THE DEVIL DRUM

THE DEVIL DRUM⁠[19]

By BARRETT WILLOUGHBY

(From The Century Magazine)

O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom.

Up from the kashim, the underground council-house, came the beat of the devil-drum, pulsing hollow and strange amid the scream of the gale and the rumble of icebergs grinding below the snow-buried Eskimo village.

O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom.

Ah-king-ah, the medicine-man, was trying to change the wind. Day and night for two moons the polar blizzard had split its force on the bleak island pyramid thrusting up through the ice of Bering Strait. It was a wind of death, a devil’s wind, piling floe on floe until the ice grounded, yet keeping it ever a-stir. No life could exist beneath the pack or on top of it, and in the igloos clinging to the white slope of the shore the people, unable to hunt, were facing starvation.

O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom.

In the temporary lull the hollow rhythm grew louder, penetrating the walls of the missionary’s igloo, where he, the only white man on the island, sat alone before a table clutching an open book with both mittened hands. The twilight of the arctic noon made no impression on the thick frost-crust of the window, but the wan rays of a kerosene-lamp fell on the volume, and on the missionary’s gray hair showing above the dropped hood of his reindeer parka. With every breath a shaft of vapor clouded the chill air, for his supply of driftwood had vanished while the blizzard was in its first month, and after he had shared his oil with the village families there was little left for use in his Eskimo heating-lamp.

The reverberation of the devil-drum was suddenly pierced by the wail of a wolf-dog dying under the teeth of its hunger-maddened mates. The man raised sunken eyes, blue and fervid with a terrible anxiety, and listened. The sounds of cannibalistic ravening sent a tremor through his body.

“God—God—” he flattened his palms on the open Bible and strained his thin face upward in desperate supplication—“God, Father, change the wind!” During a moment’s silence his gaze remained fixed on something beyond the blackened ceiling of the igloo, beyond the driven ice-dust of the blizzard. Then in a voice that gathered confidence as he proceeded he filled the room with ringing phrases from the Book:

“He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven: and by his power he brought in the south wind.

“He rained flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered fowls like as the sands of the sea.

“And He let it fall in the midst of their camp, round about their habitations.

“So they did eat and were well filled.”

O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom, the devil-drum beat a barbarous amen.

“They did eat and were well filled!” The missionary closed the Bible and firmly, as one who has found new courage, repeated the words in the Eskimo tongue. He rose from the table, a lean, little man even in his heavy furs, and crossed over to a corner where a canned-milk box did duty as a cupboard. From the curled bacon rind that hung there he cut a thin slice and slipped it hungrily into his mouth. Chewing a bit of it eased the gnawing in his stomach, which had not yet grown accustomed to one meal a day, a ration made necessary since he had divided the last of his provisions with the village.

Opening a door at the back of the igloo he made his stooping way into another larger room—the schoolhouse and church his own hands had built so hopefully six months before. Under his stiff fingers the light flared up from a bracket lamp, revealing a small wall-blackboard which had never known a chalk mark and the yellow lumber of benches that had yet to feel the contact of Eskimo garments.

In the beginning the Eskimos had treated him with the good-natured tolerance of their race. They accepted his presents, ate his food, and begged or borrowed from him in accordance with their code: The white man who outwits us is a better man than we, and we admire him; the white man we outwit is a fool. The unsuspecting little missionary, confident that he was making great strides into their friendship, was unusually generous; but the moment he tried to preach the word of his God, the moment he attempted to interfere with their customs, he found himself up against a glacial wall of resentment.

“Leave us alone! Leave us alone!” Milli-ru-ak, the hunter, had said to him in the squirrel-hunting season when the missionary went to remonstrate with him for biting off the nose of his wife’s lover. “Leave us alone! Does the Eskimo force his way on the white man who invades his country? Why does the white man force his way on the Eskimo? Leave us alone!”

“But Milli-ru-ak, to bite off the nose of thy neighbor——”

“Listen, white man, to the law of my fathers!” The hunter’s dark eyes narrowed. “Had my neighbor come to me and said: ‘Milli-ru-ak, thy woman hath found favor in my eyes. Let us change wives during the squirrel-hunting, that our families may be allied when the children are born’; then would I have been proud that my neighbor should have taken his pleasure with my wife and I with his. But my neighbor was without honor. He waited until I was gone to the hunt, then like a thief he goes to my woman. I found him there. I bit off his nose. Such,” said Milli-ru-ak, turning on his heel, “was the just law of my fathers.”

Aghast at this disclosure, the little missionary persistently attempted to convince the hunter of his sins, and after a week Milli-ru-ak shot at him—by accident. The bullet passed harmlessly between the white man’s arm and his body, embedding itself in the shaky pulpit he was building at the time. He could see the splintered hole now as he placed his open Bible upon it and reached for the dangling bell-rope behind the pulpit.

The ding-dong that marked the Sabbath day was caught up by the blizzard and carried with the boom of the devil-drum out over the polar wastes. Every Sunday and Wednesday since the completion of the meeting-house the missionary had doggedly rung the first and second bell summoning an indifferent people to listen to the word of his God. Not a soul had ever responded.

He rang the first bell longer than usual. Now that the magic of Ah-king-ah had failed to change the wind, now that the dogs were starving, and the people were eating the last of the moldy seal-meat originally intended for the animals, surely, he thought, they were ready to abandon their ways of darkness for the light of Christianity.

