The Eskimos are not great smokers, a whiff or two is generally enough for them, but they are very fond of chewing tobacco, or “eating tobacco” as they call it, and there was a good store of this on the ship. Harry offered a moderate-sized piece for the ring and then wanted to purchase the second with a similar piece. This he could not do. The crafty little man’s price had risen fivefold, and it was only reluctantly that he parted with the second ring at the price of five pieces of tobacco. But when it came to the third one, there seemed to be no such thing as purchasing it. Harry offered tobacco galore, added trinkets and trade goods, but the little man was obdurate and all chances of trade seemed off.
Harry remembered the shoes and the mirror, and did not despair. He went down to his locker and brought out the alarm clock again. He wound it up, set the alarm for a little ahead of the moment, and took it on deck. There he set it up on a cask and waited. Several of the Eskimos gathered round and admired it, but the little man only looked at it out of the corner of his eye.
After a few minutes the alarm went off, and being a vigorous one, it startled the crowd of little men and women around it. They nearly fell over one another in astonishment, and when Harry wound up the alarm and set it off again, their delight was great. The ring-maker tried to assume an air of indifference, but when his boat was ready to go he came toward Harry as if to offer to trade. Harry had learned much of the ways of the Eskimo trader by that time and turned away indifferently. When the boat was loaded, he strolled to the side with the clock in his hand. The little man held up one ring, but he shook his head. Then the Eskimo offered two. The boat was just going, and Harry wanted the rings so much that he yielded. It would make four in all, which was perhaps all he cared for anyway. He handed the clock to the little man, and that worthy dropped something in his palm as he did so. At the same time he pointed toward the cliff and jabbered something excitedly in Eskimo.
Harry looked where he pointed but saw nothing. The boat was several lengths away now, the click of the windlass pawl showed that the Bowhead’s anchor was coming up, and they were off. The little man was no longer gesticulating, but looked back over his shoulder and solemnly winked one eye. This was a new feature in Eskimo expression, and Harry wondered much if a wink meant as much with these seemingly stolid people as with us. As he mused, the umiak rounded the cliff and was gone, and Harry looked at his two rings for the first time. They were not rings at all, only two circular sections of a walrus back tooth, flat and useless disks, which the little man may have meant to make into rings later.
Then he realized that a wink is a wink the world over, and the language of signs is common to all people.
The day was bright, the gale was over, and the Bowhead put to sea, once more heading northward into the mysterious Arctic, keeping a keen lookout for whales. The southerly weather had driven the ice of the straits far to the northward, and though there was now and then a floating cake, the pack was many miles distant.
“Suppose you could pull a whaleboat oar?” asked Captain Nickerson of Harry that day at dinner.
“Why, yes, sir,” replied Harry, “I think so. I’m a good oarsman, though I have never used quite such large oars as you have in the whaleboats.”
“I’m sure he could, father,” said Joe; “what of it?”