“Ribs, ribs and slices! Quick, woman,” cried Mangivik cheerily as he sat down. “Cheenbuk has been talking and I have been listening till we are both quite hungry.—That is a pretty girl you have brought home with you, my son,” said the old man, with a stare of approval. “Almost as pretty as some of our own girls.”
“Much prettier, I think,” returned the youth, as he quietly selected a rib of walrus that seemed suitable to his capacity.
“Tell your mother how you got hold of her,” said Mangivik, whose teeth were next moment fastened in a steak.
Cheenbuk made no reply. Eskimo manners did not require an answer in the circumstances. But when he had taken the edge off his appetite—and it took a good deal of dental grinding to do that—he looked across at Adolay with a genial expression and began to give his mother and sister a second, and much more graphic, edition of the speech which he had just delivered to the men.
Of course the narration served to strengthen the bonds of friendship which had already been formed between the Mangivik family and the Indian girl, who had been thus unexpectedly added to their circle.
That evening Nootka begged her brother to give her a lesson in the Dogrib language. On the same evening, during a moonlight ramble, Adolay asked him to give her a little instruction in the Eskimo tongue, and, just before he retired for the night, his mother asked him if he intended to take the Indian girl as one of his wives.
“You know, mother,” was Cheenbuk’s reply, “I have always differed from my friends about wives. I think that one wife is enough for one man; sometimes too much for him! I also think that if it is fair for a man to choose a woman, it is also fair for the woman to choose the man. I would gladly take Adolay for a wife, for she is good as well as pretty, but I do not know that she would take me for a husband.”
“Have you not asked her, then?” persisted Mrs Mangivik.
“No. I have been till now her protector. I can wait. If she wants to return to her people I have promised to take her to them.”
“But surely my son is not bound to keep a promise given to one of our fire-spouting enemies?”