He allowed the bell-rope to fall, and poured a bit of oil from a deflated seal-skin container into the stone lamp in the middle of the floor. When the flame flared up from the moss wick he held his hands over it. Not for himself would he have used any of the precious oil, but he hoped that some curious Eskimo might come and, seeing the fire, spread the news of it in the village. The people might come to him then, since there was no oil in the native igloos—no oil for heating, no oil for melting ice for water, no oil for cooking the moldy seal-meat. Only the medicine-man had oil now.

The dogs outside had quieted, and the voice of Ah-king-ah’s drum alone rode the gale. The little missionary, squatting over the lamp, kept turning his thin, expectant face toward the outside door. He was always looking for it to open, but it never did. Fifteen minutes dragged by before he rose and rang the second bell. In the silence that followed its last clang the oom-oom of Ah-king-ah’s drum mocked him with his failure in the service of his Master.

Across the vapor of his breath the rows of clean new benches reproached him with their emptiness, and from the bare wooden walls frost-pegs on every nail-head pointed at him like accusing white fingers. He turned slowly and, mounting the pulpit, stood, his hands on the open Bible, his blue eyes looking down wistfully on the cheerless room. The smoky bracket lamp behind him threw his shadow, long and grotesque, across the bare benches, as if in pity trying to cover them. The sound of the devil-drum filtered in faint, taunting, but the missionary cleared his throat and, as was his wont, began his lonely Sunday service. His voice, forlorn and strange at first, grew firmer as he proceeded.

At the end he closed his Bible and turned out the light. There was a dispirited sag to his narrow shoulders as he went back to his living room. Today, because death was so near to them all, the Eskimos’ animal-like indifference to him and his message made him feel small and forsaken; made him ache with the terrible longing of the lonely white man for his kind. For a moment he stood uncertain, his breath clouding the cold, stale atmosphere of the igloo; then with the air of one banishing personal weaknesses he shoved his parka hood over his head, drew the long fur about his face, and made his way out through the snow tunnel leading from his door to the open.

The force of the gale struck him flat against a trampled snow-bank where red stains still defied the covering of the wind-blown snow. Not a bone or a piece of fur remained of the dog who had died there an hour before.

The pallor of the arctic noon was filled with frost-dust borne on wind of such velocity that its passing was like the whiz of speeding bullets. Through the fur about his face the man peered at the ice-pack lying like a gray monster below him. Stationary it appeared at first, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the murky light, it became a thing of horrid life, heaving, quivering, forming itself into grotesque shapes with a slowness that was as sinister and relentless as death. Through the blizzard as far as he could see berg was creeping up over berg, grinding, crunching, to heights of twenty, thirty feet, until the masses tottered and crashed down on the other side, sending powdered ice streaming on the gale like ocean spray. The awful, insensate force loosed thus in a strange, unearthly land struck to the missionary’s soul with primeval terror. He felt puny, insignificant, cruelly at the mercy of that tremendous wind which was blowing the ice-pack down from the pole and maliciously grounding it in the shallow waters of the strait. For an instant something primitive in him was near to endowing it with the malevolent personality the Eskimos were even then trying to placate through Ah-king-ah’s drum.

“God, Father,” he prayed with sudden, panicky earnestness, “change the wind!”

O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom, reverberated the devil-drum.

Far out on the pack, where death was certain, a dark thing moved. It drew nearer the village, a great bull walrus scouting vainly for leads of open water that meant life to the small herd wallowing along in its wake. The scout rolled its three thousand pounds from side to side over the moving ice, dexterously fastening its tusks into the base of each berg and pulling itself to the top. On the pinnacle it reared still higher on its flippers, sniffing the air, tusked head swaying, short-sighted eyes trying to pierce the thick atmosphere. A moment of decision, and through the stridor of the elements a bellowing grunt rumbled deep and lone, signaling the advance of the herd. The valiant creature wallowed on from point to point of vantage, progressing through the zone of constant and terrible danger with a courageous dignity that won admiration even from the hungry missionary, who saw it as food, heat, life itself.

Opposite the village the walrus escaped the buckling of the ice by a hair’s-breadth, and drawing itself up to the peak of a moving berg, paused longer than usual to toss its mighty tusks in nervous apprehension of a new danger. Just as the berg began to topple it sensed the presence of human beings, and sent its wild trumpetings to warn the herd. The gallant animal, too late to take any thought for itself, plunged recklessly. A patch of black in the gaping angle between two floes, a slow closing of the frigid trap, and a long-drawn despairing roar wove itself through the hissing of the wind and the booming of the devil-drum. As it died away, the ice was marked by a seeping red stain.

The herd, panic-stricken at the loss of their leader, flung themselves forward to destruction, leaving crushed bodies to mark a spotted trail of death across the ice-field.

The last terror-driven creature was disappearing in the haze of the blizzard when a bent Eskimo battled his way down from the kashim to the edge of the heaving ice. He sheltered himself in the lee of a floe, looking long at the evidences of tragedy before him. Three wolf-dogs, scenting the blood, came out from under the snow and sat on their haunches to send their hunger-cry keening through the glimmering twilight. Starving though they were, neither man nor beasts dared venture over the few feet that lay between them and the meat tantalizing them on the creeping ice.

