Amatikita spoke up like a man. “Very pleased to see you, Cappie. What you come for? What you want?”
“You’re a man of business,” I said. “You waste no time. I like that. What I want is bearskins. The jackets of big, white, baggy-trousered polar bears, you know; and I brought along a couple of tip-top rifles for you to get them with. Now, I make you a fair offer. Get me all the bears in the North Polar regions, and you shall have my Henrys and all the cartridges that are left over. And as for the meat, you shall have that as your own share of the game.”
“You want shoot those bears yourself?”
“Not if I can help it. I’m an engineer, and a good one at that. But as a sportsman I’ve had but little experience, and don’t seem drawn toward learning. It is too draughty up here, just at present, for my taste. I’ll stay and keep house, and maybe do a bit of repairing and inventing among the furniture. I’ve brought along a hand-vice and a bag of tools with me, and if you can supply drift-wood and some scrap-iron, I’ll make this turf-house of yours a real cottage.”
The deal was made. I worked away with my tools, and whenever those powdering winter gales eased for a little, Amatikita and his friends would go off with the howling dog-sledges and the Henrys, and it was rare that they’d come back without one bear, and often they’d bring two or even three. These white bears sleep through the black winter months in hollows in the cliffs, and the Esquimaux know their lairs, though it’s rare enough they dare tackle them. Small blame, too, you’d say, if you saw the flimsy bone-tipped lances and harpoons, which are all they are armed with.
With a good, smashing, heavy-bore Henry rifle it is a different thing. The Esquimaux were no cowards. They would walk up within a yard of a bear, when the dogs had ringed it, and blow half its head away with a single shot. And then they would draw the carcass up to the huts with the dog trains, and the women would skin and dress the meat, and Amatikita and the others would gorge themselves.
At last the long winter wore away. Amatikita dived in through the entrance of the hut one day and told me that the ice-floe was beginning to break. The news affected me like the blow of a whip. I went out into the open and found the sun up. The men were overhauling their skin canoes. The snow was wet underfoot and seafowl were swooping around. The floe was still sound where it joined the shore, but two seaward lanes of blue water showed between the ice, and in one of them a whale was spouting pale gray mist.
It was high time for me to be off. So the bearskins were fastened by thongs to the sledges and word was shouted to the dog leader of each team. The dogs started, and presently away went the teams full tilt, the sledges leaping and crashing in their wake, with the drivers and a certain Scotch engineer who was unused to such [v]acrobatics clinging on top of the packs. My! but yon was a wild ride over the rotten, cracking, sodden floe, under the fresh, bright sunshine of that Arctic spring morn!
Presently round the flank of a small ice-berg we came in view of the Gleaner. She was still beset in the ice; but the hands were hard at work beating the ice from the rigging and cutting a gutter around her in the floe, so that she might float when the time came. They knocked off work when we drove up.
“Good-day, Captain Black,” I said. “I’ve been troubling myself over bearskins, and I’ll ask you for seven shillings head money on twenty-nine.”