The Eskimo Invasion (10 page)

 

He clung to the sled undulating over the ice. The wonder of Marthalik!
The dogs were running uncontrollably. The sled bucked over a pressure
ridge. Marthalik, in her arms he had been so much more than he had ever
been before. If he let go he would fall off the sled and go back. He
laughed with bewilderment. It was these women who would be too much for
the world.

 

 

Up a steep pressure ridge he clung to the sled, and down. The sled
runner jammed in the ice. It almost capsized as it abruptly stopped.
His sunglasses slid down his nose.

 

 

Blinking, Dr. West slid off the sled, hoisted the runner free and shouted
at the dogs, who surged forward. Dr. West found himself loping behind
the sled, trying to overtake it, running. He tripped, dislodging his
glasses as he lunged through the blinding white glare.

 

 

Squinting without his sunglasses, almost catching the sled as it skidded
across a puddle of meltwater, he fell. Springing up, running harder and
shouting angrily at the dogs, he had thought they would stop, but they
were veering off to the left, and their loose gait accelerated to an
excited rush as if they had scented a seal.

 

 

His commanding shouts grew shrill. Desperately he ran a shorter course
to head them off, but they were bounding too fast, the lightened sled
skipping behind them. Without the sled he was helpless, hopeless. His
eyesight whirled with blinding lights as he fell.

 

 

From the ice, kneeling upward, gasping with breathless panic, he unslung
his rifle. In the glare, his twitching eye could barely distinguish the
front sight as it shook back and forth. Aiming ahead of the dogs he fired.

 

 

Unchecked, the dogs ran into the blinding distance. He fired again.
The lead dog turned end-for-end biting his rump as the other dogs dragged
it along. With a crushed yelp, it was mounted by the sled runners as the
team swept on. Dragging the writhing dog and the swerving sled, the dog
team charged on like troops into battle. They were running suicidally
straight toward an open lead.

 

 

At the last moment, abruptly they stopped at the edge of the lead, and
the sled skidded sideways, braked only by the body of the wounded dog
from sliding into the dark water. Dr. West ran furiously. With stupid grins,
the dog team looked back at Dr. West, their breath fogging. If there had
been a seal, it was long gone.

 

 

Whiteman, you panicked. Dr. West blundered toward the team's watching
eyes and steaming grins.

 

 

His unprotected eyes were shimmering and blurring, but he had to recapture
the sled before he could go back to search for his dark glasses. His face
twisted in pain and guilt as the wounded dog whined and sniffed its
shattered spine.

 

 

The other sled dogs watched, their tongues lolling out of great grins,
while he pointed the rifle muzzle at the wounded dog's ear and pulled
the trigger.

 

 

His hand trembling, with his knife Dr. West cut through the leather
strap and freed the dead dog. Rising, squinting against the whiteness,
he tried to see back along the sled runner's trail all the way to the
indistinct pressure ridge where he thought he had fallen, where he had
lost his glasses.

 

 

He was afraid Edwardluk and the other two would have heard the shots,
but they should be a long way off near the iceberg. Surely this was a
different iceberg. His eyes were killing him!

 

 

To reduce the glare, he slit his handkerchief and tied it across his eyes.
Almost blinded, he shouted at the dogs, pushed the sled, yelled, cursed,
flailed with the whip while dogs dodged in every direction, and suddenly
the dog team darted, curved and flowed along their back trail toward
the pressure ridge. He intended to allow himself one minute to search
for his sunglasses.

 

 

"Here are your snow eyes!" Edwardluk stood up holding the dark glasses
above his head.

 

 

Dr. West tore off the handkerchief, squinted around in a semicircle and
did not see the other two men in ambush.

 

 

"Hand me the glasses." Dr. West did not point the rifle directly at
Edwardluk.

 

 

Edwardluk's small hand extended the sunglasses. "Bad dogs run away,"
his voice murmured as if in apology, and he ducked his head as if ashamed.
He shuffled his mukluks on the ice. "This poor person couldn't
run fast enough."

 

 

"I cannot return to camp," Dr. West interrupted. "I must go find the other
whitemen now."

