Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/795

Rh the movements of the seal, which is taken in by the deception. When he has at last got near enough, he brings down his game with a well aimed shot. Times are good now, for this kind of hunting yields several seals a day. Then comes the golden season of summer, bringing plenty of birds, eggs, salmon, reindeer, seals, and walruses—summer, with its gay flowers and rushing streams, freeing the seas from their icy fetters—a season which the Eskimo loves, and the beauty of which he celebrates in his songs. Thus closes the circle of the year of this people, careless and contented under the most straitened circumstances, whose hospitality and indomitable serenity I learned during my life among them to love and prize.

When, late in the fall, storms rage over the land, and again release the sea from the icy fetters by which it is as yet only slightly bound; when the loosened floes are driven one against another, and break up with loud crackings; when the cakes of ice are piled in wild disorder against or upon one another, the Eskimo believes he hears the voice of spirits which inhabit the mischief-laden air.

The spirits of the dead—the Tupilak—knock wildly at the huts which they can not enter, and woe to the unhappy person whom they can lay hold of! He immediately sickens, and is fated to a speedy death. The wicked Krikirn pursues the dogs, which die as soon as they see it with convulsions and cramps; Kallopalling appears in the water, and drags the brave hunters down, and conceals them in the great hood of his duck-skin dress. All the countless spirits of evil—the Torgnet—are aroused, striving to bring sickness and death, bad weather, and failure in hunting. The worst visitors are Sedna, mistress of the under-world, and her father, to whom dead Innuit fall.

The old stories which mothers relate during the long winter evenings to their timidly listening children tell of Sedna. Once upon a time there lived a Jnnung, with his daughter Sedna, on the solitary shore. His wife had been dead for some time, and the two led a quiet existence. Sedna grew up to be a handsome girl, and the youth came in from all around to sue for her hand, but none of them could touch her proud heart. Finally, at the breaking up of the ice in the spring, a fulmar flew from over the sea and wooed Sedna with enticing song. "Come to me," it said; "come into the land of birds, where there is never hunger, where my tent is made of the most beautiful skins. You shall rest on soft deer-skins. My fellows, the storm birds, shall bring you all your heart may desire; their feathers shall clothe you thickly; your lamp shall always be filled with oil, your pot with meat." Sedna could not long resist such wooing, and they went together over the vast sea. When at last they reached the country of the fulmar, after a long and hard journey, Sedna discovered that her spouse had shamefully deceived her. Her new home was not built of beautiful pelts, but was covered with wretched fish-skins, full of holes that gave free entrance to wind and snow. Instead of white