA THE FIGHTER
N the Far South near Cape Horn there is a place of many islands, and it is a corner of the world where winds are piercing cold and great black clouds scurry across a lead-gray sky. From snowclad mountains slide rivers of ice from which break off mighty pieces to fall into the sea with thunder-sounds. It is a land wrinkled into narrow valleys that are always gloomy and cold and wet. Cold, ice cold, is the gray-green sea, and the wild cries of a million sea birds fill the air. Sometimes great albatrosses sweep up the channels between the high, jagged mountains or drop low to sail over penguin-crowded rocks, and sometimes the mountain echoes are deep-toned with the booming of walrus and the barking of seals. But people are few. There are Indians there, poor gentle folk who fish in the sea and who know nothing but a life of cold, and they paddle or sit crouching in their canoes, taking no heed of the biting wind and the snow that falls on their naked bodies.
Travelling in that part of the world, I came upon a boy who had been left, somehow, on an island not much larger than a good-sized playground. He must have been there alone for some months, for he had lived on mussels and shell-fish, and the empty shells formed a good-sized heap about his sleeping place. Though I questioned him closely later, when we came to know one another, I could never learn how he got there. He was, I suppose, about ten years old, and certainly bright and intelligent. As for his memory it was quite remarkable, and he picked up words and the names of things very rapidly. Altogether, he stayed with me for three months, and I was often astonished at the aptness with which he did some things, as, for instance, the making of an arrow-head from a piece of broken bottle. But other things he seemed quite unable to do. A knot in a rope puzzled him sorely and for a long time a belt-buckle was a deep mystery to him.
One day I found that he was trying to tell me a story about a seal, for we had seen several that morning. For awhile I paid no attention, being occupied at something or other that required care, but soon it dawned on me that he was very earnest and that the tale was a long one. Fearing that I had missed much by my preoccupation and carelessness, I made him tell it to me a second and a third and a fourth time, and presently made shift to piece things together, and so get a fair notion of his story.
I have called the tale by the name of the hero and have set it down in my own words and as I understood it. Were I to write it in his words it would go something like this:
“Many day, a far day, under-water man walk water. Eat man my father’s father; men cry much hard.” There would have to be indicated, too, much gesticulation and arm waving by way of illustration and emphasis. . . . So here is the tale.