Red Rooney: The Last of the Crew by R. M. Ballantyne (free e books to read .txt) 📕

Why some people should wink and blink as well as smirk when they are comfortable is a question which might possibly be answered by cats if they could speak, but which we do not profess to understand. Nevertheless we are bound to record the fact that on the very day when Nunaga and her invalids drew near to the first Moravian settlements in Greenland, Ippegoo slowly mounted a hillside which overlooked the icy sea, flung himself down on a moss-clad bank, and began to wink and blink and smirk in a way that surpassed the most comfortable cat that ever revelled on rug or slumbered in sunshine.

Ippegoo was supremely happy, and his felicity, like that of most simple folk, reposed on a simple basis. It was merely this—that Spring had returned to the Arctic regions.

Spring! Ha! who among the dwellers in our favoured land has the faintest idea of—of—pooh!—words are wanting. The British poets, alive and dead, have sung of Spring, and doubtless have fancied that they understood it. They had no more idea of what they were singing about than—than the man in the moon, if we may venture to use a rather hackneyed comparison. Listen, reader, humbly, as becometh the ignorant.

Imagine yourself an Eskimo. Don’t overdo it. You need not in imagination adopt the hairy garments, or smear yourself with oil, or eat raw blubber. For our purpose it will suffice to transport yourself into the Arctic regions, and invest yourself with the average intelligence of an ordinary human being who has not been debased by the artificial evils that surround modern civilisation, or demoralised by strong drink. In this condition of happy simplicity you draw near to the end of an Arctic winter.

During eight months or so you have been more or less shrivelled-up, petrified, mummified, by frost of the most intense and well-nigh intolerable description. Your whole body has frequently been pierced by winds, the constituents of which seemed to be needles and fire. Shelter has been one of your chief subjects of meditation every day—ofttimes all day; unwillingness to quit that shelter and eagerness to return to it being your dominant characteristic. Darkness palpable has been around you for many weeks, followed by a twilight of gloom so prolonged that you feel as if light were a long-past memory. Your eyes have become so accustomed to ice and snow that white, or rather whitey-grey, has long since usurped and exclusively held the place of colour in your imagination, so that even black—a black cliff or a black rock cropping up out of the snow—becomes a mitigated joy. Your ears have been so attuned to the howling blast with interludes of dead calm and variations of rending icebergs and bellowing walrus accompaniments, that melodious harmonies have fled affrighted from your brain. As for your nose—esprit de marrow fat, extract of singed hide, essence of lamp-smoke, eau de cuisine, and de-oxygenised atmosphere of snow-hut, have often inclined you to dash into the open air, regardless of frost and snow, for purposes of revivification. Imagine all these things intensified to the uttermost, and prolonged to nigh the limits of endurance, so that genial ideas and softening influences seem to have become things of the long-forgotten past, and then try to imagine a change, compared to which all the transformation scenes of all the pantomimes that ever blazed are as a tomtit’s chirp to a lion’s roar, or a—a— Words fail again! No matter.

But don’t give in yet. Try, now, to imagine this sudden transformation wrought, perhaps, in a few days to the slow music of southern zephyrs, bearing on their wings light, and heat, and sunshine. Your ear is surprised—absolutely startled—by the sound of trickling water. Old memories that you thought were dead come back in the trumpet of the wild-goose, the whistling wing of the duck, the plaintive cry of the plover. Your nose—ah! your nose cocks up and snuffs a smell—pardon!—a scent. It is the scent of the great orb on which you stand, saturated at last with life-giving water, and beginning to vivify all the green things that have so long been hidden in her capacious bosom.