“O God, Father, change the wind!” prayed the missionary.

O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom, propitiated the devil-drum of Ah-king-ah.

II

When the white man saw the Eskimo, he started. Then tightening the hood of his parka against the stinging ice-dust, he began creeping cautiously away toward the sound of the drum. With every backward glance he quickened his progress. At last he would be able to enter the tunnel of the kashim while the guard was absent from his post; for though the missionary’s presence had been tolerated in the igloos, he had never yet succeeded in forcing his way into the council-house. He had convinced himself that once in the kashim, where he could address the assembled village, he could persuade them to abandon their heathen incantations and fling themselves on the mercy of God.

He pressed forward eagerly toward the open jaws of a whale which formed the entrance to the tunnel. Despite his haste, he came to an abrupt halt inside the passage. A queer cross of driftwood lay there, warning strangers against entering the kashim while the medicine-man was performing the weird mysteries of his calling.

The missionary’s hesitation was banished by his zeal, and a moment later he caught up a club from the stack of hunting implements near the opening and began to feel his uneven way along the icy stones of the tunnel. Half a dozen steps plunged him into darkness where every movement of his feet roused wolf-dogs driven to shelter by the storm. They leaped, savagely snarling their hatred of the disturbing white, and the missionary, knowing that one misstep would send him sprawling under their slavering jaws, laid about him with a club, beating a way through the starving animals.

He advanced blindly until a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel guided him to the opening in the floor of the kashim above. With a gasp of relief, he clutched the ladder that led upward, and mounted. He was not observed as he thrust his head into the dim room, hot and rank with ammoniacal smells and the reek of close-packed bodies. Miak, the witch-woman, huddled in one corner, tending the wick of the medicine-man’s stone lamp. It’s smoky light barely revealed the skin-covered shelf about the walls where hunters, stripped to the waist, sat cross-legged and cross-armed, their Mongolian faces set in earnest concentration. On the floor below them squatted the women, the old men, and the quiet children, naked as fishes.

All eyes were on Ah-king-ah, the medicine-man—Ah-king-ah who had successfully defied the Christianizing efforts of two former missionaries. Many were the tales told of the man’s cunning and strength not only among the Eskimo tribes, but among the whalers and the white traders of the arctic. In the Season of the Sun, when the tribes assembled on In-ga-lee-nay for the yearly Festival of the Whale, it took Miak, the witch-woman, three days to sing all the runes of his magic. Mightiest and richest shaman of the high North was Ah-king-ah, and great in the eyes of the Innuits, was the singing of Miak. So strong were his words of enchantment, he could plunge a hunting-knife through his vitals and dance with his necklace of bird-claws dangling from the point behind. So marvelous were his chants of wizardry that the sound of them formed kayaks, which took him far to the moonless land, where spirits of departed ivory-hunters yielded up their secrets to him. Ah-king-ah had the spirit of a crow. Ah-king-ah was a son of the wind. Ah-king-ah flew to the moon on the rays of the ice-blink. Once he flew to Siberia and challenged Nan-kum, the one-eyed shaman of the Chuckchees, to battle for the supremacy of the North. Had not all the village seen them fighting over the strait one morning—two great black crows whose raucous screams sent chills to the hearts of the bravest hunters? Mightiest shaman of the North was Ah-king-ah. With his beak he had wrenched off the leg of Nan-kum and flung it to the ice, cawing triumphantly, while the cripple flapped away defeated to Asiatic shores. Had not Milli-ru-ak found the leg where it fell, and was it not the leg of a man? And did not hunters returning from Siberian tundras report Nan-kum hobbling about on one leg ever after? Great indeed was Ah-king-ah, the medicine-man, and greater still would he be when he had changed the wind that was bringing famine to In-ga-lee-nay; greater and richer, for his price would be half the fruits of the village hunt for the space of six hunting moons.

The missionary’s eyes fell upon Ah-king-ah, half crouching in the middle of the floor. He was six feet tall, and nude except for a short, transparent garment made of the intestines of seals and trimmed with the crimson beaks of sea-parrots. He was beating upon the sacred devil-drum and chanting runes treating of the secret things of spirits, while his slim, naked feet made weird passes and performed strange, halting steps. With every movement his superb brown body rippled beneath the transparent shirt, setting all the beaks clattering in measured cadence. Behind him sat his three apprentices, swaying their naked bodies as they thumped the floor with sticks adorned with wolf-tails and gull-wings.

A sudden, sinuous motion, and Ah-king-ah was facing the west. The drum began a soft, rolling accompaniment to his rising, long-drawn croon. The tawny torsos of the hunters, moving to and fro from the hips, caught the light in zigzag waves.

Ah-king-ah’s tones grew louder, the tempo of the drum quickened, and its sound swelled until it became the voice of the wind, the thunder of crashing seas, the expression of nature in all her moods of fury. Swaying bodies responded. The people began to shout, to vent queer cries in unison, urging the shaman to greater efforts, deeper magic. Excitement grew until it was a very frenzy of earnestness that increased the heat of the kashim and started the sweat on the sixty bodies packed there. The reek of them was sickening, the deluge of sounds deafening.

Suddenly everything stopped. Ah-king-ah grew rigid. While the jade and amber beads dangling from the plugs in his lower lip quivered into life, his dark face took on the look of a demon. He flung out his arms, raised his chin, and sent an intonation soaring through the din of the gale.

