Sitika

by Bertram Atkey

 

SITIKA

BY BERTRAM ATKEY

SITIKA was an Eskimo whose body perambulated Greenland in the days when there were no Arctic missionary settlements. But his soul was of these days. That is to say his body was savage and his spirit semi-civilized. Long years since the bears have eaten the body of him, but it is quite probable that his wraith still flits anxiously about the polar wastes which were his haunts in life.

Sitika himself did not know that his soul was aloof from and in advance of the spirit of his period. He did not even guess that he was in any degree different from his fellows—until the ankoot, or sorcerer, of his tribe suggested that Sitika’s mother should be taken out and put in a hole in the everlasting ice and left there. To perish, of course. It seemed to Sitika, then, as grunted acquiescence came from the other inhabitants of the snow house, that something hot rolled bodily over in the neighborhood of his heart, and he flickered an eye across his shoulder to assure himself that his seal spears were within easy reach.

Sitika’s mother was old—very old. And it is extremely likely that, had she been the mother of any man but Sitika, she would have been lain in the ice years before the ankoot introduced the notion. She had worn her teeth completely away to stumps during a lifetime largely spent in chewing tough skins into the state of suppleness necessary to render them fit to use for raiment or kayak patching, or snow-shoe thongs; she was feeble and useless with age; and, despite her years, she yet managed to eat sufficient blubber to make the ankoot discontented with the smallness of the ration which fell to him.

Sitika’s mother was aware of all her deficiencies, and she blinked sorrowfully and ashamedly as the sorcerer explained that it was her turn to go out to the ice. She was not afraid, for she knew the custom of her people. The Arctic gives too sparingly to the able-bodied to encourage weaklings and encumbrances. The tribe would find it hard to keep from starvation this winter, and, for the sake of the majority, the able-bodied must be fed, and since somebody must starve or die, the useless must go. That, in those days, was the custom of the Eskimo, and Sitika’s mother was too old to dream of attempting to live her life or die her death by any but the established rules. She had seen too many of the infirm laid in the ice-hole for that. No thought of protest entered her poor old head, only—she did not want to die. It was pleasant and warm in the big hut—to sprawl on the sleeping bench mumbling a strip of blubber. She had lived through so many winters in that way, warm and drowsy. But out there it would be cold, and bitter, and hard—even for the dead. Under the malignant polar wind in the ice, the gliding foxes would find her body, or the haggard, restless old he bears, who could not sleep in the winter but hunted desperately throughout the long Arctic night, would come to her. Sitika’s mother looked dully across at her son, with a remote pleading in her eyes, so remote that it might be Sitika only imagined it. For even as we, feeling that we are dying in the natural fashion of man’s death, do not plead to our own people to save us from it, so Sitika’s mother did not plead to her son to save her from the ice-hole. Her appetites, limited almost to extinction as they were, may have shone protestingly in her eyes.

But Sitika saw. And in his brain vague, dull memories awoke and stirred, memories of warmth his mother had given him years and years before, of pleasant things that had come direct from her when he was little and she was at her zenith. His eyes burned at the back and he reached behind him.

He stood up swiftly, naked and unlovely, and his spears clattered softly as he took them all but one into his left hand. He realized with a shock that the body of the ankoot was the sleekest of all the bodies in the hut, and that his mother was the most emaciated.

“No!” he said suddenly—and sent a spear through the fat throat of the sorcerer, who fell, clutching aimlessly at the spear-shaft, staring, amazed and stupidly, and died after the fashion of most sorcerers.

Sitika glared round, and saw that his people were regarding him with awe and horror. They were shockingly afraid—one cannot kill an ankoot and escape evil, they muttered, trembling. The spirit of the sorcerer would return and destroy the whole tribe. The men reached for their spears, so that when the spirit of the ankoot came again the dead body of Sitika should be there to appease and satisfy it.

But Sitika looked bluntly at them, and they waited, doubtfully, glancing from the dead sorcerer to his living killer, and it grew in upon them that they were afraid also of a new thing—of an expression in Sitika’s eyes. Sitika was nearer intellectual man than they, and they held off from him as beasts hold off from their trainer.

And he told them that this was the end of all ankoots in that tribe, and the end of the ice-hole for the aged also. He said it, Sitika. The strong should feed the weak, he said—speaking from a hundred years in advance of his times—and the Spirit of the North in her own good time would take those whom she most desired. The Spirit of the North should take them or leave them, according to the food brought in by the hunters, but the ice-hole should take no more while they lived. They seemed to understand, for one or two replaced their spears in silence.

But Sitika was overthrowing a religion, which is not to be accomplished without a certain opposition. Suddenly he flung up his hand violently, ducking his head aside just in time to escape the spear of the ankoot’s nephew.

