Not satisfied with their experience and the changed condition of things, they soon had the second ball unfastened and in their hands, when little "Tooloogigra," gaining possession of this also, broke it as he had the first. A dark vapor was liberated, which, spreading over the earth, extinguished the bright light. The people then cried "oongnoo," from which has been derived "oongnoorpuk"—night.
Ever since that time, many a polar mother has interested her children by telling them how young "Tooloogigra" liberated day and night from their confinement.
XI
MAN'S FIRST CONSTRUCTED HOME
North America, having gradually emerged from the water, had come into existence. To the east of Alaska, the warm Atlantic currents had become restricted by the rising land and did not flow so freely as formerly. To the south, the Seward Peninsula was forming, first appearing as a string of islands with shoals, then gradually rising more and more, until it restricted the ocean currents from the Pacific. The Arctic regions, being deprived of their warming influences, were beginning to feel the cold of winter.
The birds had taken the warning and were commencing to form their migratory habits by flying south to escape the cold and to find regions where their food supply was more abundant, returning north each summer to their earlier homes for the nesting season. The mammoth had also apparently tried to make its escape, but had perished in large numbers in the region of Escholtz Bay, at a section often called the Mammoth Graveyard. The birds and ducks seemed to be trying to overtake the retreating sun as it worked its way southward, the godwit continuing its flight as far as New Zealand, where it yet continues to spend the winter months.
Many of the inhabitants of Alaska, in trying to make their escape from the cold, apparently preferred to follow the sun in its western course. These people had progressed far enough to know the art of canoe building. The remains of three of their canoes are to be seen to-day on mountains inland, where they have been well preserved by the ice and snow, remaining as silent witnesses of an early day and showing where the ocean used to be in the remote past. Also on higher ground inland can be seen the skeleton of a whale; while on the Seward Peninsula, on land between four and five hundred feet higher than the ocean, an acquaintance found a driftwood log in a fair state of preservation. The people, following the chain of islands which separate Behring Sea from the Pacific Ocean, reached Siberia, which they probably crossed. We read that there lived in Europe at a very early date, a rude race of hunters and fishers, closely allied to the Eskimos, who were apparently driven there from the east by the increasing cold. They seem to have made an impression on the older languages of Europe in the line of their words and grammar, and it is also probable that their tradition of the earliest state of man may have led to the fable of the sea nymph.
The Seward Peninsula continued rising until at last it entirely emerged above the water, disclosing those wonderful deposits of gold that of late years have made Nome famous throughout the world. The rising land formed a barrier against the warming influence of the Japan current. Then the Arctic winters set in with their utmost severity, continuing until at last Nature came to the relief of this ice-bound region. A portion of the land nearest Asia sank, forming what is now known as the Behring Straits, again admitting the Japan current to exert its ameliorating influence on the Arctic sections. Our seasons then assumed pretty much the same conditions they have now. Tradition states that in the past there have been severe earthquakes in this section and it may be due to such a cause that the land subsided.
As the seasons grew more and more severe, Nature, according to tradition, took care of the seal and the wolf, by changing the fat of the former to the blubber of to-day, and by causing the thin, short hair of the latter to grow into the thick, warm fur of the present. Man, with his superior intellect, was left to solve his own problem. Those people who had remained behind soon found that their cave-dwellings were not a sufficient protection against the cold, which was recurring with greater severity each succeeding winter, and undoubtedly many perished. The polar bear had solved the problem of sheltering herself by building a home, according to circumstances, either on the land, or on the ocean ice, and it was the latter that suggested to man how to construct his first mound house, called iglo.