“Thou, Almighty Devil——”

“Stop!” The small figure of the missionary catapulted to the middle of the room, one arm outstretched, one thin finger extended. “Stop, blasphemer!” he shouted, lost to all sense of danger in the fervor of his religious indignation. “Servant of Satan! son of Belial! wouldst thou anger God by thy sacrilege?” His pale eyes flashed in his twitching face, his accusing fingers trembled. “God alone is mighty! God alone is good! Oh, poor deluded ones,”—he turned pleadingly to the stunned and wondering people—“shut your ears to the evils of this sorcerer! Turn to the true God, and the blizzard will die, and you shall have meat!”

In the smoky light the astonished expressions on the dark faces changed. They grew sullen, grew threatening, in a silence that was pregnant with hostility. One wolf-step brought Ah-king-ah close to the white man, who became dwarfed and insignificant beside the powerful Eskimo. Ah-king-ah’s voice rang deep and mellow and supremely exalted after the thin, excited tones of the missionary.

“The white man has spoken, my brothers. But—did we of In-ga-lee-nay ask him for this God whom he says we insult? The white man has broken in upon us. He has crossed the sign that warns all strangers from our council-house. He has spoken. Listen now to Ah-king-ah and compare the wisdom of our tongues.” He paused until the murmur of approval went around the hunters’ shelf. “Well ye know that our people have lived on In-ga-lee-nay for ten times a thousand moons, happy in the customs of the ancient ones. Well ye know that our island and the waters about our island have ever been the abode of plenty, the breeding-place of birds, the dwelling-place of land-creatures, the home of sea-creatures. In all the land of the Innuits no village has been so favored by the spirits. In no village but thine could a man sit in his doorway and shoot enough seals to give a feast.”

The hunters grunted assent and gravely nodded their heads above their folded arms.

“Yea, my brothers, in the old time ye were happy. Your bellies were rounded and well filled. Skins of oil hung from your ceilings, and oil in plenty burned in the lamps of your igloos. This was the happy way of life under the wise laws of your fathers.” Ah-king-ah shifted his drum from one hip to the other and resumed with quickened utterance:

“Then comes this white man from the South. Uninvited, he pushes his way into your igloos with the words of his God. He comes with the ringing of the bell that is bad medicine in the ears of the almighty devil, tossing in his hands the ivory ball of the world. Then, my brothers, from the Place of Winds strange evils have come upon you. Why? Why, my brothers?”

He allowed a moment’s silence before he leaned forward and whispered slowly in a way that left the room ringing:

“The—almighty—devil—is—angry—with—you!”

In the hush that followed, the sound of the blizzard seeped in through the thick walls. Ah-king-ah suddenly flung himself upright, and continued in a voice that gathered volume as he proceeded:

“The almighty devil is angry with you for harkening to new words. Behold, your bellies grow flat against your backs. Your igloos grow cold. Your dogs consume each other. Oh, hear the words of Ah-king-ah, my brothers, whom the spirits have taught concerning these things of mystery.” The shaman wheeled, and with a quick, accusing finger transfixed the missionary. “It is because of this white man and his ringing bell that the devil is angry!” he shouted. “Wherefore, I say, let this white man take his God back to his own kind—back to the land of his fathers!” The words rose to a shriek. “Let him take his God back to the land of his fathers!”

The muttering of the crowd broke loose in a yelling frenzy as men, women, and children took up the cry. In the seething, sweating mass of humanity the missionary’s protests were lost; but the dauntless little man wrested himself from the hands of the medicine-man’s apprentices, snatched the drum from the great Ah-king-ah himself, and leaped to the now empty shelf of the kashim.

“Wait! Wait!” he commanded. His fist banged the devil-drum, which none but a shaman might touch on penalty of death. The very magnitude of the sacrilege bludgeoned the people into an aghast silence. “For the sake of your starving women and children, listen to the words of the white man’s God. In the Book of which I have told you it is written: ‘Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do!’ Oh, poor benighted ones, pray to God for help, and He will answer. For two months ye have watched Ah-king-ah with his devil tricks trying to change the wind. His words are a lie within his mouth! His sorceries are an abomination to the Lord. His——”

A lightning movement, and Ah-king-ah had snatched the drum to him.

“We do not know this man’s God, and we do not want to know Him!” The shaman’s mighty voice extinguished the missionary’s. “Let the white man take his God back to the land of his fathers!” The rumble of the drum began, and the shaman’s feet resumed their weird passes. Again and again he repeated the words. His rhythmic chanting and the booming of the drum woke the mob spirit in the people. The yelling crowd that surged threateningly toward the missionary was led by Milli-ru-ak, who leaped to the shelf and crooked his avid fingers about the white man’s throat.

