saw.
The picture, like all of youth’s impressions, was still strong with him, and his dim eyes
watched the end played out as vividly as in that far-off time. Koskoosh marvelled at this,
for in the days which followed, when he was a leader of men and a head of councillors,
he had done great deeds and made his name a curse in the mouths of the Pellys, to say
naught of the strange white man he had killed, knife to knife, in open fight.
For long he pondered on the days of his youth, till the fire died down and the frost bit
deeper. He replenished it with two sticks this time, and gauged his grip on life by what
remained. If Sit-cum-to-ha had only remembered her grandfather, and gathered a larger
armful, his hours would have been longer. It would have been easy. But she was ever a
careless child, and honored not her ancestors from the time the Beaver, son of the son of
CHILDREN OF THE FROST
23
Zing-ha, first cast eyes upon her. Well, what mattered it? Had he not done likewise in his
own quick youth? For a while he listened to the silence. Perhaps the heart of his son
might soften, and he would come back with the dogs to take his old father on with the
tribe to where the caribou ran thick and the fat hung heavy upon them.
He strained his ears, his restless brain for the moment stilled. Not a stir, nothing. He alone
took breath in the midst of the great silence. It was very lonely. Hark! What was that? A
chill passed over his body. The familiar, long-drawn howl broke the void, and it was
close at hand. Then on his darkened eyes was projected the vision of the moose — the old
bull moose — the torn flanks and bloody sides, the riddled mane, and the great branching
horns, down low and tossing to the last. He saw the flashing forms of gray, the gleaming
eyes, the lolling tongues, the slavered fangs. And he saw the inexorable circle close in till
it became a dark point in the midst of the stamped snow.
A cold muzzle thrust against his cheek, and at its touch his soul leaped back to the
present. His hand shot into the fire and dragged out a burning faggot. Overcome for the
nonce by his hereditary fear of man, the brute retreated, raising a prolonged call to his
brothers; and greedily they answered, till a ring of crouching, jaw-slobbered gray was
stretched round about. The old man listened to the drawing in of this circle. He waved his
brand wildly, and sniffs turned to snarls; but the panting brutes refused to scatter. Now
one wormed his chest forward, dragging his haunches after, now a second, now a third;
but never a one drew back. Why should he cling to life? he asked, and dropped the
blazing stick into the snow. It sizzled and went out. The circle grunted uneasily, but held
its own. Again he saw the last stand of the old bull moose, and Koskoosh dropped his
head wearily upon his knees. What did it matter after all? Was it not the law of life?
NAM-BOK THE UNVERACIOUS
(First published in Ainslee’s Magazine, Aug, 1902)
“A BIDARKA, is it not so? Look! a bidarka, and one man who drives
clumsily with a paddle!”
Old Bask-Wah-Wan rose to her knees, trembling with weakness and
eagerness, and gazed out over the sea.
“Nam-Bok was ever clumsy at the paddle,” she maundered reminiscently,
shading the sun from her eyes and staring across the silverspilled water.
“Nam-Bok was ever clumsy. I remember . . .”
CHILDREN OF THE FROST
24
But the women and children laughed loudly, and there was a gentle
mockery in their laughter, and her voice dwindled till her lips moved
without sound.
Koogah lifted his grizzled head from his bone-carving and followed the
path of her eyes. Except when wide yaws took it off its course, a bidarka
was heading in for the beach. Its occupant was paddling with more
strength than dexterity, and made his approach along the zigzag line of
most resistance. Koogah’s head dropped to his work again, and on the
ivory tusk between his knees he scratched the dorsal fin of a fish the like
of which never swam in the sea.
“It is doubtless the man from the next village,” he said finally, “come to
consult with me about the marking of things on bone. And the man is a
clumsy man. He will never know how.”
“It is Nam-Bok,” old Bask-Wah-Wan repeated. “Should I not know my
son?” she demanded shrilly. “I say, and I say again, it is Nam-Bok.”
“And so thou hast said these many summers,” one of the women chided
softly. “Ever when the ice passed out of the sea hast thou sat and watched
through the long day, saying at each chance canoe, ‘This is Nam-Bok.’
Nam-Bok is dead, O Bask-Wah-Wan, and the dead do not come back. It
cannot be that the dead come back.” “Nam-Bok!” the old woman cried, so
loud and clear that the whole village was startled and looked at her.
She struggled to her feet and tottered down the sand. She stumbled over a
baby lying in the sun, and the mother hushed its crying and hurled harsh
words after the old woman, who took no notice. The children ran down the
beach in advance of her, and as the man in the bidarka drew closer, nearly
capsizing with one of his ill- directed strokes, the women followed.
Koogah dropped his walrus tusk and went also, leaning heavily upon his
staff, and after him loitered the men in twos and threes.
The bidarka turned broadside and the ripple of surf threatened to swamp it,
only a naked boy ran into the water and pulled the bow high up on the
sand. The man stood up and sent a questing glance along the line of
villagers. A rainbow sweater, dirty and the worse for wear, clung loosely
to his broad shoulders, and a red cotton handkerchief was knotted in sailor
fashion about his throat. A fisherman’s tam-o’-shanter on his close-clipped
head, and dungaree trousers and heavy brogans, completed his outfit.
But he was none the less a striking personage to these simple fisherfolk of
the great Yukon Delta, who, all their lives, had stared out on Bering Sea
and in that time seen but two white men,—the census enumerator and a
lost Jesuit priest. They were a poor people, with neither gold in the ground
CHILDREN OF THE FROST
25
nor valuable furs in hand, so the whites had passed them afar. Also, the
Yukon, through the thousands of years, had shoaled that portion of the sea
with the detritus of Alaska till vessels grounded out of sight of land. So the
sodden coast, with its long inside reaches and huge mud-land
archipelagoes, was avoided by the ships of men, and the fisherfolk knew
not that such things were.
Koogah, the Bone-Scratcher, retreated backward in sudden haste, tripping
over his staff and falling to the ground. “Nam-Bok!” he cried, as he
scrambled wildly for footing. “Nam-Bok, who was blown off to sea, come
back!”
The men and women shrank away, and the children scuttled off between
their legs. Only Opee-Kwan was brave, as befitted the head man of the
village. 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.
“Ever did I say Nam-Bok would come back.”
“Ay, it is Nam-Bok come back.” This time it was Nam-Bok himself who
spoke, putting a leg over the side of the bidarka and standing with one foot
afloat and one ashore. Again his throat writhed and wrestled as he
grappled after forgotten words. And when the words came forth they were
strange of sound and a spluttering of the lips accompanied the gutturals.
“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. No man may mate with the off-shore wind and come back on
the heels of the years.”
“I have come back,” Nam-Bok answered simply.
CHILDREN OF THE FROST
26
“Mayhap thou art a shadow, then, a passing shadow of the Nam- Bok that
was. Shadows come back.”
“I am hungry. Shadows do not eat.”
But Opee-Kwan doubted, and brushed his hand across his brow in sore
puzzlement. Nam-Bok was likewise puzzled, and as he looked up and