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Updated: June 7, 2025
"Nay, nay, Nam-Bok," cried the head man; "how can that be? Always iron goes to the bottom. For behold, I received an iron knife in trade from the head man of the next village, and yesterday the iron knife slipped from my fingers and went down, down, into the sea. To all things there be law. Never was there one thing outside the law. This we know.
An hour passed, and a second, and Nam-Bok slept, and the talk went on. The evening sun dipped toward the northwest, and at eleven at night was nearly due north. Then it was that the head man and the bone-scratcher separated themselves from the council and aroused Nam-Bok. He blinked up into their faces and turned on his side to sleep again.
We grow tired of this which we may not understand." "You do not understand?" Nam-Bok asked despairingly. "Nay, we do not understand," the men and women wailed back. "We cannot understand." Nam-Bok thought of a combined harvester, and of the machines wherein visions of living men were to be seen, and of the machines from which came the voices of men, and he knew his people could never understand.
"Greeting, O brothers," he said, "brothers of old time before I went away with the off-shore wind." He stepped out with both feet on the sand, and Opee-Kwan waved him back. "Thou art dead, Nam-Bok," he said. Nam-Bok laughed. "I am fat." "Dead men are not fat," Opee-Kwan confessed. "Thou hast fared well, but it is strange.
"Greetings, O brothers," he said, "brothers of old time before I went away with the off-shore wind." He stepped out with both feet on the sand, and Opee-Kwan waved him back. "Thou art dead, Nam-Bok," he said. Nam-Bok laughed. "I am fat." "Dead men are not fat," Opee-Kwan confessed. "Thou hast fared well, but it is strange.
But the sea was no longer angry, and the soft south wind was blowing, and as I looked about me I saw a sight that made me think I was indeed mad." Nam-Bok paused to pick away a sliver of salmon lodged between his teeth, and the men and women, with idle hands and heads craned forward, waited. "It was a canoe, a big canoe.
He strode forward and gazed long and earnestly at the new-comer. "It is Nam-Bok," he said at last, and at the conviction in his voice the women wailed apprehensively and drew farther away. The lips of the stranger moved indecisively, and his brown throat writhed and wrestled with unspoken words. "La la, it is Nam-Bok," Bask-Wah-Wan croaked, peering up into his face.
And, moreover, we know that things of a kind have the one law, and that all iron has the one law. So unsay thy words, Nam-Bok, that we may yet honor thee." "It is so," Nam-Bok persisted. "The steamer is all iron and does not sink." "Nay, nay; this cannot be." "With my own eyes I saw it." "It is not in the nature of things."
And the roar of that village was like the roar of the sea in storm, and the people were so many that I flung away my stick and no longer remembered the notches upon it." "Hadst thou made small notches," Koogah reproved, "thou mightst have brought report." Nam-Bok whirled upon him in anger. "Had I made small notches! Listen, Koogah, thou scratcher of bone!
"If each bidarka were as a grain of sand," Nam-Bok defiantly continued, "and if there were as many bidarkas as there be grains of sand in this beach, still would they not make so big a canoe as this I saw on the morning of the fourth day. It was a very big canoe, and it was called a schooner. I saw this thing of wonder, this great schooner, coming after me, and on it I saw men "
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