Chapter Five.
A Rencontre and Flight.
Thus it naturally came to pass that the two bands of men who had gone to the same place to meet each other met in the course of time.
There was a good deal of wandering about, however, before the actual meeting took place, for the Eskimos had to provide a quantity of food on landing on the Arctic shore, not only for themselves, but to supply the four women who had accompanied them, and were to be left on the coast to fish and mend their spare garments and boots, and await their return.
“We shall not be long of coming back,” said Gartok as he was about to leave his mother, old Uleeta, who was in the crew of one of the oomiaks.
“I wish I saw you safe back, my son,” returned the woman, with a shake of her head, “but I fear the Fire-spouters.”
“I don’t fear them,” returned the young man boastfully, “and it does not matter much what you fear.”
“He will never come back,” said one of the other women when he was gone. “I know that because I feel it. There is something inside of me that always tells me when there is going to be misfortune.”
The woman who thus expressed her forebodings was a mild young creature, so gentle and inoffensive and yielding that she was known throughout her tribe by the name of Rinka, a name which was meant to imply weakness. Her weakness, however, consisted chiefly in a tendency to prefer others before herself—in which matter Christians do not need to be told that she was perhaps the strongest of all her kin.