Bertram Atkey

“ Each man of them was assured in his heart that he went to certain death. They knew that those who had borne away the bodies of the dead ankoot and his kinsman were not bears, but spirits, fierce and ravening from the ghost-haunted north; the spirits of Sitika’s outcast dead. True, the tracks were bear tracks, very enormous, but a spirit can go abroad in any form. Bear, narwhal, walrus, fox, gull. Had not the dead ankoot himself told them that a narwhal which had played daily along the ice-holes at the end of the last summer, was the spirit of a tribesman who had been drowned? ”

“ Then suddenly, after a wild and perilous evolution, the watchers heard Sitika shout like a mad thing. The bears had fallen farther away from each other. Sitika whirled the kayak facing them, and checked so that the bears and the kayak formed, as it were, a triangle, with Sitika at the apex. ”

“ Sitika’s mother was aware of all her deficiencies, and she blinked sorrowfully and ashamedly as the sorcerer explained that it was her turn to go out to the ice. She was not afraid, for she knew the custom of her people. The Arctic gives too sparingly to the able-bodied to encourage weaklings and encumbrances. The tribe would find it hard to keep from starvation this winter, and, for the sake of the majority, the able-bodied must be fed, and since somebody must starve or die, the useless must go. ”

“ They would kill him more gently, perhaps, for that he had saved them trouble and had not defied them. Spirits do not like defiance. The ankoot had said so often.
The sleigh vanished round a hummock. The faint, far crack of Sitika’s curling, snaky whip came remotely across the ice to them—and, so far as they were concerned, that was the death of Sitika. They turned back to the huts to talk. Little enough they had to talk of usually.
They told Sitika’s mother that he had driven in desperate haste to the spirit-bears, and that, therefore, he was dead. ”

“ Oh, Sitika, the bears came out of the north, and returned to the north; and the bodies are gone with the bears. Spirits come from the north. These are no bears that we can kill with spears. The spirit of the ankoot and the son of his sister. ”

“ Then with all his force Sitika sent his spear into the socket of the remaining eye, striking his paddle forward and up with one hand at the exact second the spear left his glove. He won clear of the instant flurry of foam, and waited. ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1952, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 71 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”