It was the little one’s father that pulled him out, with Harry a good second, yet distanced by paternal love. The flood was roaring through the canyon, breaking its fierce way to the sea, but the careless travelers were safe from its tumult; all but the old grandmother, whose devotion to the child had cost her her life. She had found the death that is so common to the Eskimo and the other folk of the wild north,—to vanish into the white arms of the flood, or go out to sea with the ice.
They traveled on by land, over melting snow, and across ravines in which splashed torrents. The Kowak was open to the sea, and summer navigation had begun.
CHAPTER XIII
THE MEETING OF TRIBES
The Kirghis and Tartars of eastern Europe and Central Asia have held annual trading fairs from a time beyond which record does not go. Their restless progenitors, moving eastward, took the custom with them to the shores of the northern Pacific, northeast to Bering Sea and the limits of Siberia, and with them it must have crossed the narrow ice-ridden straits and found a resting-place in Arctic America. The great sandspit between Hotham Inlet and the waters of the ocean, at the head of Kotzebue Sound, has been the scene of this meeting for no one knows how many centuries. When the chinook winds melt the snows, and the Arctic ice pack retreats northward from Bering Sea and the straits, thither the tribes flock from hundreds of miles in all directions. Down the Kowak, the Selawik, and the Noatak rivers from the far interior come the taller, more distinctly Indian-featured men of the mountain fastnesses and scant timber, bringing jade from their mysterious hills, and fox, ermine, wolverine, and caribou pelts. From Point Hope and the coast far to the north come the squat tribes of the sea line with their ivory, blubber, whalebone, and white bearskins. From the Diomedes and East Cape sail the dwellers on the straits, their umiaks built up with skins on the sides, that the rush of waves may not whelm them in mid sea, their wives and children at the paddle, and their leathern sails spread to the favoring gale. From King’s Island, rocky eyrie to the south, where they dwell in huts perched like swallows’ nests on the side of sheer cliffs, come others, while even the far shore of Norton Sound sends its contingent.
Wives, children, dogs, boats, sleds, and all earthly possessions they bring, leaving nothing behind but the winter igloo with its entrance gaping lonely where barbaric life had swarmed. They set up their topeks on the sandspit, which, for eleven months in the year so desolate and bare, now seethes with life. They visit back and forth. They exchange news of the berg-battered coast and the snow-smothered interior, and they trade. Hunting and fishing and trapping is business with an Eskimo; trade is his dissipation. During the weeks of this annual fair, things pass from hand to hand, and come back and are traded over again, in the pure joy of bargaining. Not only inanimate objects pass current, but the tribesmen, in the exuberance of barter, sell their dogs, their children, and sometimes their wives. It is a mad carnival of exchange.
The spirit of barter was in the air, and the boys found themselves entering keenly into it, yet with an eye to the future rather than for the purposes of mere trade. Their future travel must be by water, and they wanted an umiak, but those who had them also wanted them. They found one that belonged to a Point Hope man, however, that could be bought, but not at the price which they could pay. In vain they offered caribou hides, wolverine pelts, and almost everything they had. The price was not sufficient, and they would have given up had the eye of the Eskimo not lighted on the jade Buddha. Harry noted his interest in this, and the Yankee in him rose up.
ESKIMO FAMILY TRAVELING
He vowed that the bit of green stone was priceless and could not be parted with on any account. The Eskimo offered various articles for it. Harry would not sell. The owner increased the price. Harry turned his back with much indifference. He remembered the lesson of his trading with the little people of the Diomedes. How long ago that seemed! But the recollection of it was still there. Joe looked on this with much interest, well concealed. He had failed to buy the umiak. If Harry could do it, he was glad, but it would not do to show his gladness. At length, baffled, after offering everything but what the boys wanted, the Point Hope man went away. Joe laughed at Harry, who was chagrined. But the next day the Eskimo came back, bearing the umiak, which was a small one, upside down on his shoulders. He staggered beneath its weight, and it so nearly covered him that only his feet appeared. It had a ludicrous appearance of walking by itself. He emerged from beneath this and laid it at Harry’s feet.