“Stop, my brothers!” The medicine-man’s authoritative voice rang out. He had ceased his capering, and there was a light of apprehension in his wary eyes. “Milli-ru-ak, lay thy hands off! It is not well that the people of In-ga-lee-nay do violence to such as he, for well ye know how the long arm of the white man’s law reaches even from the South, where the sun sinks under the world, to the North, where the water ends. Have ye forgotten the fate of the three medicine-men, Sautock, Beelack, and O-tock-tock in the year of the Red Death? They did but bind the man O’Ryan until his spirit fled—the strange man O’Ryan, who swung the little cup of smoke before his God, and wore the long garment of a woman, with a cross about his neck. Remember my brothers, how in the Season of the Sun there came high chiefs from the South, mighty in anger, and with stars on their breasts glittering like the fishes’ scales? Remember how they hanged Sautock, Beelack, and O-tock-tock high on the slope back of the village? Have ye the minds of children that ye can forget the long moons their bones rattled in the chains as the east wind lipped them? I, Ah-king-ah, to whom spirits whisper, tell ye it is not well that we do violence to a white man,”—he woke again the rumbling rhythm of the drum—“but let him leave us in peace to practice the ways of our fathers. Let him take his God back to his own land!”

“Yea! Yea!” The people took up the words in a clamoring chorus, while the shaman’s three apprentices seized the protesting missionary and carried him to the opening in the floor. One of them placed his feet on the ladder. The other two pressed him down rung by rung until he found himself on the floor of the tunnel, where the eyes of starving dogs menaced him.

He stood uncertain for a moment while the oom-oom of the devil-drum rolled in his ears. Then blindly he groped and beat his way along the slippery passage.

“Oh, Thou, Almighty Devil—” The propitiatory chant of Ah-king-ah followed him out into the blizzard.

Darkness had already fallen. The malicious wind flung ice-dust like splintered glass through the fur about his face. He shut his eyes against the sting of it, and stumbled forward, a small, forlorn figure in the polar night. A gust flung him into a drift, and he crawled on his hands and knees until he encountered a dog asleep under the snow. He rose hastily, shivering as the roused animal’s howls set all its mates wailing their hunger in the blackness.

Back in the chill emptiness of his igloo he swayed toward his bunk and, dropping on tense knees beside it, began to pray.

III

Day after day the blizzard continued unabated. The supply of moldy seal-meat dwindled, vanished. The people began eating the walrus-skin coverings of the oomiaks. They chewed the hide dry because there was no oil for cooking except in the house of the medicine-man. The thin-faced children and babies suffered mutely, sucking on sealskin ropes, on thongs of snow-shoes, on anything that contained a bit of nourishment. The dogs, with uncanny prescience, left the habitations of their masters for the heights back of the village. There in the graveyard, where the iron chains still clanked a warning against the hanging-posts of Sautock, Beelack, and O-tock-tock, the gaunt beasts riddled the sepulchers and fought like werwolves over what they found. Not even Milli-ru-ak, the greatest hunter on In-ga-lee-nay, could battle his way up through the blizzard to shoot at them for food.

Hunger gnawed at the stomachs of the people and marked their faces with hollows, yet there were no lamentations, no visible evidences of despair. After the fatalistic manner of their race they waited patiently, stoically, for a change of weather—or for death.

One night the old mother of Miak, the witch-woman, froze to death. The next day every family moved to the kashim, where, by shutting out the air and huddling close together, the people could keep warm without oil. Once a day Ah-king-ah brought them hope and comfort by lighting the stone lamp and chanting magical words to the almighty devil.

The missionary in his igloo spent desperate hours on his knees pleading with his God to change the wind. In the darkness he paced his room, warming his thin body by the exercise and striving for courage by repeating over and over the promises of the Bible. Sternly he reduced the rations for his scant daily meal until hunger brought upon him that strange fanatical exultation which is akin to the ecstasy that causes the fasting prophet to prophesy, or the medicine-man to perform his greatest feats of magic. With the passage of each dreary day the conviction grew upon him that this unprecedented blizzard had been sent to test his zeal as a worker in the vineyard of the Lord. This blizzard was his opportunity to win an entire village from the heathen sway of the medicine-man. With every atom of his being the little missionary grew to believe that if once he could persuade the people to enter the meeting-house, if once he could induce them to pray to his God, the wind would die, and the hunters be able to get food.

This conviction forced him every afternoon through the gale to the kashim. He ignored every rebuff, ignored utterly the danger to himself, although he knew that Ah-king-ah, should he forget the fate of the priest-murdering medicine-men, might have him killed as a witch who had brought misfortune on the village. Sometimes, by dint of superhuman self-denial, he brought bits of hardtack for the strangely quiet little ones clinging to their mothers in the kashim. Always he pleaded with the elders to turn from shamanism to the true God. The Eskimos, apathetic from prolonged hunger, suffered his presence. While he was with them, there was at least the light of his kerosene lantern. Otherwise, the kashim was always in darkness now, for Ah-king-ah’s oil was gone.

Construing this tolerance as an encouraging sign, the earnest little man brought his Bible, and standing under the swinging light of the lantern, he translated page after page of Exodus—the promises of the Lord to the Children of Israel, the feeding of the wanderers in the desert. But the Eskimos sat stolid, unmoved, apathetic. Even his ardent rendering of the miracle of the loaves and fishes fell flat. Ah-king-ah, as if in weary scorn of his rival, stretched himself on the skins of his shelf and slept, or appeared to sleep.

One day, by accident, the missionary read of the magicians and sorcerers who competed with Moses and Aaron at the court of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Milli-ru-ak raised his eyes from a sad contemplation of his ailing infant son asleep in its mother’s arms. Miak, the witch-woman, leaned forward over her empty lamp to listen. A stir of interest went among the people. Here at last was something they could understand.

