JEST OF AN INNUIT MOTHER
“Yes—me sell!—plenty tabak”
THE SON OF AHGAAN
An Innuit boy, 6 or 7 years old
It has already been mentioned that many individuals give away all their property on such occasions. If it happens that during such a memorial feast a visitor arrives from a distant village who bears the same name with the subject of a celebration, he is at once overwhelmed with gifts, clothed anew from head to foot with the most expensive garments, and returns to his home a wealthy man.
The country in which the Innuit lives is one that taxes the utmost hardihood of man when it is traversed by land or by sea. It is not likely that it will ever be much frequented by white men—it will remain to us as it has been to the Russians, an immense area of desolate sameness, almost unknown to us, or to its savage occupants, for that matter. The general contour of the great Alaskan mainland interior is that of a vast undulating plain with high rounded granitic hills and ridges scattered in all lines of projection; on the flanks of which, and by its countless lakes and water-courses, a growth, more or less abundant, of spruce, birch, willows, poplars, and a large number of hardy shrubs, will be encountered. Its summers are short, warm, and pleasant; its winters are long, and bitterly cold and inclement.
The tundra, however, which fronts the whole of that extensive coast-line of Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, is indeed cheerless and repellant at any season. In the summer it is a great flat swale, full of bog-holes, shiny and decaying peat, innumerable sloughs, shallow and stagnant, and from which swarms of malignant mosquitoes rise to fairly torture and destroy a traveller unless he be clad in a coat of mail. In the winter and early spring fierce gales of wind at zero-temperature sweep over these steppes of Alaska in constant succession, making travel exceedingly dangerous, and as painful even as it is in the warmer months. During this period of the year all approach to the coast is barred in Bering Sea by a system of shoals and banks which extend so far seaward that a vessel drawing only ten feet of water will be hard aground, beyond the sight of land, sixty miles off the Yukon mouth.
At the head of the Bay of Bristol a small but deep and rapid river empties a flood of pure, clear water into an intricate series of sand and mud channels which belong there. The Kvichak is the name of this stream, and it rises less than forty miles away in the largest fresh-water lake known to Alaska—that inland sea of Ilyamna, over ninety miles in its greatest length, varying in width from fifteen to thirty. Those gusts and gales that sweep over its blue waters raise a heavy surf which beats sonorously upon its pebbly shores and under its cliffs, while the loud wailing cry of a great northern loon[149] echoes from one lonely shore to the other when disturbed by the unwonted passage of a native’s canoe. Against the eastern horizon there springs from its bosom an abrupt and mighty wall of Alpine peaks, which stand as an eternal barrier between its pure sweet waters and the salt surges of the Pacific.
The ruins of an old Russian trading-post stand in the midst of a small native village at the outlet of, and on the slope of, a lovely grassy upland which rises from the lake. Its people are all living in log houses like those we noticed in Cook’s Inlet; but nevertheless they are true Innuits. The two other small hamlets on these Ilyamna shores are all that exist. Their inhabitants live in the greatest peace and solitary comfort that savages can understand. Two trails over the divide are travelled by these natives, who trade with the Cook’s Inlet people, and who range over the mountain sides in pursuit of reindeer and of bears. A most noteworthy family of Russian Creoles lived here on the first portage. The father was a man of gigantic stature, and he reared four Anak-like sons, who are, as he was, mighty hunters, and of great physical power. This family lives all to itself in that beautiful wilderness of Ilyamna, a little way back from the lake on a hillside, where they command passes over to Cook’s Inlet. They control the trade of this entire region and rule without a shadow of disputation.
A tragedy occurred in one of these small villages of Ilyamna, which has been fitly memorized by the Russian Church. In 1796 a priest of the Greek faith came over from Kadiak, and, enchanted by the scenery and pleased by a warm, kindly welcome received from the natives, he determined to tarry here with them and save their souls. He[150] was a man of the most handsome presence and the sweetest address, and for a moment prevailed. Then, as the heathenish rites and festivals were postponed at his bidding, surly shamans fomented seeds of hate and fear. Finally an hour arrived when, at a preconcerted signal, the slumbering wrath of the savages was aroused, and they fell upon and slew this unsuspecting missionary and destroyed every vestige of his existence among them. The cause of Father Juvenal’s death was his strong opposition to polygamy. It is said that when he was attacked by savages he neither fled nor did he defend himself, either of which he might have successfully done; but he delivered himself unresistingly into the hands of his murderers, asking only for the safety of his subordinates, which was granted. The natives say, in their recitation of the event, that after the monk had been struck down and left by the mob as dead, he “rose up once more, walked towards them, and spoke.” They fell upon him again, and again, and again, for he repeated this miracle several times, until at last, in bewildered fury, they literally cut him into pieces.
Reindeer cross and recross the Kvichak River in large herds during the month of September, as they range over to and from the Peninsula of Alaska, feeding, and also to escape from mosquitoes. At the mouth of this stream is one of the broadest deer-roads in the country. The natives run along the banks of the river when reindeer are swimming across, easily and rapidly spearing those unfortunate animals as they rise from the water, securing in this way any number that fancy or want may dictate. At one time a trader counted seven hundred deer-carcasses as they lay here on the sands of the river’s margin, untouched save by a removal of the hides; not a pound of that meat out of the thousands putrefying had been saved by these lazy Innuits; who, improvident wretches as they are, would be living, less than five months later, in a state of starvation! But all this misery of famine in March will have been forgotten again next September, when the same surplus of food is within their reach, for they will not store up against the morrow—the labor is too great—the shiftless sentiment of a savage forbids that exertion.