Pomiuk's mother cooked the food over the usual stone lamp, which also served to heat their igloo in winter. This lamp, which was referred to in an earlier chapter, and described as a hollowed stone in the form of a half moon, was an exceedingly crude affair, measuring eighteen inches long on its straight side and nine inches broad at its widest part. When it was filled with oil squeezed from a piece of seal blubber, the blubber was suspended over it at the back that the heat, when the wick of moss was lighted, would cause the blubber oil to continue to drip and keep the lamp supplied with oil. The lamp gave forth a smoky, yellow flame. This was the only fireside that little Pomiuk knew. You and I would not think it a very cheerful one, perhaps, but Pomiuk was accustomed to cold and he looked upon it as quite comfortable and cheerful enough.
Ka-i-a-chou-ouk, Pomiuk's father, was a hunter and fisherman, as are all the Eskimos. He moved his tupek in summer, or built his igloo of blocks of snow in winter, wherever hunting and fishing were the best, but always close to the sea.
Here, under the shadow of mighty cliffs and towering, rugged mountains, by the side of the great water, Pomiuk was born and grew into young boyhood, and played and climbed among the mountain crags or along the ocean shore with other boys. He loved the rugged, naked mountains, they stood so firm and solid! No storm or gale could ever make them afraid, or weaken them. Always they were the same, towering high into the heavens, untrod and unchanged by man, just as they had stood facing the arctic storms through untold ages.
From the high places he could look out over the sea, where icebergs glistened in the sunshine, and sometimes he could see the sail of a fishing schooner that had come out of the mysterious places beyond the horizon. He loved the sea. Day and night in summer the sound of surf pounding ceaselessly upon the cliffs was in his ears. It was music to him, and his lullaby by night.
But he loved the sea no less in winter when it lay frozen and silent and white. As far as his vision reached toward the rising sun, the endless plain of ice stretched away to the misty place where the ice and sky met. Pomiuk thought it would be a fine adventure, some night, when he was grown to be a man and a great hunter, to take the dogs and komatik and drive out over the ice to the place from which the sun rose, and be there in the morning to meet him. He had no doubt the sun rose out of a hole in the ice, and it did not seem so far away.
Pomiuk's world was filled with beautiful and wonderful things. He loved the bright flowers that bloomed under the cliffs when the winter snows were gone, and the brilliant colors that lighted the sky and mountains and sea, when the sun set of evenings. He loved the mists, and the mighty storms that sent the sea rolling in upon the cliffs in summer. He never ceased to marvel at the aurora borealis, which by night flashed over the heavens in wondrous streams of fire and lighted the darkened world. His father told him the aurora borealis was the spirits of their departed people dancing in the sky. He learned the ways of the wild things in sea and on land and never tired of following the tracks of beasts in the snow, or of watching the seals sunning themselves on rocks or playing about in the water.
The big wolf dogs were his special delight. His father kept nine of them, and many an exciting ride Pomiuk had behind them when his father took him on the komatik to hunt seals or to look at fox traps, or to visit the Trading Post.
When he was a wee lad his father made for him a small dog whip of braided walrus hide. This was Pomiuk's favorite possession. He practiced wielding it, until he became so expert he could flip a pebble no larger than a marble with the tip end of the long lash; and he could snap and crack the lash with a report like a pistol shot.
As he grew older and stronger he practiced with his father's whip, until he became quite as expert with that as with his own smaller one. This big whip had a wooden handle ten inches in length, and a supple lash of braided walrus hide thirty-five feet long. The lash was about an inch in diameter where it joined the handle, tapering to a thin tip at the end.
One summer day, when Pomiuk was ten years of age, a strange ship dropped anchor off the rocky shore where Pomiuk's father and several other Eskimo families had pitched their tupeks, while they fished in the sea near by for cod or hunted seals. A boat was launched from the ship, and as it came toward the shore all of the excited Eskimos from the tupeks, men, women and children, and among them Pomiuk, ran down to the landing place to greet the visitors, and as they ran every one shouted, "Kablunak! Kablunak!" which meant, "Stranger! Stranger!"