The white man had heretofore preached only a kind and beneficent God, but seeing in this an opening in the wall of their indifference, he plunged into detailed descriptions of the misfortunes that had visited the Egyptians. His gaunt face and sunken eyes glowed with fervor. Hunger lent a delirious and terrible vividness to his speech. Vicariously, the starving Eskimos were drowned in his Biblical rivers of blood. They were tormented by plagues of frogs and boils, locusts and lice. They were terrified by hails and thunders. Aware of the Eskimos’ almost idolatrous love for their offspring, he loosed his tongue of all restraint when he pictured the smiting of the first-born. To the sound of the howling blizzard he dwelt long on the pathos of the dead childish faces in those desolate homes along the Nile. Ah-king-ah bestirred himself and sat up. There was a murmuring among the hunters. The mothers caught their children to their breasts and swayed back and forth, moaning. The missionary, light-headed from hunger and emotion, reeled under the swinging shadows of the lantern.

“Would ye, like the Egyptians, harden your hearts against the word of God and bring death to your children?” he shouted. “Oh, come, my friends! Come with me before your little ones lie dead in your arms. Pray to Almighty God and be delivered! Follow me before it is too late!” Carried away by the effect of his eloquence on the hitherto indifferent Eskimos, he caught at the lantern and lurched forward toward the exit of the kashim. “Follow me to the house of God!”

The mothers rose with hysterical cries. The hunters began to get down from their shelf. But before the missionary had reached the ladder, Ah-king-ah was standing in the middle of the floor. Calm and dignified, he made a single motion with one hand. Not a soul moved farther to follow the white man.

The next day, when the missionary climbed to the opening of the kashim, he found the hole covered. His knocks and pleas for entrance met with no response, because Ah-king-ah was sitting on the door to hold it down.

Night brought a drop in temperature and an increase in the force of the gale. The grinding and crash of the ice-pack seemed to threaten the very foundations of the island. With the exception of the missionary, every soul on In-ga-lee-nay was packed in the kashim. Men, women, and children chewed desperately on dry walrus-hide and clung together to keep from freezing. The little ones wedged between their parents whimpered in misery. At last the company, weary from many wakeful nights, jerked and flung their arms about in troubled sleep.

When morning broke Milli-ru-ak’s child was dead.

The wailing of the mothers mingled with the roar of the blizzard and the increased fervor of the medicine-man’s incantations. Before the day was done, two more little ones died.

It was then that Milli-ru-ak, with three of the council men, appeared in the igloo of the white man.

“We will pray to your God,” said the hunter, wearily.

The peals of the bell that summoned the people to the prayer-meeting were freighted with the little missionary’s joy in the fulfilment of his mission. He had wrested a whole village from the dominance of the medicine-man!

The sunken eyes in his gaunt, unshaven face glowed with fanatic happiness as he looked down on the crowded room. Eskimos filled the benches, stood about the walls, and squatted on the floor about the last of his oil burning in the stone lamp below the pulpit. Of all the village only Ah-king-ah was absent. The people sat silent, grave, attentive, their eyes fixed on the Bible lying open on the pulpit.

The missionary began his exhortation, raising his voice above the raging of the blizzard and the rending of the icepack. Thrilled by a sense of achievement and inspired by faith, he spoke with a confidence and an eloquence he had never known before. Within him woke the spirit of the evangelist. During the hour he worked upon his congregation he felt himself rising to the sublime heights from which Jesus himself had dominated all physical conditions. So exalted was he that his preaching aroused a measure of faith in the starving Eskimos, even as the incantations of Ah-king-ah had done.

“Such is the might and goodness of our God,” he shouted after he had combed the Bible for incidents showing the stilling of storms, the feeding of the hungry, the raising of the dead. “And He is the same yesterday, today, and forever! Oh, down on your knees, my friends!” he cried with sudden vehemence. “Down on your knees and prove him now—now!”

His impassioned utterance swept his listeners to their knees, shouting, praying, pleading in long, fragmentary prayers for food, for life, for a change of wind. The fervid little white man leading them felt the whole room to be charged with power—an invincible power that flowed from him and from each one and definitely made its connection with the Infinite Mind that rules creation.

When he sprang to his feet at the end of the supplication, his thin face was alight.

“Go home, my people!” his voice rang out with confidence. “Go home and wait on the salvation of our Lord. Sharpen your spears; put an edge on your skinning-knives. Make ready your gears, for the day of hunting is near!”

“If the white man’s God answers, we will all become Christians!” cried Milli-ru-ak, rising and bringing the others with him.

“Yea! Yea!” came the chorus of assent. Miak, the witch-woman, sidled close to the pulpit, putting out a curious, but cautious, finger to feel the Bible.

“If the white man’s God changes the wind,” she croaked, slanting a wise, bleary eye up at the missionary, “the people of In-ga-lee-nay will come when the bell calls and listen again to the words in the black medicine-book.”

From the supreme heights of his faith the missionary watched his fur-clad congregation depart, seeing in them brands he had plucked from the burning, souls he had saved from destruction. Finally, in his cold living-room, he staggered toward his bunk and in sudden exhaustion sank upon it. He had scarcely drawn the fur robes about him when he was plunged into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

IV

He awoke to a hush so intense that his soul ached with it. It was as if the world had died, leaving him the only living thing upon it. After a moment’s bewilderment he realized that the wind was still, and there was no sound of grinding ice! His nerves, for ten weeks made taut by the continuous shriek of the blizzard, relaxed with a suddenness that was like a fall from a great height. Like a man swimming in a sea of silence, he raised his hands, groping for the luminous-faced watch by his bunk. He saw, with a gasp of incredulity, that he had slept eighteen hours!

