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The girl's face, on the whole, was unusually pretty for that of an Eskimo, and would have been still more so but for the grease with which it was besmeared for the damsel had just been having a little refreshment of white-whale blubber. Her figure was comparatively slim and graceful, and would have been obviously so but for the ill-fitting coat and clumsy boots with which it was covered.
Seal steak was not bad, and seal liver was as good as calf's liver. Polar bear steak and walrus stew were impossible. "Wouldn't even make good hamburger," was Phi's verdict. The boiled flipper of a white-whale was tender as chicken. But when a hind quarter of reindeer meat found its way into the village there was feasting indeed.
The red man returned to the wigwams of his people, while the young Eskimo, descending the river in his kayak, continued to hunt the white-whale and pursue the feathered tribes which swarmed in the creeks, rivulets, and marshes that bordered the ice-encumbered waters of the polar seas. Alas for the hopes and efforts of good men!
In short, there was a good deal of the spirit of "let-be for let-be" between the two at the time of which we write. One morning in the spring-time of the year, soon after the floods caused by the melting snows had swept the ice clean out of Greygoose or Whale River, a sturdy young Eskimo urged his sharp kayak, or skin-covered canoe, up the stream in pursuit of a small white-whale.
It is an insignificant stream compared with such well-known waterways as the Mackenzie and the Coppermine; nevertheless it is large enough to entice the white-whale and the seal into its waters every spring, and it becomes a resting-place for myriads of wild-fowl while on their passage to and from the breeding-grounds of the Far North.
In their columnar movements they somewhat resemble the porpoise, long processions being frequently seen, composed of three in a row, perhaps led by a single whale. Among the Samoyeds, at Chabanova, on the Siberian coast, the white-whale fisheries amount to fifteen hundred or two thousand pood of train-oil a year.
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