Here again Nazinred’s superior knowledge came into play, though to a limited extent.
“I have seen a thing like that,” he said. “The trader at the great fresh-water lake had one. He carried it in a small bag at his waist, and used often to pull it out and look at it. He never told me what it was for, but once he let me hear it speak. It went on just like this one—tik, tik, tik—but it did not require shaking or squeezing. I think it had a tongue like some of our squaws, who never stop speaking. One day when I went into the trader’s house I saw it lying on the thing with four legs which the white men put their food on when they want to eat, and it was talking away to itself as fast as ever.”
They were still engaged with this mystery when a cry of delight from Nootka drew them back to the cabin, where they found the girl clothed in a pilot-cloth coat, immensely too large for her. She was standing admiring herself in the mirror—so quickly had her feminine intelligence applied the thing to its proper use; and, from the energetic but abortive efforts she made to wriggle round so as to obtain a view of her back, it might have been supposed that she had been trained to the arts of civilisation from childhood.
With equal and earnest assiduity Cowlik was engaged in adorning her head with a black flannel-lined sou’-wester, but she had some trouble with it, owing to the height of her top-knot of hair.
Ridiculous though the two girls might have looked in our eyes, in those of their companions they only seemed peculiar and interesting, for the step between the sublime and ridiculous is altogether relative, in Eskimo-land as elsewhere. There was no opportunity, however, to dwell long in contemplation of any new thing, for the discoveries came thick and fast. Cowlik had barely succeeded in pulling the ear-pieces of the sou’-wester well down, and tying the strings under her fat chin, when a tremendous clanking was heard, as of some heavy creature approaching the cabin door. Cheenbuk dropped forward the point of his spear, and Nazinred kept his gun handy. Not that they were actually alarmed, of course, but they felt that in such unusual circumstances the least they could do was to be ready for whatever might befall—or turn up.
A moment later and Aglootook stalked into the cabin, his legs encased in a pair of fishermen’s sea-boots, so large that they seemed quite to diminish his natural proportions.
In all their discoveries, however, they did not find a single scrap of any kind of food. It was quite clear that the poor fellows had held by the ship as long as provisions lasted, in the hope, no doubt, that they might ultimately succeed in working their way out of the ice, and then, when inevitable starvation stared them in the face, they had tried to escape in their boats, but without success—at least in one case, though how many boats had thus left to undertake the forlorn hope of storming the strongholds of the polar seas it was impossible to tell.
On the second night, as the Eskimos sat in their igloe at supper talking over the events of the day, Nazinred asked Cheenbuk what he intended to do—
“For,” said he, “it is not possible to take back with us on one sledge more than a small part of the many good things that we have found.”
“The man-of-the-woods is right,” interposed the magician; “he is wise. One sledge cannot carry much. I told you that we were sure to find something. Was I not right? Have we not found it? My advice now is that we go back with as much as we can carry, and return with four or five sledges—or even more,—and take home all that it is possible to collect.”