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Updated: May 20, 2025
The entire escort followed, even two or three very dirty little boys everybody, except the handful of women and girls left at the mouth of the underground entrance and the two men who had run on to make a fire. It was already smoking viciously as though the seal-lamps weren't doing enough in that line, when Yagorsha and Nicholas laid the half-frozen traveller on the sleeping-bench.
The Angakok grew better natured every minute. By the time he had eaten all he could hold he was really quite happy and benevolent! He clasped his hands over his stomach and smiled on everybody. The women chattered in their corner of the sleeping-bench, and Koolee showed Koko's mother the new fur suit trimmed with white rabbit's skin that she was making for Menie.
The moment the twins' father and mother heard the word bear they jumped off the sleeping-bench and began to put on their clothes. They both wore fur trousers and long kamiks, with coats of fur, so they looked almost as much alike in their clothes as the twins did in theirs. The mother always wore her hair in a topknot on top of her head, tied with a leather thong.
She spoke disapprovingly. "Want to get an Orange Grove." "Find him up river?" "Hope so." "I think I go, too"; and all the grave folk, sitting so close on the sleeping-bench, stretched their wide mouths wider still, smiling good-humouredly. "You better wait till summer." "Oh!" She lifted her head from the fire as one who takes careful note of instructions. "Nex' summer?"
Kotuko went on with his carving, and Kadlu threw a rolled bundle of leather dog-harnesses into a tiny little room that opened from one side of the house, slipped off his heavy deerskin hunting-suit, put it into a whalebone-net that hung above another lamp, and dropped down on the sleeping-bench to whittle at a piece of frozen seal-meat till Amoraq, his wife, should bring the regular dinner of boiled meat and blood-soup.
They were more rarely found in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and as I do not know what they were called in New England, we will give them the Dutch name slawbank, from sloap-bancke, a sleeping-bench. A slawbank was the prototype of our modern folding-bed. It was an oblong frame with a network of rope.
Fortunately, the Boy had remembered to "ketch" that essential, and his little offering was laid before the council-men. More grunts, and room made for the visitor on the sleeping-bench next the post that supported one of the lamps, a clay saucer half-full of seal-oil, in which a burning wick of twisted moss gave forth a powerful odour, a fair amount of smoke, and a faint light.
Kadlu's eye rolled round the skin-lined snow-house till it fell on fourteen-year-old Kotuko sitting on the sleeping-bench, making a button out of walrus ivory. "Name him for me," said Kotuko, with a grin. "I shall need him one day."
He nodded at the sleeping-bench, where he had slept as a little boy; but the old Fire-drum he brought out, and dragged it into the middle of the room, and said to it and to his mother: "My father would have beaten a famous roll this evening. Now I must do it!" And he beat a thundering roll-call on the instrument, and the Drum felt so highly honored that the parchment burst with exultation.
When the yelpings grew too loud Kotuko lazily rolled off the sleeping-bench, and picked up a whip with an eighteen-inch handle of springy whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy, plaited thong. He dived into the passage, where it sounded as though all the dogs were eating him alive; but that was no more than their regular grace before meals.
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