SHAKING HANDS WITH SIBERIA

The ship's prow was turned northward after work on the whale had been finished. I expected we would soon run into the ice again. We sailed on and on, but not a block of ice big enough to make a highball did we sight. The white floes and drifts and the frozen continent floating southward, along the coasts of which we had cruised for whales and which had surrounded us and held us captive for three weeks, had disappeared entirely. The warm water from the south, the southern winds, and the spring sunshine had melted the ice. Its utter disappearance savored of magic.

A long hilly coast rose ahead of us covered with grass, barren of trees or shrubs, dotted with blackened skeletons of old ice—an utterly desolate land. It was Siberia. We put into a bight called St. Lawrence Bay. There was an Eskimo village on the shore. The huts were made of whale ribs covered with hides of walrus and reindeer. In the warm weather, some of the hides had been removed and we saw the white gleaming bones of the frame work. We could see the dogs with tails curling over their backs frisking about and could hear their clamor as they bayed the great white-winged thing that had come up from over the sea's verge.

In this first part of July it was continuous day. The sun set at eleven o'clock at night in the northwest. Its disc remained barely below the horizon—we could almost see its flaming rim. A molten glow of color made the sky resplendent just above it as it passed across the north pole. It rose at 1:30 in the morning high in the northeast. All the time it was down a brilliant twilight prevailed—a twilight like that which in our temperate zone immediately follows the sinking of the sun behind a hill. We could see to read without difficulty.

Soon boats and kyacks were putting off from the village. When we were still a mile or two out, strange craft came alongside and Eskimo men, women, and children swarmed aboard. Very picturesque they looked in clothes made of the skins of reindeer, hair seals, dogs, and squirrels, oddly trimmed and decorated with fur mosaics in queer designs. Some of the women wore over their furs a yellow water-proof cloak made of the intestines of fish, ornamented with needle-work figures and quite neat looking.

The men and the older women had animal faces of low intelligence. The young girls were extremely pretty, with glossy, coal-black hair, bright black eyes, red cheeks, lips like ripe cherries, and gleaming white teeth forever showing in the laughter of irresponsibility and perfect health.

The captain ordered a bucket of hardtack brought out in honor of our guests. The biscuit were dumped in a pile on the main deck. The Eskimos gathered around in a solemn and dignified circle. The old men divided the bread, giving an equal number of hardtack to each.

This ceremony of welcome over, the Eskimos were given the freedom of the ship, or at least, took it. We kept a careful watch upon them, however, to see that they took nothing else. Several of the Eskimo men had a sufficient smattering of English to make themselves understood. They had picked up their small vocabulary among the whalers which every spring put in at the little ports along the Siberian and Alaskan coasts. One of them had been whaling to the Arctic Ocean aboard a whale ship which some accident had left short handed. He spoke better English than any of the others and was evidently regarded by his fellow townsmen as a wonderfully intellectual person. He became quite friendly with me, showing his friendship by begging me to give him almost everything I had, from tobacco to clothes. He constantly used an Eskimo word the meaning of which all whalers have learned and it assisted him materially in telling his stories—he was a great story teller. This word was "pau,"—it means "nothing." I never knew before how important nothing could be in human language. Here is a sample of his use of "nothing:"

"Winter," he said, "sun pau; daylight pau. All dark. Water pau; all ice. Land pau, all snow. Eskimo igloo, plenty fire. Moss in blubber oil all time blaze up. Cold pau. Plenty hot. Eskimo, he sweat. Clothes pau. Good time. Hot time. Eat plenty. Sleep."

This seemed to me a good, vivid description. The picture was there, painted chiefly with "nothing."

Of course he had the English words "yes" and "no" in his assortment, but his way of using them was pure Eskimo. For instance: "You wear no clothes in winter?" I asked him. "No," he replied. "No?" I echoed in surprise. "Yes," he said. His "yes" merely affirmed his "no." It sometimes required a devious mental process to follow him.

A pretty girl came up to me with a smile and an ingratiating air.

"Tobac," she said holding out her hand.

I handed her my smoking plug. She took half of it at one cavernous bite and gave the remainder back to me, which I thought considerate. She enjoyed the tobacco. She chewed upon it hard, working her jaws as if she were masticating a dainty tidbit. Did she expectorate? Not a drop. She evidently did not propose to waste any of the flavor of that good weed. Neither did she get sick—that pretty Eskimo girl. At last when she had chewed for twenty minutes or so, she removed her quid and stuck it behind her right ear. She chewed it at intervals later on, always between times wearing it conspicuously behind her ear.

I rather expected our guests would depart after a call of an hour or so. Not so. They had come to stay indefinitely. When they became tired they lay on deck—it didn't make any particular difference where—and went quietly to sleep. They seemed to have no regular time for sleeping. I found Eskimos asleep and awake during all my deck watches. As it was day all the twenty-four hours, I wondered if these people without chronometers did not sometimes get their hours mixed up.

New parties of Eskimos kept coming to see us. One of these had killed a walrus and the skin and the raw meat, butchered into portable cuts, lay in the bottom of their big family canoe of hide. The boat was tied alongside and the Eskimos came aboard. If any of them became hungry, they climbed down into the canoe and ate the raw walrus meat, smacking their lips over it. When the sailors would lean over the rail to watch this strange feat of gastronomy, the Eskimos would smile up at them with mouths smeared with blood and hold out a red chunk in invitation. It was their joke.