 

 

"The other whitemen," Edwardluk agreed like an echo, and his real thinking
emerged circuitously. "Bad ice. Wisest dog is dead. This is the dog's fault
not to understand you. We do not understand you, but we like you. We want
to help you always. When ice is safe, we go. Tomorrow. Each day you will
like us better. Tomorrow."

 

 

Dr. West became aware of movement behind him, another Eskimo.

 

 

"I cannot go back now," Dr. West protested. "You must understand I'm trying
to help you. I'll tell the whitemen your babies are hungry. I'll bring back
food for the winter. Because I like you," he insisted rapidly. "I like you.
Grandfather Bear eat me if I lie."

 

 

Edwardluk looked up at the sky, and he laughed. "West, you are stronger
than my fear. Eh-eh, you want to go, we go! This person understands so
little, but perhaps some day we people will help the whitemen, too.
When we are many, we will help much. Help whitemen of whole world."
Like a tiny giant, Edwardluk spread his arms and laughed, unaware that
the world was 24,000 miles in circumference at the equator, that there
were six billion white-whitemen, yellow-whitemen and black-whitemen,
that their vast machines rumbled and lurched toward the stars.

 

 

"Go back," Edwardluk said to the other two young Eskimos. "Tell Marthalik
her husband's safe with Edwardluk. We will return in a -- ?" He looked
questingly at Dr. West.

 

 

"In a month," Dr. West said, intending to allow plenty of time so she
wouldn't worry.

 

 

"We go!" Edwardluk shouted at the dogs and cracked the whip. The sled
rushed off carrying Dr. West, with Edwardluk running alongside, shouting:
"There is the island."

 

 

Beyond the furthest iceberg on the horizon, Dr. West could see the gray
smudge. "A Guard Station of whitemen is truly there?" Dr. West knew
Edwardluk had never been there, and other Eskimos who approached had
been herded away by the Guards' helicopter. Perhaps antipersonnel radar
would mistake him for another Eskimo, he thought. The helicopter might
try to herd him back into the Cultural Sanctuary. "Has anyone seen the
whitemen, spoken to them?"

 

 

"Peterluk has been close," Edwardluk shouted, "but the ice was not this bad.
If there is much open water, we will have to turn back to the camp. We will
try again next winter."

 

 

My god, Dr. West thought,
by then I'll be snowblind and the Eskimos
will be starving.
If necessary he could threaten Edwardluk with the
rifle. They would have to go on. If there was too much open water out
there, he would build a signal fire and try to attract the helicopter.

 

 

Dragging the sled over pressure ridges, the dogs soon slowed. Tiring,
Dr. West trotted beside the sled toward the gleaming horizon. Always
there was another crack or ridge.

 

 

Helping lift the sled, slipping, tiring, falling, he accidentally jammed
the muzzle of his rifle into the ice and rose muttering, staggering after
the relentlessly gliding sled. He was encased in perspiration as he slogged
into the blinding sun. His thoughts became confused. In his exhaustion,
he became suspicious. Perhaps Edwardluk's plan was to wear him out and
then seize the rifle --

 

 

When the sled snagged on the thousandth pressure ridge, dizzy with
exhaustion, Dr. West lay down on the sled. The dogs lay down.

 

 

"Eh-eh, you rest in camp." Cheerfully Edwardluk scampered about with
seemingly inexhaustible energy simultaneously trying to sight a seal
while forcing two harpoon shafts into the ice and erecting a tattered
caribou skin windbreak.

 

 

"Eh-eh, this person will talk to that seal." Edwardluk hefted the third
harpoon and walked away into the blurry distance.

 

 

The wind hissed over the ice, bending the caribou skins into a funnel,
a wind tunnel directed at Dr. West's congealing body. Edwardluk had vanished.
Shivering, Dr. West ceased to know he was shivering until his ears awoke him
to the distant grunting of the polar bear.

 

 

"Eh-eh," Edwardluk's voice laughed. "He don't find no seals either."

 

 

The dogs' voices whined, but their tone was not hunger. Dr. West's eyelids
felt glued together. The dogs' voices whined with fear. Alaskan Eskimo dogs
would have been roaring with eagerness to rush along the scent of the polar
bear, he thought. These dogs were whining.