Sitika growled, ran at him viciously, and the spear-thrower died redly across the body of his kinsman.

In the uproar Sitika’s mother stole a lump of seal blubber from the lamp fuel unobserved. She did not understand it all very well, but—nobody was looking and she was hungry. If the ankoot had been alive she would never have dared, She remembered that, and was glad Sitika had killed him. And Sitika had said that nobody should go out to the ice-hole again. She felt vaguely comforted, but wondered if Sitika was mad. She had never known such a thing as this.

Again Sitika quieted the men—they had looked to see him blasted and were bewildered that he was not—and they fell back uneasily.

Then Sitika slipped on his furs and took the ankoot by the leg, and dragged him down the burrow, which was the door of the snow house. Presently he returned alone, and departed again with the nephew of the ankoot.

He came back with hands full of snow and cleaned the places where they had fallen. Then he stripped himself—nakedness indoors was another custom of the Eskimo before the missionaries introduced indoor clothing, and with them, consumption—and, all in profound silence, took the ankoot’s place on the sleeping-bench, the best, and prepared to sleep.

The others watched him dully for a time. Then, one by one, they, too, slept.

Outside the polar wind passed eternally across the dark and desolate region of ice and frozen snow, flurries of sleet swept out of the dark, ricochetting fantastically, from the humped snow huts of the Eskimos’ winter quarters; and presently there came noiselessly up-wind two huge and ghostly shapes that snuffed loudly at that which they found awaiting them outside one of the huts.

II

When Sitika, gloomy and sullen, went silently out into the semi-darkness of the next day, to watch for a seal at an ice-hole, there was no ankoot nor ankoot's nephew. Only a long line of blurred pits—tracks of two bears, half obliterated with newly fallen snow, but still enormous. Even Sitika was amazed at the size of the tracks. He stood for a moment looking north along the trail of the bears—the tracks came out of the north and returned to the north. The wind swung steadily out of the north also, bitter, and pitiless, and everlasting. For a long time, a very long time, Sitika stared mutely up-wind, a dull foreboding of disaster knocking at his heart.

Ordinarily he would have called some of the hunters and—this being a time of famine—together they would have trailed the bears, and striven to kill at least one of them. But now he waited staring, until he was joined by other of the hunters. These, too, looked thoughtfully at the tracks, following them with their eyes until they were lost among the tall and ghostly hummocks of ice that shouldered up out of the gloom—moveless, yet like an army of giants white-furred and shapeless. The hunters glanced furtively at Sitika when they lifted their eyes from the far end of the trail.

“Bears—very big bears,” said Sitika, at last, looking first at the spears of his tribesmen, and then at the winter quarters of the dogs.

There was uneasy silence.

“Meat! These bears will not have traveled far,” said Sitika, with sinister meaning, and wheeled toward the dogs’ quarters.

He took two strides as if to fetch his sleigh. But the others shouldered together, and one of them spoke.

“Oh, Sitika, the bears came out of the north, and returned to the north; and the bodies are gone with the bears. Spirits come from the north. These are no bears that we can kill with spears. The spirit of the ankoot and the son of his sister. They came for their bodies—and they will return.”

All the hunters muttered together, glancing fearfully from Sitika to the north.

Sitika looked bleakly at them with bloodshot eyes.

“Kill seal then! Crouch by the air-holes—as women crouch!” he said bitterly, and strode off toward his dogs, squat and bulky in his many furs.

He harnessed his team to his sleigh; they were snarling and dangerous with hunger, but sprang to their places cringing from the whip. Then he drove off in silence, down the trail of the bears.

They watched him go. Each man of them was assured in his heart that he went to certain death. They knew that those who had borne away the bodies of the dead ankoot and his kinsman were not bears, but spirits, fierce and ravening from the ghost-haunted north; the spirits of Sitika’s outcast dead. True, the tracks were bear tracks, very enormous, but a spirit can go abroad in any form. Bear, narwhal, walrus, fox, gull. Had not the dead ankoot himself told them that a narwhal which had played daily along the ice-holes at the end of the last summer, was the spirit of a tribesman who had been drowned? And the ankoot knew all the ways of the spirits—he had said so. He was a great ankoot—although he ate very much when he was planning his miracles—a great ankoot, and he would surely await Sitika among the hummocks.

The hunters, straining their eyes after the sleigh, muttered these things among themselves.

Sitika was wise, they said, to go to the spirits of his own free will. They would kill him more gently, perhaps, for that he had saved them trouble and had not defied them. Spirits do not like defiance. The ankoot had said so often.

