I sauntered down to the beach and gave them a hand in unloading their burden. They told me that it was their father who had died a considerable time ago and they were absolutely obliged to bury him as soon as possible. Being Catholics, they had to bring the body for burial to the priest whom the bad weather had kept on his side of the lake.
An hour or so later I heard the screech of a violin. Going out to investigate, I found my two Indians in a shack close by, receiving visitors from the neighborhood and whiling away the time by an impromptu dance. Meanwhile, the coffin had been dragged outside to make more room. It lay, grim and dark, on the right side of the door along the wall of the cabin. All the dogs of the village, one by one, their tails curled up and their ears pointed, were passing in front of it in a solemn procession. I watched them from a distance. Each dog stopped—sniffed at one corner of the coffin, went to the other—sniffed again and then, slowly and religiously, cocked up one hind leg and remained there, motionless for a few seconds.
Meanwhile the wind wailed across the lake as if striving to drown the whining of the fiddle.
Tale XVI: A Walrus Story
When men have no knowledge whatsoever of the danger they run, they are liable to do the most foolhardy thing imaginable and come out of it safely—to the utter astonishment of all old timers.
Here is a striking example of that, which happened a few years ago:
We were forging ahead through the ice of Hudson Straits on an auxiliary schooner. There were on board a lot of “Husky” dogs which we were transferring from one trading station to another.
One morning the man in the crow’s nest saw a small herd of walrus asleep on the ice. Creeping up slowly, we got up to a hundred yards from them before they took any notice of the ship.
