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Title: Of The High Class Eskimo
Author: R. D. Cumming [
More Titles by Cumming]
Away up in the great northland, even further north than the northern boundary of British Columbia, there lives a race of people who form, and have formed, no part of the great human civilization of the world which has been, and is going on in the more moderately climatic regions of the earth. For centuries they have lived apart, and have taken no notice of the big world which has been, and is living itself to death far from them down in the indolent south, where the sun could shine every day in the year--where it did shine every day that it was not cloudy, and where there was no long, dreary, dark midnight of at least four months' duration; where the sun did not dip beneath the horizon at about the beginning of October, and disappear, not to be seen again until the end of March; where, in some parts, there was no snow, while in others only for a few weeks during the year. No snow! no ice! Can you imagine such a condition? And up there it is almost the Eskimo's only commodity. He eats it, drinks it, lives in it, sleeps on it, and his castle is built of it. And he endures it year after year, from his babyhood to his gray days, and there appears no hope for him. Bare ground is a curiosity to the Eskimo; and there are no spring freshets. Their bridges across their streams are formed of ice; the very salt sea is covered with it; and they venture out on those great floors of ice in search of the polar bear and the right whale which form almost their only food, and supply them with their only source of clothing, heat and light. In the midst of his narrow and cramped circumstances the Eskimo can laugh at times as heartily as any other human, and he has grown extremely low in stature to accommodate himself to the small opening which gives access to his igloo (house). The average man or woman does not exceed much over four feet. No other explanation seems to have been offered by science for the extreme dwarfishness in stature of this curious race of people.
Like the polar bear--almost their only associate in those northern and frozen wilds--the idea never occurred to this people to migrate south where the earth is bare and warm, and is clothed in a green mantle; where the sun shines every day; where the land is flowing with milk and honey; where peaches and water melons grow, and where it is not necessary to go through a hole in the ice to take a bath. No, this strange people, whose food is ice, whose bed is ice, whose home is ice, and whose grave is ice, are part and parcel of the snowy north; and they live on, apparently happy and contented with their hard life and uncongenial environment. Where the white man begins to be uncomfortable, the Eskimo begins to be at home. Where the white man leaves off the Eskimo begins, and his haunts penetrate away into the far north--into the land of perpetual ice and snow. Where we go only to explore he builds his permanent abode.
But this is not a history of the geographical distribution of men; it is to be the story of an Eskimo who went astray according to the moral ideals of his immediate tribesmen.
Once upon a time there lived in this northland of which we have been speaking a young native who had mysteriously arrived at the conclusion that the life of an Eskimo was a very narrow and fruitless existence indeed, and that the conditions under which they lived were totally inadequate to supply the demands of a twentieth century human being. In the midst of the other members of the family he assumed an attitude of weariness and contempt for his associates and environs. "One may as well associate with a polar bear," he soliloquized. "Man was made to accomplish things; the Eskimo is no further advanced in the scale of living, organic beings, to all intent and purpose, than the polar bear, or the walrus. He is born, lives, eats, sleeps, hunts, kills, dies, and is buried in the cold frozen earth, if he does not fall through a hole in the ice into the bottomless sea. To the south of us is a great healthy world where men live; where they have discovered all that the world has to give, and where they enjoy those things to the utmost; where they read and write and take records of their doings. Me for the south!" he shouted, and he made up his mind to migrate at the first opportunity and be in the swim with men. "I must learn to read and write and think, even if I have to forget my own language," he declared.
Now, it came to pass that as he was soliloquizing as above one morning, a girl appeared before him. She was so muffled up in furs that only an Eskimo could distinguish whether the bundle was male or female. She sat down beside him and placed her short, stubby, muffled arm as far around his neck as it would go, and in this attitude she coaxed, and begged, and prayed, and argued with him, thinking that she might resurrect him to himself again. But when she found that his mania was for the south, she wept as only woman can weep the whole world over, even in the far north where the tears are in danger of freezing to her cheeks. But he, in his brutish, advanced-thought sort of way, pushed her from him.
"If you love me you will help me to go," he said. "If you love me you will stay," she responded.
He rose and moved towards his igloo; she followed. He crawled like a bear through the thirty feet or more of narrow tunnel which led into the hut proper. She did likewise. In the igloo he threw himself down on the ice floor among the squalor and quantities of bear meat in various stages of decomposition. The smell from the whale-oil lamp almost choked him. The girl sat down and continued to cling to him.
"Let me go to the south and I will make a lady of you," he said. "I will give you gold and silver and feather beds. These environs are not fit for a bear to hibernate in. Just think of our branch of the human family existing and suffering up here among the ice and snow for thousands of years and not having advanced one step from the hovel in which we were first produced? Is the Eskimo destined to everlasting failure--perpetual degeneration? Must you and I be satisfied and consent to endure this animal existence to the end of our days because it is our only heritage from our ancestors? No! I say, a thousand times no. I am ashamed of myself, my ancestors and my entire race," he shouted, and the girl almost trembled in fear of him. He must surely be demented. But she still clung to him, thinking that her enchanting presence might cure him. Thus love can be a very warm thing even up among the cold ice and snow. Their cold, half frozen cheeks came together and she kissed him. "Stay," she murmured, coaxingly, as only a woman can.
"I will take passage south," he continued unheedingly, "and will plunge myself into the midst of the big, busy, warm world, and will gain with one bound that social condition which it has taken the white man thousands of years to attain."
Now, after all, was this man not right, and is the Eskimo not to be pitied?
The girl, seeing that her whole world was about to vanish from her, left the igloo weeping, and again crawled like a bear through the narrow tunnel to the colder world outside.