Still dazed with sleep and hunger, he crawled from his robes and hurried out into the glimmering twilight of the arctic day. Great as was his faith in the power of prayer, he was astonished at the sight that met his eyes.

Under dark, moving clouds strangely shot with silver the ice-pack lay quiet and gray. A quarter of a mile away an inky, jagged line marked a lead of open water among the bergs. Every hunter in the village was squatted along the lead, and, as he looked, a sudden fusillade of rifle-shots registered the death of seals coming up to breathe.

Along the shores women and children and old men swarmed laughing, shouting, as some one threw a seal-hook into a dead animal and drew it to the ice. They crowded about it, their excited yells increasing. Five minutes later they were devouring the steaming flesh, stopping often to toss bits to the dogs, which gulped it ravenously.

The missionary bowed his head, a great gratitude, a great wonder in his heart. God had listened. God had heard. The famine was over.

Like the blizzard, that day’s hunting was unprecedented in In-ga-lee-nay. Thirty seals and a sixty-foot whale fell to the lot of the hunters. There was food in abundance, and oil for the lamps and for the torches that fluttered yellow lights over the ice-bound shores where the people worked joyously over the kill. All day the missionary moved among them. He was happy, elated. They were his flock, his children. In the flush of his joy he had to exercise considerable self-control to keep from calling attention to the glory of God’s mercy. The following day, Saturday, was also filled with unusual activities, but he permitted himself to speak of the meeting of thanksgiving which he would hold for them on Sunday. The Eskimos nodded, and laughed in answer to his enthusiasm. Light-hearted, variable, they had already forgotten the misery of the famine in the plentitude of feasting.

But the children with whom he had divided his last hardtack came shyly to his side and took hold of his hands. They had not forgotten. The little missionary had not realized his utter loneliness, his craving for friendship, for love, until he felt the clinging of their small, warm fingers. His vision was blurred as, one by one, he gathered them up in his arms and talked to them. Here indeed was his work among these benighted little ones and their parents. Here would he stay as long as he lived, teaching them the ways of truth and civilization. His last thought that night was of the meeting-house on the morrow filled with grateful Eskimos sending up their praises to God. Perhaps even Ah-king-ah, the defeated, might come to listen to the Holy Word and become converted.

Sunday morning found him up early preparing his sermon. He melted ice, and for the first time in many weeks was able to shave. As he lighted the blubber-lamps to heat the meeting-house, he noted a small pair of fur mittens left by some child who had accompanied its mother to the first gathering. He picked them up and placed them on the pulpit, intending to return them later. The thought of the youngster sent him to the bottom of his trunk for the flag he always carried with him. He could not begin too soon to familiarize the little ones with their country’s flag, he thought, as he pinned the Stars and Stripes above the blackboard in anticipation of the near day when the people should send their children to school.

He rang the first bell, and then busied himself with a rearrangement of the benches. Engrossed in happy thoughts, he did not realize how swiftly time was passing until he glanced at his watch. Half an hour had gone by since his call to meeting! Apprehension stirred in him as he reached for the cord to ring the second bell, but before his outstretched fingers touched it, he stiffened in the attitude of arrested action.

O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. The air suddenly began vibrating to the deep boom of the devil-drum. His hand fell to his side. Incredulity, comprehension, anger, succeeded each other in his face. Without pausing to tighten his parka hood he rushed out into the calm arctic noon, and ran toward the kashim tunnel. One leap carried him over the medicine-man’s crossed sticks at the entrance, the next plunged him into the darkness of the passage.

Beat of drum and pagan chanting grew louder as he thrust his head up through the opening in the floor which was once more the stage for Ah-king-ah. Behind the shaman stood Milli-ru-ak, with the three whale hunters who had helped him kill the whale. Bird-beaks and crab-claws on their scanty garments were clattering to every motion of their dancing bodies. Their feathered heads swayed above whale-charms of jade that dangled on cords about their necks. Four Eskimo maidens in primitive finery stood together, holding by its ivory chains the Ceremonial Cup of the Whale filled with blubber cubes. At intervals, when the medicine-man signaled, they held the cup aloft and uttered long, weird cries like gulls.

The people who had so recently prostrated themselves in supplication before the white man’s God were now as fervently assisting Ah-king-ah in the ancient rites of thanksgiving to the Spirit of the Whale. Their faces glowed with happiness and well-being; their voices rose in joyous unison with the voice of the shaman.

At sight of the missionary the dancing and chanting ceased abruptly. Ah-king-ah took a confident step forward.

“Why does the white man bring his long face here to anger the spirits of the hunt?” he asked.

The missionary’s sunken eyes passed slowly over the faces of the hunters squatted on the shelf, over the faces of the mothers and of the old men and the children below. His anger ebbed to a great hopelessness that showed in the weary sag of his shoulders. He was defeated, yet he climbed to the floor of the kashim and stood beside the half-nude figure of the giant shaman.