The sleigh vanished round a hummock. The faint, far crack of Sitika’s curling, snaky whip came remotely across the ice to them—and, so far as they were concerned, that was the death of Sitika. They turned back to the huts to talk. Little enough they had to talk of usually.

They told Sitika’s mother that he had driven in desperate haste to the spirit-bears, and that, therefore, he was dead. She did not seem to understand, and gave no sign that she was distressed, except by hunger.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

Many hours later those inside the hut heard one moving along the burrow, and as they stared, stiff with fear, the heavy skins that hung over the entry were moved, and Sitika came in, gray with cold and drawn with hunger.

He looked contemptuously at them, and they received him as though he were an evil but very powerful spirit.

“There are no spirits!” he said blasphemously, and took lumps of blubber from the lamp and ate wolfishly.

“I came up with the bears. They are very huge. They were full and sleepy and they ran away,” he said simply; drove out with a glance the buck who had appropriated his place on the sleeping-bench, stripped, stretched himself, and was silent.

That night the bears came again to another hut, and clawed through the burrow, built of solid ice blocks and armored with snow frozen like iron though it was, and took toll of the warm crowd within. The survivors, half-clothed, and horribly frost bitten, split up among the huts, were moaning with terror, and talking incoherently of bears that were twice a man’s height and were strong enough to smash in the huts’ roofs with one stroke of their mighty paws. Sitika said nothing. Only he noted how every man in the hut turned his eyes upon him at the end of the tale.

“To-morrow we will await them, and kill them,” he said. ‘There are two bears against many men, many dogs, and many spears.”

But the bucks said nothing. Sitika was not civilized enough to shrug his shoulders, but the expression in his little eyes amounted to the same thing.

Four times the bears broke into the huts that winter, and scores of times they pounded upon those whose roofs were too solidly built and frozen to injure. Sitika became accustomed to hearing their muffled snarling roars overhead. To him they were no more than unusually large bears driven from their own haunts by the long-sustained and bitter winter.

But to the others they were spirits, and but that toward the end of the winter Sitika was the only one who would hunt at any distance from the huts, and, consequently, brought in more food than any combined four of the hunters the tribe would have speared both him and his mother, and left them outside the huts as a peace offering. Even as it was Sitika slept with his spears ready gripped in his hand.

But at last the wind seemed, one day, to blow without its full ruthlessness, and the dogs, emaciated, and feeble, seemed to liven a little. There was a smell of moisture in the air, and the ice-floe rang somehow less sharply under the bone sleigh runners. Presently the surface of the floe grew wet and the ice rotted slightly round the seal holes. Then, one by one, lanes of water appeared in the ice, slowly and few at first, but gradually increasing in size and number. There were slow, eerie, quaking movements underfoot as though the floe were really a monstrous live thing awakening very reluctantly from sleep, and the air trembled with huge ice noises, The long polar night was nearly over.

Spring was at hand, and the floe was breaking up. And the bucks grew bolder with the approach of easy hunting. They muttered openly before Sitika now. But Sitika said little. He was trusting to a prosperous summer to show how little the ankoot had really helped them. For even the heathen bow down before the irresistible logic of the stomach. Hitherto, the ankoot had always taken credit for the good and successful summers. The bad ones he had been accustomed to ignore. Sitika wanted a plentiful summer with no ankoot in the background.

They came to Sitika in a body one day, while he was overhauling his kayak for the new season. He saw purpose in their eyes, and took up his ever-ready spears.

“Well,” he said, “you can kill me—but I have five spears here and that will be five dead among you before I am dead.”

They hesitated, for there were not five among them who desired to die. Then one spoke:

“Oh, Sitika, we go now into the summer encampment. But if you are with us the ankoot—the bears—will come. It is for you that the bears come out of the north, seeking and hungry. We have talked all together, and we say that you cannot be with us in the summer camp.”

Sitika looked them over, and he saw that this time it was their will which would prevail. Unconsciously they had learned the fine art of combination. He knew they would not fight if they could avoid it, but he also knew that they were determined to fight rather than permit him to join them at their summer encampment. They were afraid of him, but they were more afraid of the spirits that chose to hunt him in the guise of bears.

“Kill the bears, Sitika, and we shall know that they are no spirits, And we shall not be afraid any more,” they said, one-ideaed, like children.

“1 shall kill them,” said the outcast, and began to carry his frail kayak to the open water.

“Place my skins and my goods here,” he said, imperatively, indicating a spot. They stared after him as he went to the water, launched the kayak, entered it, and laced himself in. His paddle rose and fell, and the narrow canoe-like craft darted out across the water.

