Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/280

266 "Then why did he make them, did he say?"

"He was taught to; that's all he knows. In his tribe long ago—he's one of the survivors of a tribe that was almost wiped out by starvation; and he came to the Palugmiuts when he was a boy—he had been taught to scratch his spears that way."

"Then what do you think the marks mean?"

Eric looked at Koehler, who took the handle again and studied it. "They aren't real runes, of course," Koehler said conservatively. "They're only marks that suggest runes—as you'd expect runes to be made if they'd been taught from one generation to another after their meaning was forgotten. But when I first saw the marks they made me think of runes I'd seen on stones in Greenland spelling the name of Sigur."

"Sigur?"

"That was a powerful family in the old Norse colony there, one of the families that disappeared."

The man who had made the marks on the spear gazed about the circle, and seeing that his work had interested them so much he put