But it is to your eye, perhaps, that the strongest appeal is made, for while you throw off one by one the garments which have protected you for so many months, and open up body and soul to the loved, long-absent, influences of warmth, and sound, and odour, your eye drinks up the mighty draughts of light—light not only blazing in the blue above, but reflected from the blue below—for the solid ice-fields are now split into fragments; the swell of old Ocean sends a musical ripple to the shore; great icebergs are being shed from their parent glaciers, and are seen floating away in solemn procession to the south, lifting their pinnacles towards their grandparent clouds, until finally reduced to the melting mood, and merged in their great-grandparent the sea. Imagine such visions and sensations coming suddenly, almost as a surprise, at the end of the stern Arctic winter, and then, perchance, you will have some idea of the bounding joy that fills the soul on the advent of Spring, inducing it to feel, if not to say, “Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord.”

This is Spring! The Eskimos understand it, and so do the dwellers in Rupert’s Land; perchance, also, the poor exiles of Siberia—but the poets—pooh!

Far down below the perch occupied by Ippegoo lay a little sandy bay, around which were scattered a number of Eskimo huts—rude and temporary buildings, meant to afford shelter for a time and then be forsaken. This was the bay which Angut, Okiok, Simek, Red Rooney, and the others had reached in their pursuit of the wizard when the ice broke up and effectually stopped them.

As it was utterly impossible to advance farther with dog and sledge, they were compelled to restrain their impatience as best they could, and await open water, when they might resume their journey in kayaks. Meanwhile, as there was a lead of open water to the northward as far as they could see, the youth Arbalik had been despatched with a small sledge and four of the strongest dogs along the strip of land-ice, or “ice-foot,” which clung to the shore. His mission was to reach the village, and fetch Nuna, Pussimek, Kunelik, Sigokow, and his own mother, in one of the oomiaks or women’s boats when open water should permit.

It was while our Eskimos were thus idly waiting for their wives, that the before-mentioned southern Eskimos arrived, and met them with every demonstration of friendliness and good-will.

These men, who had been forced to make a long, difficult détour inland after the ice gave way, were not a little pleased to find that the ice-foot to the northward was still practicable, and that the Eskimo village was so near. Of course they told of their meeting with Ujarak’s sledge, which rendered inaction on the part of the pursuers still more unbearable. But they were all men who could accept the inevitable with a good grace, and as they knew it was impossible to advance without kayaks and oomiaks, they awaited the return of Arbalik as patiently as possible. Meanwhile they made themselves agreeable to the new arrivals, whose hearts they gladdened by telling them that their friends in the north had plenty of narwhal horns and bones and walrus tusks and sinews to exchange for their wood and iron.

But to return to Ippegoo on his distant and elevated outlook.

While he gazed at the busy groups below, our weak-minded youth observed two of the party step into kayaks which lay on the beach, push off into the bay, and commence what may be styled “kayak exercise.” As Ippegoo greatly enjoyed witnessing such exercises, he threw off his lethargy, and, leaping up, quickly descended to the shore. The kayaks were old ones which had been found by the party on arriving at the deserted village. They had probably been left as useless by previous visitors, but Okiok’s boys, Norrak and Ermigit, being energetic and ingenious fellows, had set to work with fish-bone-needles and sinew-threads, and repaired them with sealskin patches. They were now about to test their workmanship and practise their drill.

“Do they leak?” shouted Okiok, as the lads pushed off.

“Not more than I can soak up,” replied Norrak, looking back with a laugh.

“Only a little,” cried Ermigit, “and hoh! the water is still very cold.”

“Paddle hard, and you’ll soon warm it,” cried Rooney.

When they had got fairly off, a spirit of emulation seized the brothers, and, without a direct challenge, they paddled side by side, gradually increasing their efforts, until they were putting forth their utmost exertions, and going through the water at racing speed.

“Well done, Norrak!” shouted the father, in rising excitement.

“Not so fast, Ermigit; not so fast,” roared Simek.

Heedless of the advice, the brothers pushed on until they were brought up by the pack-ice at the mouth of the bay. Here they turned as quickly as possible, and raced back with such equal speed that they came in close together—so close that it was impossible for those on shore to judge which was winning as they approached.

As in