“The Kabluna knows lots more about these things than I do,” the boy murmured. He leaned over, gazing at his companion’s face; he considered him wistfully.
Omialik looked huge lying there in the tiny tent. He was certainly powerful. He could run fifty miles beside the dog sleigh without resting, this man; he could kill the fiercest animals by his strong magic—Kak had seen him do it, and had been told the gun would quite as easily kill people. He was a Kabluna. He lived with Eskimos and was one of them, yet he talked to Indians like a blood brother. He was a stranger to fear—and everybody loved and served him. “What does it?” the boy wondered. “Gee! I wish I could grow up a strong, wonderful fellow like him.”
Kak pondered Omialik’s magic as he watched him sleeping helpless on the ground. His hand stole over and gently touched the sleeper’s head—a big head with its bushy mass of hair. “Omialik is so kind his heart must be big also,” the lad mused, never guessing how his thought impinged on the secret of the other’s power, for together great hearts and great brains master their world.
In the dim interior forms began to dance and blur. Kak’s own head nodded. He jerked upright and grasped his knife; but presently his muscles slacked. He nodded again. Then the Kabluna turned on one side and the sound of his breathing ceased. All was silent. Kak’s head bobbed right down, his chin rested on his chest and his shoulders sagged against the tent.
Omialik found him that way next morning, his knife grasped ready for their mutual defense. And as the man of the big heart gazed at the heroic youngster he decided it would not be too much trouble, some day, to take such a faithful follower as far as Herschel Island. He kept the plan a secret, though. Parking Indians and carrying the news home promised sufficient excitement for the present.
Noashak waked from her long sleep demanding food, so Guninana was busy over the cooking pot when the hunters returned.
“You will stay and eat?” she begged the white man; but all the time she was putting choice pieces into her guest’s plate, both eyes and mind were on her son.
It is difficult for a boy to hoodwink his mother. Guninana knew at once something was in the wind. “What can they have been up to?” she asked herself; but kept still and waited, sure it would not be long before the matter leaked out.
Kak was simply bursting to tell. Never in his life had he experienced such thrills as the waking to that day of strange companionship and stealthy travel, culminating in the wild unreality of hiding Indians a couple of miles from their village. Every soul he had met since entering the camp seemed to look at him with probing eyes. “Suppose they knew!” thought the boy, and his heart beat faster. The fact of having seen their hereditary foe, of having spoken to Indians at all was a great distinction, another feather to stick in his cap along with the slain ugrug and his house-building. And on top of this, knowing three of the terrible redskins were lying hidden among the trees so near his own home was just too much to bear quietly.
“I’ve got a secret,” he whispered to Guninana.