Sedna was inconsolable. She had the horror of a very human girl at her strange mate, and could by no means make his land her home and his people hers. The legend has it that the Loon provided for her as an ordinary hunter would have done; but she was wild and homesick, and passed her days bewailing, as lone and desolate an exiled maiden as ever cried, “Woe, woe!”
(Sedna’s disillusionment is a note in the story wholly coarse to European ideas. The Eskimos are a people without prudery. A perfectly natural incident on the journey revealed that the lover was a bird.)
But the father wearied for his daughter—the Eskimo [[190]]word has the loving possessive “his own daughter”—and at length fitted out his boat and sailed away to that distant coast whither she had been borne. The husband Bird was from home when he came to this land, and it was a sad and sorry tale that greeted his ears from the wind-lashed, spray-beaten maiden that had been his smiling, contented child. Without more ado, he lifted her into his boat, made one swift turn, and fell to retracing his course. The craft—a tiny mark—was soon lost to sight in the welter of the waves.
Then the Loon, returning, enquired and said, “But where is my wife?” The cry echoed round the naked cliffs. And answering cries, wind-borne on the darkening air, told him that his wife had fled. Her father had come and snatched her back, in grief and anger, to his bosom.
At once, the Bird, assuming the Phantom form again, followed in his kyak; but when the Father saw him coming he covered up his daughter with the furs and things he had loaded in the boat. Swiftly the kyaker bore down upon them, and rushing alongside demanded to see his wife.
“Let me see my wife!” he cried. “Let me only see her; pray let me see her!”
The angry father refused, and held determinedly on his way.
“Then let me see her hands only. I only ask to see her hands!” the Kokksaut cried, to be passionately rejected again. [[191]]
Then, bowing his head over the opening of his kyak in grief and desolation, the kyaker fell behind. He had failed! His manhood had failed; Sedna had hated and left as true a lover as ever a man could have been to her, and he would no more of it! With one wild sweep of his wings, he was a bird again, the kyak a mote upon the waters beneath, and a stroke or two of his great vans brought him above the boat of the fugitives. He hung there awhile, uttering the strange cry of the Loon; but at last dropped away into the darkness.
Then there arose a storm—a black arctic storm—out at sea.