 

 

Dr. West slid his fingers under his sunglasses to his throbbing eyelids.
Overpowering light penetrated, although his eyes were closed. His head
ached with pain messages from his overloaded optic nerves. When he tried
to open his eyes, he gasped, drowned in dazzling liquid light.

 

 

He was snowblind.

 

 

The hoarse coughing sound was so distant he knew it wasn't Edwardluk.
Edwardluk was moving here beside him. From the blind distance came a
grunting sound as if from an indecisive hog. Dr. West's hand tightened
on his rifle.

 

 

When a bear is hungry enough, he thought,
it will stalk sled dogs
lying on the ice like seals. When a bear is starving it sees nothing
but seals, and I am blind.

 

 

"Eh-eh," Edwardluk's voice laughed, "nothing but seals. Give me the rifle.
Big noise will tell the bear we are not seals."

 

 

"I will hold the rifle," Dr. West replied; he was afraid to let go of it
because the rifle was all he had, snowblind and helpless. "I know how to
work the rifle."

 

 

"This person knows how to work it," Edwardluk volunteered, and Dr. West
could hear him moving closer. "Peterluk shot his rifle many times, and
this person watched. It is not magic. It is shot with the finger. This
person could shoot."

 

 

But not at bears, Dr. West thought.

 

 

"Close to the bear," Edwardluk answered his thought. "Give me the rifle."

 

 

"You would not shoot the bear even if I gave you the rifle," Dr. West
replied, clinging to its stock.

 

 

"This person would not shoot too close," Edwardluk agreed, tugging at
the rifle. "This person is not a bear killer like Peterluk, who will
never rise into the sky. This person would only shoot a loud noise so
the bear understands we are not seals. Give me -- "

 

 

"Get back." Dr. West clicked off the safety catch, pointed the barrel
down and squeezed the trigger. The supposedly recoilless rifle blasted,
kicking viciously. There had been ice in the barrel, he realized, but it
had not burst. "I have frightened the bear," Dr. West blurted. "Now there
is no need for you to have the rifle."

 

 

"If this person had the rifle, a seal could be shot," Edwardluk's voice
persisted.

 

 

"There are three harpoons," Dr. West replied.

 

 

"But your eyes are bad," Edwardluk murmured circuitously.

 

 

"I will not give you the rifle."

 

 

Further away the polar bear emitted a mooing noise.

 

 

"This person watched you while you sleep," Edwardluk said, as if this
was more important than the circling bear. "Eh-eh, asleep you frown,
you twist. In the encampment it was this way also. You look unhappy
when asleep. The same as you, Peterluk is that way. Even with your arms
around Marthalik, your sleep-face is unhappy. Are all whitemen unhappy
when they sleep?"

 

 

"How the hell should I know?" Dr. West slung the rifle over his back
and crawled blindly onto the sled. "Let's go!"

 

 

"Whitemen do not shoot us -- " Edwardluk asked what really must have been
worrying him, " -- as if we are dogs?"

 

 

"No, I was frightened when I shot the dog. I thought they were running
away. I thought they were leaving me alone to die. I only shoot things
that are leaving me to die."

 

 

On the moving sled, Joe West clung to his rifle, his head muffled in
the futile darkness of caribou skins, his eyes throbbing and flashing
with lights of pain. Once he heard Edwardluk shouting at someone, and
his stomach contracted. He dreamed Edwardluk had circled all the way
back to the encampment. No escape. Then he realized Edwardluk had merely
admonished the dogs.

 

 

The sled was moving sporadically, as if the dogs were exhausted again.
Finally the sled stopped. Their whining faded.

 

 

Motionless, Dr. West was awakened by the distant crackwhoosh of a recoilless
rifle.
Whitemen?
Dr. West's fingers crawled along the oddly thin stock
of his rifle. He was holding on to a harpoon shaft. "My rifle. He's stolen
my rifle."

 

 

Under him the sled jerked, and the dogs whined, hungrily straining, while
the sled creaked immovably because Edwardluk had anchored it to the ice.

 

 

Edwardluk's plodding return with a dragging sound was engulfed by the
roaring lunges of the dogs. Edwardluk was feeding the dogs first,
hurling thuds of meat within their harnessed range. Then he was beating
them off. "No more! Got no more!"