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Updated: May 6, 2025
The Aleut boy kept on his stealthy approach little by little until finally he was within thirty or forty yards of the edge of the water, along which the great wild-fowl were scattered. Rob nudged him to get up and throw, but Skookie knew his own business better.
They were not Aleut Indians, and barely escaped being Russians; but were of mixed blood so common on the Aleutian Islands. The younger one broke the silence. "I'm tired of baskets! I want to do something else," she said, with a yawn. "Run out upon the hills awhile, but first finish the row you are doing, then put all away in a safe place.
Rob had his hand done up, Jesse's foot was encased in a mud plaster, and John still wore his handkerchief tied over his nose, whose tip he had nearly severed in his attempt at eating after the Aleut fashion.
With ample firearms and enough brandy half a dozen Russians could control a thousand Aleuts. Swaggering and bullying and loud-voiced and pot-valiant, Drusenin and two Cossacks stooped to enter a low-thatched Aleut hut. The entrance step pitched down into a sort of pit; and as Drusenin stumbled in face foremost a cudgel clubbed down on his skull.
And there, in the glow of the dying fire, bright and alluring visions successively took shape: A red-and-yellow temple on a hill, to which a thousand steps led up from a lake the color of a blue heron's breast; a junk with sails of purple creeping out of a morning mist as yellow as saffron; an island with a still lagoon in its center, and coconut palms alive with screaming parrots of every gorgeous hue; a sandy beach where jabbering natives dragged the flotsam of a wrecked steamer out of the breakers; a village on a high plateau, where a drum throbbed incessantly, and naked Indian children peered out from behind the huts; a skirmish line in khaki crawling up to the brow of a shell-swept hill; a dog-team yelping under the long lash of a half-breed Aleut, on a frozen river that sparkled in the sun; a sweating jungle where two bright spots glowed balefully in the gloom.
In truth the Aleut seemed to accept the place assigned him. He not only built the fire in the middle of the hut, but picked up the skillet as a matter of course, wiped it out with some dried grass, put into it some of the bear fat, and added a part of the liver which they had brought along.
Now, a few fathoms at a time, the native edged the bidarka up toward his game, precisely as the Aleut chief had approached the whale. The dory, no longer rowed furiously, but now paddled silently by John and Skookie, approached on the other side.
Even when squabbles arrive the argument is carried on in poetry to the accompaniment of dancing, and one would be inclined to prefer the Aleut angry to the Aleut amiable, did he not know he also dances when festive and when religious. "Among them the social duty of visiting has its drawbacks.
"This beats doing it ourselves!" said John, who was not especially fond of work. "We ought to thank him some way," said Rob. "You know a little Chinook, John; why don't you talk to him?" John grinned. "Kla-how-yah, tillicum!" he began. "Klosh-tum-tum, eh? Skookum! Skookum!" Again the Aleut smiled in his distorted way, but whether or not he understood no one could tell.
Day after day, three months at a time, warm or cold, not daring to light fires on the island, the Aleut hunters go out to the spearing-surround, till the schooner returns for them from the main post; and whether the hunt is harder on man or beast may be judged from the fact that where the hunting battalions used to rally out in companies of thousands, they to-day go forth only in twenties and forties.
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