Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
Kotuko leaped forward wildly, dragging the girl after him, and crawled to the bottom of the mound. The talking of the ice grew louder and louder round them, but the mound stayed fast, and, as the girl looked at him, he threw his right elbow upward and outward, making the Inuit sign for land in the shape of an island.
Williams, first officer of the 'George and Mary', went with two boats and some Inuit guides, sailing directly up the bay toward the north-west until it debouched again upon Hudson's Strait, about fifty miles above where we were anchored, or about sixty-five miles north-west of North Bluff.
His mother was anxious to make peace with him, and offered him food and clothing, which he refused to take. He went to the other Inuit who lived in the same village and made a spear and a harpoon of the same pattern as they used. Then he watched them throw the harpoons, and in a short time he became an expert hunter and could catch many white whales.
He and his master they did not count the team of ordinary dogs as company hunted together, day after day and night after night, fur-wrapped boy and savage, long-haired, narrow-eyed, white-fanged, yellow brute. All an Inuit has to do is to get food and skins for himself and his family.
He is as untiring in his efforts to aid us in our search as in securing food, and there is always a degree of intelligence displayed in whatever he undertakes that is wholly foreign to the Inuit character. Even the stones that he brought into camp bore marks that were most astonishingly like writing. You could almost read them.
In these contests victory generally perches upon the banner of the walrus, though the Inuit will never give up until the last extremity is reached. Often he is dragged to the very edge of the ice before he finds a protuberance against which to brace his feet, and often he is drawn down under the ice before he will relinquish his hold.
Though there is no excitement in it, you can easily believe that the sitting still in the buckle with the thermometer perhaps forty degrees below zero is the hardest work an Inuit knows. When a seal was caught, Kotuko the dog would bound forward, his trace trailing behind him, and help to pull the body to the sleigh, where the tired and hungry dogs lay sullenly under the lee of the broken ice.
The anchor soon swung at the bow of the 'George and Mary', and her yards were squared for Marble Island, where we were to take on board water for the homeward-bound voyage. Our Inuit friends shouted their last farewells, and we were actually "en route" home.
"Here it is; there it is," the spirit whispered, hoarsely. But as the woman touched the head, all of a sudden she fell dead. It had no bones and no hair. In olden times the Inuit were not the only tribe living in the Eskimo country. Around Cumberland Sound there lived some very large, strong people called the Tornit.
Another cause of misfortune is for the line to become entangled around the arm of the hunter, so that he cannot cast it off, in which case he is most assuredly drawn into the sea, and in nine cases out of ten drowned, for his knife is seldom at hand for an emergency, and no amount of experience will ever induce an Inuit to provide against danger.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking