“Oh, tell me about them,” said Tommy, eagerly.
So, as they walked along, his father told him of the strange little, flat-faced people, who live all winter in houses made of ice and snow and hunted on the ice-floes for polar bears and seals and walrus, and in the summer got in their little kiaks and paddled around, hunting for seals and walrus with their arrows and harpoons, on the “pans” or smooth ice, where every family of “harps” or seals have their own private door, gnawed down through the ice with their teeth.
“I wish I could go there,” said Tommy, his eyes gazing across the long, white glistening fields with the dark border of the woodland beyond and the rich saffron of the winter sky above the tree-tops stretching across in a border below the steelly white of the upper heavens.
“What would you do?” asked his father.
“Hunt polar bears,” said Tommy promptly. “I’d get one most as big as the library, so mother could give you the skin; because I heard her say she would like to have one in front of the library fire, and the only way she could get one would be to give it to you for Christmas.”
His father laughed. “All right, get a big one.”
“You will have to give me a gun. A real gun that will shoot. A big one—so big.” Tommy measured with his arms out straight. “Bigger than that. And I tell you what I would do. I would get Johnny and we would hitch his goats to the sled and drive all the way up there and hunt polar bears, and I’d hunt for sealskins, too, so you could give mother a coat. I heard her say she wanted you to give her one. Wouldn’t it be fine if I could get a great big bearskin and a sealskin, too! I wish I had Johnny’s goats!”
“You must have dogs up there to draw your sled,” said his father.
“All right! After I got there I would get Santa Claus to give me some,” said Tommy. “But you give me the gun.”
His father laughed again. “Well, maybe—some day,” said he.