Page:Eskimo Folk-Tales (1921).djvu/177

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ESKIMO FOLK-TALES
153

Then seeing there was no other thing to be done, he covered up the body at the foot of the cliff below the guillemot’s nest, and went home. And told the others of his place that he had covered him there below the guillemot’s nest because he was dead. And the umiak and its crew of women stayed there, and wintered in that place.

Next summer, when they were making ready to go southward again, they had no man to go with them. But on the way that wifeless man procured food for them by catching fish, and when he had caught enough to fill a pot, he rowed in with his catch.

And in this way he led them southward. When they came to their own country, they had grown so fond of him that they would not let him go northward again. And so that wifeless man took a wife from among those women, because they would not let him go away to the north.

It is said that the skeleton of that wifeless man lies there in the south to this day.