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drowsing man, and straightened up. But the shrinking and bending began
again, and he sank down slowly, quite slowly, to the ground.
It was a clean mile from the pit of the Sunlanders, and death had spanned
it. A great cry of rage went up, and in it there was much of bloodvengeance,
much of the unreasoned ferocity of the brute. Tyee . and Aab-
Waak tried to hold the Mandell Folk back, were thrust aside, and could
only turn and watch the mad charge. But no shots came from the
Sunlanders, and ere half the distance was covered, many, affrighted by the
mysterious silence of the pit, halted and waited. The wilder spirits bore on,
and when they had cut the remaining distance in half, the pit still showed
no sign of life. At two hundred yards they slowed down and bunched; at
one hundred, they stopped, a score of them, suspicious, and conferred
together.
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Then a wreath of smoke crowned the barricade, and they scattered like a
handful of pebbles thrown at random. Four went down, and four more, and
they continued swiftly to fall, one and two at a time, till but one remained,
and he in full flight with death singing about his ears. It was Nok, a young
hunter, long-legged and tall, and he ran as never before. He skimmed
across the naked open like a bird, and soared and sailed and curved from
side to side. The rifles in the pit rang out in solid volley; they
flut-flut-flutflutted
in ragged sequence; and still Nok rose and dipped and rose again
unharmed. There was a lull in the ~firing, as though the Sunlanders had
given over, and Nok curved less and less in his flight till he darted
straight
forward at every leap. And then, as he leaped cleanly and well, one lone
rifle barked from the pit, and he doubled up in mid-air, struck the ground
in a ball, and like a teal 1 bounced from the impact, and came down in a
broken heap.
"Who so swift as the swift-winged lead?" Aab-Waak pondered.
Tyee grunted and turned away. The incident was closed and there was a
more pressing matter at hand. One Hungry Man and forty fighters, some
CHILDREN OF THE FROST
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61
of them hurt, remained; and there were four Sunlanders yet: to reckon
with.
"We will keep them in their hole by the cliff," he said, "and when famine
has gripped them hard we will slay them like children."
"But of what matter to fight?" queried Oloof, one of the younger men.
"The wealth of the Sunlanders is not; only remains that in the igloo of
Neegah, a paltry quantity "
He broke off hastily as the air by his ear split sharply to the passage of a
bullet.
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Tyee laughed scornfully. "Let that be thy answer. What else may we do
with this mad breed of Sunlanders which will not die?"
"What a thing is foolishness!" Oloof protested, his ears furtively alert for
the coming of other bullets. "It is not right that they should fight so,
these
Sunlanders. Why will they not die easily? They are fools not to know that
they are dead men, and they give us much trouble."
"We fought before for great wealth; we fight now that we may live," Aab-
Waak summed up succinctly.
That night there was a clash in the trenches, and shots exchanged. And in
the morning the igloo of Neegah was found empty of the Sunlanders'
possessions. These they themselves had taken, for the signs of their trail
were visible to the sun. Oloof climbed to the brow of the cliff to hurl great
stones down into the pit, but the cliff overhung, and he hurled down abuse
and insult instead, and promised bitter torture to them in the end. Bill-Man
mocked him back in the tongue of the Bear Folk, and Tyee, lifting his
head from a trench to see, had his shoulder scratched deeply by a bullet.
And in the dreary days that followed, and in the wild nights when they
pushed the trenches closer, there was much discussion as to the wisdom of
letting the Sunlanders go. But of this they were afraid, and the women
raised a cry always at the thought. This much they had seen of the
Sunlanders; they cared to see no more. All the time the whistle and blubblub
of bullets filled the air, and all the time the death- list grew. In the
golden sunrise came the faint, far crack of a rifle, and a stricken woman
would throw up her hands on the distant edge of the village; in the
noonday heat, men in the trenches heard the shrill singsong and knew their
deaths; or in the gray afterglow of evening, the dirt kicked up in puffs by
the winking fires. And through the nights the long "Wah-hoo-ha-a wahhoo-
ha-a!" of mourning women held dolorous sway.
CHILDREN OF THE FROST
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62
As Tyee had promised, in the end famine gripped the Sunlanders. And
once, when an early fall gale blew, one of them crawled through the
darkness past the trenches and stole many dried fish. But he could not get
back with them, and the sun found him vainly hiding in the village. So he
fought the great fight by himself, and in a narrow ring of Mandell Folk
shot four with his revolver, and ere they could lay hands on him for the
torture, turned it on himself and died.
This threw a gloom upon the people. Oloof put the question, "If one man
die so hard, how hard will die the three who yet are left?"
Then Mesahchie stood up on the barricade and called in by name three
dogs which had wandered close, meat and life, which set back the day
of reckoning and put despair in the hearts of the Mandell Folk. And on the
head of Mesahchie were showered the curses of a generation.
The days dragged by. The sun hurried south, the nights grew long and
longer, and there was a touch of frost in the air. And still the Sunlanders
held the pit. Hearts were breaking under the unending strain, and Tyee
thought hard and deep. Then he sent forth word that all the skins and hides
of all the tribe be collected. These he had made into huge cylindrical bales,
and behind each bale he placed a man.
When the word was given the brief day was almost spent, and it was slow
work and tedious, rolling the big bales forward foot by foot. The bullets of
the Sunlanders blub-blubbed and thudded against them, but could not go
through, and the men howled their delight. But the dark was at hand, and
Tyee, secure of success, called the bales back to the trenches.
In the morning, in the face of an unearthly silence from the pit, the real
advance began. At first, with large intervals between, the bales slowly [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]