“Did I not say that?” returned Ujarak promptly.
“No; you said near it—whereas we came from it, from inside of itself.”
“Inside of itself must be very near it, surely!” retorted the wizard, with a grave look of appeal to those around him.
A laugh and nod of approval was the reply, for Eskimos appreciate even the small end of a joke, however poor, and often allow it to sway their judgment more powerfully than the best of reasoning—in which characteristic do they not strongly resemble some people who ought to know better? The matter-of-fact leader smiled grimly, and made no further objection to the wizard’s claim to correct intelligence.
“Now,” continued Ujarak, for he felt the importance of at once taking and keeping the upper hand, “my tribe is not far from here; but they are going away on a hunting expedition, so you must lose no time, else they will be gone before you arrive. They want iron very much. They have horns and tusks in plenty. They will be glad to see you. My torngak told me you were coming, so I came out a long way to meet you. I brought my wives and children with me, because I want to visit the Kablunets, and inquire about their new religion.”
He paused for a moment or two, to let his tissue of lies have full effect, but the very matter-of-fact leader took advantage of the pause to ask how it was that if he, Ujarak, had been told by his torngak of the coming of the trading party, he had failed to tell his tribe not to go on a hunting expedition, but to await their arrival.
“Ha! ho!” exclaimed several of the Eskimos, turning a sharp gaze upon the wizard, as much as to say, “There’s a puzzler for you, angekok!”
But Ujarak, although pulled up for a moment, was not to be overturned easily. “Torngaks,” he said, “do not always reveal all they know at once. If they did, angekoks would only have to listen to all they had to tell on every subject, and there would be an end of it; they would have no occasion to use their judgments at all. No; the torngaks tell what they choose by degrees. Mine told me to leave my tribe, and visit the Kablunets. On the way he told me more, but not all.”
This explanation seemed quite satisfactory to some, but not to all of them. Seeing this, the wizard hastened to turn their minds from the subject by asking how far it was to the land of the Kablunets.
“Four suns’ journey,” replied the leader.