Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/263

Rh women and children of the hunters were grouped—silent, staring but smiling as the strangers approached and were proclaimed by the escort as visitors of good intentions about to become guests. Half famished and dying dogs skulked about and bristled at the smell of the visitors and their foreign dog teams. This was one of the tribes that had never seen kabluna till Eric Hedon came on them; but they had heard of the whites from other tribes.

Kabluna, in the reports of these people, were strange men with ways of their own. Sometimes they appeared in possession of monstrous wealth and in large ships well supplied, and then they gave to the Eskimos only in barter—a needle for a fox skin, another for a seal. But at other times the kabluna, starving and with empty seldges, sought out the Eskimos for fuel and skins. This was one of those times now; so, as other tribes had done before, the Palugmiut offered the hospitality of the village. Some of the hunters, putting down their seal spears, at once sent for their snow-knives; others who had armed themselves with bows and arrows at the first sight of the