“Were your words then a lie within your mouths, ye people of In-ga-lee-nay?” he asked quietly. “Ye did promise this day to send up thanks to Almighty God for his mercies. If these promises were lies, why did ye come to pray with me?”

Milli-ru-ak started forward, his eyes narrowed with anger, but the medicine-man gestured for silence.

“Listen to the words of Ah-king-ah!” He spoke with primitive dignity, his authoritative voice instantly quelling the murmur of the hunters. “It was I, Ah-king-ah, who sent my people to the kashim of the white man.”

The missionary turned incredulously.

“Long had I chanted the runes that please the almighty devil tossing in his hands the ivory ball of the world,” went on the medicine-man. “And I knew the time was ripe for fulfilment. Yet the wisdom of my fathers tells me that all things change form, even as the ice-pack changes its face in the arms of the wind. New spirits come. Old spirits die. There is sorcery in all things. Perhaps there is sorcery in the black Book the white man keeps. Perhaps there is not. But I, Ah-king-ah, maker of medicine, am not a man of wisdom if I protect not my people against it. Therefore I sent them to thee, white man, who knoweth the ways of thy God in the black Book, but before I sent them I promised that I, Ah-king-ah, who knoweth the ways of the almighty devil, would stay alone, working for them my strongest magic while they pray. They know my medicine is great, for, behold! the storm dies like the last grunt of the stricken walrus and”—he drew himself up proudly, resting his drum on his thigh—“it is I, Ah-king-ah, mightiest shaman of the North, who changed the wind!”

In the approving chorus that filled the room the missionary tried to make himself heard, but Ah-king-ah’s voice continued, vanquishing every other sound:

“And why should thy God be thanked?” he asked in the earnest manner of one seeking to understand another’s point of view. “Thou hast told my people He is a good God wanting to do only good to man. Why pray to Him when he can do us no harm? But the almighty devil—he is evil, evil. All his pleasure comes from doing evil to man. Therefore we must sing the magic runes that please him, so he leaves us alone. Therefore we must dance before the Spirit of the Whale to show our joy at the good fortune the devil has permitted. White man”—Ah-king-ah’s shrewd dark eyes were not unkind as he looked down on the little missionary “our ways are still the ways of our fathers. Thy ways are the ways of thy fathers. Leave us, then, and give thy thanks to whom it please thee.” He raised the drum from his thigh and made a quick motion with it. As the booming sounded, the three apprentices sprang forward. Not ungently they laid hold of the missionary and led him to the opening in the floor. Then rung by rung he was forced down the ladder until his feet touched the icy cobblestones at the bottom. The trap-door dropped above him, leaving him in darkness.

As he stumbled over wolf-dogs gorged with food and indifferent with sleep, his ears rang to the thump of the devil-drum and the pagan chanting of well fed, joyous people. The sounds followed him from the passage into the awful pervading silence of the polar day. He dragged his forlorn figure back along the snowy trail to the meeting-house. His knees trembled. A sudden awareness of his isolation from his kind struck through his heart like a sickness.

Past the mocking bareness of the benches, past the blackboard where the flag, loosed from three of its tacks, hung limp and dispirited, he made his way to the shaky little pulpit. He rubbed a fumbling hand across his eyes then, as a hurt child seeks the comfort of its mother’s breast, his gray head sank on his folded arms, and he pressed his face against the open Bible.

Numbed by his disappointment, crushed by his failure, he lay, a small, defeated white man in the primitive fur garments of an alien race. Gradually into his memory began to crowd the long months of loneliness, sacrifice, and privation he had borne to bring the comforts of religion and the uplift of civilization to an ungrateful heathen people. For them he had given up everything a white man holds dear. For them he had been willing to give even his life. His work had been futile. Futility! The word stood out in letters of ice against the blackness of his misery. But he was at the end. He was through. In the spring, when the first boat came from the mainland, he would leave In-ga-lee-nay. He would take his God back to his own land, where there was at least the companionship of his kind.

Sagging wearily against the pulpit, he was oblivious to the passage of time, deaf to the increasing happy shouts from the kashim. The oil in the lamps burned away, the sputtering wicks grew black. Unconsciously, one hand, opening and shutting in anguish, had taken hold of something soft and warm. When at last he raised his face from his cramped arms, his eyes, dull with brooding, fell on the tiny pair of mittens he had placed on the pulpit that morning.

For the space of a dozen breaths he stared at them, then slowly, meditatively he began stroking them. Into his tired mind crept thoughts of yesterday. Children had come to him then—children with upraised, trusting eyes and warm, clinging fingers. They had come because they believed in him. They liked him. They were potential hunters and mothers of hunters. With their small clinging hands they were already molding the future of their race.

Little by little the look of hopelessness faded from his eyes, and a new determination crept into his thin face. When he stepped from the pulpit he turned and pinned the flag back into place, then hung the mittens on a nail beside it.

It was very late for the second bell, but the missionary crossed over to the bell-rope. His step was firm again, his dogged chin upraised. He laid hold of the rope and began pulling it vigorously, hopefully.

Out over the still, white bergs of Bering Strait two sounds strove once more for dominance in the arctic air:

O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom. O-o-m, oom-oom.

D-i-n-g-d-o-n-g, d-i-n-g-d-o-n-g. D-i-n-g-d-o-n-g.

FOOTNOTES: