That shut Kak up for a minute. He was more afraid of bears than of anything else in the world; but of course he did not want to admit that any wild animal could scare him enough to make him run away.

“When I get a gun,” he bragged, “I’d like to see any bear attack me. Why, I’d just walk right up and stick the long nose into the bear’s mouth and shoot it off, whang!—and where would your bear be then?”

“Well, maybe you’ll have a chance, for there are lots of bears about,” grunted Akpek as he turned over to go to sleep.

Kak lay very still, but wide awake. This talk of bears upset him. Suppose a bear were to come stalking about the house now, waking up the dogs; and they all had to run out, not even waiting to put on their clothes, and fight him off hand to hand. Oooch! The boy shivered. He really was horribly afraid of bears, and he wished he could be a shaman and have a powerful magic that would kill wild animals before they appeared; instead of having to stand still till the beast came close, or else creep nearer and nearer without letting the bear see you, and so get a good crack at him—which the Kabluna said was the right way to hunt with a gun.

CHAPTER IV
Bears

The day following the dance all the villagers felt very tired; they slept late, neglected to go hunting, and spent the time standing about talking with the strangers, or escorting Omialik from house to house; showing him their family belongings and clothes, their lamps and pots, hunting implements, bows and arrows, spears and harpoons. He wanted to take a number of these away with him to be placed in museums in New York and other cities (where many of them are now, and where you can go and see them if you care to) and the business of trading took a long time. Moreover he asked a variety of questions about where they got the stone for their lamps and the wood for their sleds, what sort of people lived to the eastward, and so on and so forth. All their answers he wrote down in a small book.

Although the Eskimos think it impolite to ask questions, they were very kind about answering.

Now this sort of thing, while it was important to the white man, promised a dreadfully dull day for two lively lads like Kak and Akpek. So when they had hung around several hours waiting for action and excitement they gave up, thoroughly disgusted, and decided to have some fun of their own.

“Let’s go out to the rough ice and play at climbing houses six times six rooms high,” Kak suggested.

If you stop to consider you will see this notion of climbing the outside of a tall house was perfectly natural to an Arctic boy. Kak had no conception of buildings with straight walls, for his winter home was shaped like an old-fashioned beehive, and the proudest summer home they ever attained was a tent. Besides he had never in his life seen a stairway, and it is extremely difficult to imagine what you have never seen. How could he think of climbing up inside a house by means of stairs? But he had often scrambled on top of their snow dome to slide down with the girls, or get a view of the surrounding country; and so when he told Akpek of houses six times six rooms high, he had in mind a huge pile of snow up the outside of which they would have to walk; and the pressure ice, piled by the winter storms into ridges of great blocks, chunk on chunk, was not such a poor imitation of this idea.