One day when the sun was just about to make its appearance above the horizon, and the long night was nearly at an end, two half starved and partially frozen white men burrowed their way into our hero's igloo and asked for food and shelter. The night had been long, dreary, dark and cold, and the approaching return of the sun was welcomed like a prodigal. Is it a wonder then that the Eskimo worships the sun? It seems his only hope, his only comfort; and it would seem to him, more than to any other, the source of all life, his only friend in his dire need. The Eskimo offered the two strangers some meat, which they devoured greedily; and then they told a long, pitiful story. They were explorers. Their ship had been crushed hopelessly between masses of ice. Fifty had started on the long journey south. Provisions gave out. Men had dropped off daily. The trail was one long line of frozen corpses stretched out in the dark and silent night. They two alone had survived, so far as the strangers were able to tell. It was the usual tale of woe which befalls the Arctic or Antarctic explorers. Beginning happily, hopefully, buoyantly; ending in misery, sorrow and death. The strangers wanted a guide to lead them to the south--to civilization and warmth. They had not known what it was to be comfortable for two years; and they had not seen one square inch of bare ground during that period.
"Oh, for a sight of mother earth!" they shouted. "We would gladly eat the soil, and chew the bark from the trees." Thus one does not appreciate the most trivial and simple but indispensable things until one is deprived of them for a period of more or less duration.
Our hero agreed to guide them so far as his knowledge extended--even to the very gateway between the north and south lands--if they would guarantee to guide him from that point into their own big, beautiful world further on; they taking the helm when his usefulness as a guide would be exhausted; and he explained his ambition to them.
So, one morning when summer was approaching, and the sun, for the first time in the year was sending her streamers above the horizon, and when his sweetheart Lola stood with arms outstretched over the cold snow and ice towards him, pleading and sending forth her last appeal to his stony heart, he walked out across the white table-land towards the south, and was soon a small black speck in the far horizon.
When the strange expedition reached Dawson they discarded their hibernating costumes and substituted more modern ones, not so much because they were out of fashion, but because they rendered them somewhat uncomfortable. At this point the white men grasped the helm and the Eskimo followed. At Fort Fraser our hero discarded more of his clothing, and at Quesnel he became determined to strip himself. "I cannot stand this heat," he said; "why, it will kill me."
"Heat? Kill you?" exclaimed his two companions. "Why, the thermometer is scarcely above the freezing point. If this moderate climate makes you uncomfortable, what will be your condition in California? Why, you will melt away like a candle beside a red-hot stove." And thus they joked with him, not taking him seriously. So they sailed along and in due time reached Ashcroft. The Eskimo perspired to such an extent that his condition threatened to become dangerous. The slightest covering of clothing became a burden to him, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that his companions could prevent him from stripping himself naked. They persuaded him that he should return before it was too late, but he would not hear of it. "I have made my nest; I will sit in it to the bitter end," he said. They boarded the midnight train, and in a few moments he was fleeing to the sunny south a great deal faster than ever dog team or sledge had taken him across the frozen plateau. And the farther south he went the more he suffered from the heat, until he was in great danger of melting away. And then the truth dawned upon him; it had never occurred to him before. He was a fish trying to live out of water. He discovered that what his mind had pictured, and his heart had longed for, his constitution could not endure. He was doomed to live and die in the frozen north. Oh, those savage, unprogressive, half-animal ancestors! And for the first time he thought of his igloo, his dog teams, the polar bear, and the little woman who had pleaded with him to remain; and he saw her standing as he had left her with outstretched arms, while her very heart tissue was being torn asunder. "Oh, for the ice and snow and the long, dark night," he exclaimed; "anything but this awful heat." When they reached San Francisco he was almost insane, and his condition became critical; and, as if to punish him for his folly, the heat became intense for a few days. They rushed him to the sea shore and he plunged into the water, and refused to come out again. Those were the most congenial surroundings he had found since he left the frozen north. He was in such misery that he did not have time to enjoy the wonders of civilization which he had risked so much to see. Thus does distance lend enchantment to the view. This was an instance of how a man had grown up with his environment--had inherited qualities or weaknesses applicable to his surroundings, had breathed the air of one planet so long that the atmosphere of another was poison to him. He had envied others a lot which it was constitutionally impossible for him to emulate. And he wept for his hereditary infirmities and failings. Could a man be blamed for regretting his ancestors and cursing the fate, or the necessity which drove them into those northern fastnesses at the early stages of their existence? Here again the white man was to blame, for he, in his eagerness and greed, had seized upon the cream of the earth for himself and had driven all inferior or weaker peoples to all the four corners of the globe. And of all the unfortunate, subordinate races, the Eskimo was the most unfortunate, and their condition savored of discrimination on the part of the powers that governed or ordained things.
As our hero had only one ambition while in the north--an insane notion to go south--he had only one ambition while in California--an overpowering ambition to go north.
"Oh, for a mantle of snow, and a canopy of ice!" he shouted. "And, oh, for one touch on mine of my Lola's cold, sweet cheek. Oh, for the frozen, hopeless northland, even if its condition means the perpetual doom and obliteration of the whole Eskimo race!"
They shipped him north as fast as steam could carry him, and from Dawson he went on foot, becoming day by day more and more his natural self. When he neared his igloo he found his Lola standing with outstretched arms to welcome him even as she had mourned his departure, and he realized for the first time that the love and companionship of one woman is worth more than all the riches and wonders of the world put together. They embraced each other with the grip of a vice, in the awful power of their natures, and their affection was as genuine as the most civilized variety. And there he threw himself on the earth and hugged the snow of his dear northland.
[The end]
R. D. Cumming's short story: Of The High Class Eskimo
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