Now, this was no more than a trial trip for Sitika to discover how his kayak had stood the winter. But, as it chanced, some five hundred yards out floated a small iceberg—the water was dotted with them, but this was the nearest—and suddenly there was a murmur among the watching Eskimos. One of them, keener sighted than the others, pointed to a shape, two shapes, that were moving on this berg.

“The bears!” he said quaking.

Even as he spoke Sitika, out on the water, seemed to observe the huge white brutes, for the kayak stopped suddenly, and lay rising and falling buoyantly like a resting gull. Sitika was thinking it over. One bear is more than the average Eskimo is eager to attack, even in these days, when many of them possess rifles of a kind. And in Sitika’s time the killing of a bear was a matter which taxed the resources of the whole tribe.

Here there were two—and two of the hugest.

At last the kayak shot forward again, and the watchers muttered gutturally in their excitement. Sitika, half believing that he was paddling to his doom, had decided to attack the bears. It had occurred to him that if he were killed his spirit would meet those of the ankoot and his kinsman, and he had no doubt that, on level terms, he could deal with the spirits as he had dealt with the living.

The kayak flashed right under the terraces and miniature pinnacles of the little berg, and the watchers saw the swift movement of Sitika’s arm as he launched his first spear—at no more than three spears’ range. But the bear at which it was aimed twisted his snaky head as the spear flew, and it pricked him in the neck some six inches behind the eye.

The angry coughing roar of the big bear rolled across the water to the fascinated group that stared from the shore.

Then the kayak had darted back clear of the berg as both bears took to the water silently as otters; they headed swiftly for the dancing kayak. The paddle whirled, dripping, as Sitika maneuvered desperately. The tribesmen could see that he was trying to get the bears far enough apart to give him time to make his thrust at one before the other was upon him. But the white bear of the Arctic is almost as much at home in the water as on the ice or land, and he is enormously swift, despite his heavy build. Twice, it seemed, the kayak swept out under the very paws of one of the bears as the big brute surged up half out of the water to strike.

Minutes passed, and the watchers moved uneasily as they noticed that Sitika seemed to tire. Time and again the kayak escaped swamping by a miracle, wheeling out of danger by no more than the thickness of a man’s body. Never once did Sitika have leisure to take a hand from his flying paddle.

Then suddenly, after a wild and perilous evolution, the watchers heard Sitika shout like a mad thing. The bears had fallen farther away from each other. Sitika whirled the kayak facing them, and checked so that the bears and the kayak formed, as it were, a triangle, with Sitika at the apex.

The bears headed savagely at the stationary kayak, converging so that they would meet at the spot where Sitika waited.

They came on, swimming strongly, until no more than three yards separated them—two yards—one—and their bodies rose a little in the water. Two mighty forepaws heaved up, streaming, and the brutes struck at the same instant—an instant too late. Sitika had judged with desperate accuracy, and he literally snatched the kayak out from under the double blow, as a fox may snatch his foot from the snapping jaws of a trap.

And each of the bears took the other’s blow in a haze of spray that shut them from sight for a second. A choked roar of agony and surprise came dully out of the smother, and the kayak circled gaily, facing the bears.

Sitika saw that the head of one of them was ripped bare from the ears—the raw skin lapped over the nose of the beast in shreds, and one of its eyes was gone. It wallowed for a moment like a rudderless ship, uttering strangled roars. The other had come off little better. Its nose, between the forehead and the nostrils, was smashed, and it seemed unable to breathe properly.

Sitika took a spear tipped with narwhal horn and darted alongside the first bear. It ignored him now, rubbing its paw across its injured eye. Then with all his force Sitika sent his spear into the socket of the remaining eye, striking his paddle forward and up with one hand at the exact second the spear left his glove. He won clear of the instant flurry of foam, and waited. Not long, for there was a sudden swift smoothing of the disturbed waters as, his brain burst and shattered by the desperate spear-thrust, the bear suddenly sank.

The other had already given up the fight, and was swimming toward the berg, breathing chokingly as though it inhaled half air and half water. Reckless with triumph Sitika drove alongside.

“Aha!” he snarled hysterically. “This is the end of all ankoots for my tribe!”

The bear rolled a little red eye back at him, sinister and cunning, and menacing.

“Do you hear, oh, spirit?” said Sitika.

He dropped back a little as he selected another spear. Then he went alongside once more.

“Look at me, spirit!” he called.

The red eye rolled back again.

“Ough!” grunted Sitika, thrusting this time with the accuracy of confidence.

Then he turned and paddled slowly back to the edge of the ice, and the watchers went down to meet him as dogs go to their master for a thrashing.

They had only one reward to offer him, and that they offered.

He was already chief, so they made him ankoot!

And even Sitika was not sufficiently civilized to see the humor of that.