We loafed in St. Lawrence Bay for more than a week. We could not have sailed away if we had wanted to, for all the time there was a windless calm and the sea heaved and fell, unruffled by a ripple, like a vast sheet of moving mercury.

It was weather characteristic of the Arctic summer—a beautiful dream season of halcyon, silver seas, opalescent haze, and tempered golden sunlight. To the men in skin clothes, it was warm weather, but one had only to step from sunshine to shadow to pass from summer to winter. One perspired in the sunlight; in the shadow there was frost, and if the spot were damp, a coating of ice.

I went duck hunting with a boat's crew one day. Mr. Winchester, who headed the boat, was a good hand with a shotgun and brought back a fine bag. One of the ducks, knocked over on the wing, dropped within a few feet of shore. When we rowed to pick it up, I touched Siberia with an oar. I felt that it was a sort of handshake with the Asiatic continent. I never landed and never got any nearer.

In a little while, most of us had traded for a number of nicely tanned hair-seal skins and had set the Eskimo women and girls to work tailoring trousers and vests and coats. It was marvelous how dexterous they were at cutting and sewing. They took no measurements and yet their garments fitted rather snugly. Before they began sewing they softened the edges of the skins by chewing them. They wore their thimble on their index finger and drove the needle into one side of the skins and jerked it through from the other side with such amazing rapidity that the two movements seemed one. A good seamstress—and all seemed remarkably expert—could cut and sew a pair of trousers in an hour, a bit of work it would have taken a sailor a day or two to accomplish. We could hire a seamstress for an entire morning or afternoon for five hardtack. A bowl of soup with a piece of salt horse was sufficient pay for a day's labor.

My old skin clothes, which I had obtained from the slop-chest were greasy, dirty, and worn and I had an Eskimo woman make me a complete new outfit from hair-seal skins I purchased from her husband. She cut out a coat, vest, and trousers, spreading the skins on deck and using a knife in cutting. She sat cross-legged on deck most of the day sewing on the garments and I carefully superintended the job. She ornamented the coat with a black dogskin collar and edged it down the breast and around the bottom with the same material, which set off the glistening seal skin attractively. I also bought a new squirrel skin shirt with a hood attached. When I appeared on deck in my new toggery, I felt quite presentable.

However, I was not alone in gorgeous regalia. Most of my shipmates were soon looking like animate statues of silver in their shining seal skins. Our turns up and down deck became fashion parades. We strutted like peacocks, it must be admitted, and displayed our fine clothes to best advantage under the eyes of the Eskimo beauties.

It remained for Peter, our rolypoly little Swede, to make the only real, simon-pure conquest. In his new clothes, which sparkled like a silver dollar fresh from the mint, and with his fresh boyish face, he cut quite a handsome figure and one little Eskimo maid fell a victim to his fatal fascinations. "'E's killed her dead," said English Bill White. She was perhaps fifteen years old, roguish eyed, rosy cheeked, and with coal-black hair parted in the middle and falling in two braids at the sides of her head. Plump and full of life and high spirits, the gay little creature was as pretty as any girl I saw among the Eskimos.

Peter was all devotion. He gave his sweetheart the lion's share of all his meals, feasting her on salt horse, hardtack, soup, and gingerbread which to her primitive palate that never had risen to greater gastronomic heights than blubber and raw meat must have seemed epicurean delicacies. The sailors called the girl "Mamie," which was very different from the Eskimo name her mother spluttered at her. If Peter was missed at any time, it was only necessary to locate the charming Miss Mamie, and there by her side Peter would be found, speaking only with his eyes and making distinct progress.

Sometimes Peter, finding optical language not entirely satisfactory, pressed into his service the intellectual Eskimo as interpreter. These three-cornered efforts at love making were amusing to all who chanced to overhear them;—the dashing young Romeo could scarcely talk English himself, the interpreter could talk even less and the object of Peter's adoration could not speak a word.

As the upshot of this interesting affair, the little lady and Peter plotted between them that Peter should run away from the ship and live among her people. This plan appealed to Peter who was a cold weather product himself and almost as primitive as his inamorata. But Peter made one mistake;—he took old Nels Nelson, his countryman and side-partner, into his confidence. Nelson loved the boy like a father and did his best to persuade him to give up the idea, but Peter was determined.

One twilight midnight with the sun just skimming below the horizon, Peter wrapped from head to foot in an Eskimo woman's mackintosh of fish intestine, with the hood over his head and half hiding his chubby face, climbed over the rail into an Eskimo boat with a number of natives, his sweetheart among them, and set out for shore. Nelson and several sailors watched the boat paddle away, but no one but Nelson knew that the person bundled up in the native raincoat was Peter. The boat got half a mile from the brig. Then Nelson could stand it no longer. The strain was too much. He rushed back to the quarter-deck where old Gabriel was walking up and down.

"Peter's run away," Nelson blurted out. "There he goes in that boat. That's him dressed up like a woman in fish-gut oil-skins."

Without ado Gabriel called aft the watch, manned a boat, and set out in pursuit. The Eskimo canoe was quickly overhauled and Peter was captured and brought back aboard.

"You ben bigges' fool for sech a li'l' boy I ever have see," said Gabriel severely. "You don't know you freeze to deaf up here in winter time, no?"

Peter had nothing to say. He was ashamed, but he was mad, too. He was not punished. When Captain Shorey learned of the escapade, he merely laughed. Peter took the matter quite to heart and pouted for days. To the end of the voyage, he still dreamed of his Eskimo sweetheart and of the happiness that might have been his. Every time he spoke of her his eyes grew bright. "She was fine gal," he used to say.