filled with stones, so that Bill-Man and his brothers and Mesahchie shall
by famine be pinched to shadows and die cursing in the silence and dark.”
Cries of delight and relief greeted this, and Howgah, the last of the Hungry
Folk, swarmed up the steep slant and drew himself, crouching, upon the
lip of the opening. But as he crouched, a muffled report rushed forth, and
as he clung desperately to the slippery edge, a second. His grip loosed
with reluctant weakness, and he pitched down at the feet of Tyee, quivered
for a moment like some monstrous jelly, and was still.
“How should I know they were great fighters and unafraid?” Tyee
demanded, spurred to defence by recollection of the dark looks and vague
complaints.
“We were many and happy,” one of the men stated baldly. Another
fingered his spear with a prurient hand.
But Oloof cried them cease. “Give ear, my brothers! There be another
way! As a boy I chanced upon it playing along the steep. It is hidden by
the rocks, and there is no reason that a man should go there; wherefore it is
secret, and no man knows. It is very small, and you crawl on your belly a
long way, and then you are in the cave. To- night we will so crawl,
without noise, on our bellies, and come upon the Sunlanders from behind.
CHILDREN OF THE FROST
64
And to-morrow we will be at peace, and never again will we quarrel with
the Sunlanders in the years to come.”
“Never again!” chorused the weary men. “Never again!” And Tyee joined
with them.
That night, with the memory of their dead in their hearts, and in their
hands stones and spears and knives, the horde of women and children
collected about the known mouth of the cave. Down the twenty and odd
precarious feet to the ground no Sunlander could hope to pass and live. In
the village remained only the wounded men, while every able man—and
there were thirty of them—followed Oloof to the secret opening. A
hundred feet of broken ledges and insecurely heaped rocks were between
it and the earth, and because of the rocks, which might be displaced by the
touch of hand or foot, but one man climbed at a time. Oloof went up first,
called softly for the next to come on, and disappeared inside. A man
followed, a second, and a third, and so on, till only Tyee remained. He
received the call of the last man, but a quick doubt assailed him and he
stayed to ponder. Half an hour later he swung up to the opening and
peered in. He could feel the narrowness of the passage, and the darkness
before him took on solidity. The fear of the walled-in earth chilled him
and he could not venture. All the men who had died, from Neegah the first
of the Mandells, to Howgah the last of the Hungry Folk, came and sat with
him, but he chose the terror of their company rather than face the horror
which he felt to lurk in the thick blackness. He had been sitting long when
something soft and cold fluttered lightly on his cheek, and he knew the
first winter’s snow was falling. The dim dawn came, and after that the
bright day, when he heard a low guttural sobbing, which came and went at
intervals along the passage and which drew closer each time and more
distinct. He slipped over the edge, dropped his feet to the first ledge, and
waited.
That which sobbed made slow progress, but at last, after many halts, it
reached him, and he was sure no Sunlander made the noise. So he reached
a hand inside, and where there should have been a head felt the shoulders
of a man uplifted on bent arms. The head he found later, not erect, but
hanging straight down so that the crown rested on the floor of the passage.
“Is it you, Tyee?” the head said. “For it is I, Aab-Waak, who am helpless
and broken as a rough-flung spear. My head is in the dirt, and I may not
climb down unaided.”
Tyee clambered in, dragged him up with his back against the wall, but the
head hung down on the chest and sobbed and wailed.
CHILDREN OF THE FROST
65
“Ai-oo-o, ai-oo-o!” it went. “Oloof forgot, for Mesahchie likewise knew
the secret and showed the Sunlanders, else they would not have waited at
the end of the narrow way. Wherefore, I am a broken man, and helpless—
ai-oo-o, ai-oo-o!”
“And did they die, the cursed Sunlanders, at the end of the narrow way?”
Tyee demanded.
“How should I know they waited?” Aab-Waak gurgled. “For my brothers
had gone before, many of them, and there was no sound of struggle. How
should I know why there should be no sound of struggle ? And ere I knew,
two hands were about my neck so that I could not cry out and warn my
brothers yet to come. And then there were two hands more on my head,
and two more on my feet. In this fashion the three Sunlanders had me.
And while the hands held my head in one place, the hands on my feet
swung my body around, and as we wring the neck of a duck in the marsh,
so my neck was wrung.
“But it was not given that I should die,” he went on, a remnant of pride yet
glimmering. “I, only, am left. Oloof and the rest lie on their backs in a
row, and their faces turn this way and that, and the faces of some be
underneath where the backs of their heads should be. It is not good to look
upon; for when life returned to me I saw them all by the light of a torch
which the Sunlanders left, and I had been laid with them in the row.”
“So? So?” Tyee mused, too stunned for speech.
He started suddenly, and shivered, for the voice of Bill-Man shot out at
him from the passage.
“It is well,” it said. HI look for the man who crawls with the broken neck,
and lo, do I find Tyee. Throw down thy gun, Tyee, so that I may hear it
strike among the rocks.”
Tyee obeyed passively, and Bill-Man crawled forward into the light. Tyee
looked at him curiously. He was gaunt and worn and dirty, and his eyes
burned like twin coals in their cavernous sockets.
“I am hungry, Tyee,” he said. “Very hungry.”
“And I am dirt at thy feet,” Tyee responded. “Thy word is my law. Further,
I commanded my people not to withstand thee. I counselled—”
But Bill-Man had turned and was calling back into the passage. “Hey!
Charley! Jim ! Fetch the woman along and come on ! ”
CHILDREN OF THE FROST
66
“We go now to eat,” he said, when his comrades and Mesahchie had
joined him.
Tyee rubbed his hands deprecatingly. “We have little, but it is shine. ”
“After that we go south on the snow,” Bill-Man continued.
“May you go without hardship and the trail be easy.”
“It is a long way. We will need dogs and food—much”!”
“Thine the pick of our dogs and the food they may carry.”
Bill-Man slipped over the edge of the opening and prepared to descend.
“But we come again, Tyee. We come again, and our days shall be long in
the land.”
And so they departed into the trackless south, Bill-Man, his brothers, and
Mesahchie. And when the next year came, the Search Number Two rode
at anchor in Mandell Bay. The few Mandell men, who survived because
their wounds had prevented their crawling into the cave, went to work at
the hest of the Sunlanders and dug in the ground. They hunt and fish no
more, but receive a daily wage, with which they buy flour, sugar, calico,
and such things which the Search Number Two brings on her yearly trip
from the Sunlands.
And this mine is worked in secret, as many Northland mines have been
worked; and no white man outside the Company, which is BillMan, Jim,
and Charley, knows the whereabouts of Mandell on the rim of the polar
sea. Aab-Waak still carries his head on one shoulder, is become an oracle,
and preaches peace to the younger generation, for which he receives a
pension from the Company. Tyee is foreman of the mine. But he has
achieved a new theory concerning the Sunlanders.
“They that live under the path of the sun are not soft,” he says, smoking
his pipe and watching the day-shift take itself off and the nightshift go on.
“For the sun enters into their blood and burns them with a great fire till
they are filled with lusts and passions. They burn always, so that they may
not know when they are beaten. Further, there is an unrest in them, which