The Magnetic North Part 28

The Boy, feeling he would need an interpreter, signed to Muckluck to come and sit by him. Grave as a judge she got up, and did as she was bid.

"That the Shaman?" whispered the Boy.

She nodded. It was plain that this apparition, however hideous, had given her great satisfaction.

"Any more people coming?"

"Got no more now in Pymeut."

"Where is everybody?"

"Some sick, some dead."

The old Chief rambled on, but not so noisily.

"See," whispered Muckluck, "devil 'fraid already. He begin to speak small."

The Shaman never once looked towards the sufferer till he himself was thoroughly warm. Even then he withdrew from the genial glow, only to sit back, humped together, blinking, silent. The Boy began to feel that, if he did finally say something it would be as surprising as to hear an aged monkey break into articulate speech.

Nicholas edged towards the Shaman, presenting something in a birch-bark dish.

"What's that?"

"A deer's tongue," whispered Muckluck.

The Boy remembered the Koyukun song, "Thanks for a good meal to Kuskokala, the Shaman."

Nicholas seemed to be haranguing the Shaman deferentially, but with spirit. He pulled out from the bottom of his father's bed three fine marten-skins, shook them, and dangled them before the Shaman. They produced no effect. He then took a box of matches and a plug of the Boy's tobacco out of his pocket, and held the lot towards the Shaman, seeming to say that to save his life he couldn't rake up another earthly thing to tempt his Shamans.h.i.+p. Although the Shaman took the offerings his little black eyes glittered none the less rapaciously, as they flew swiftly round the room, falling at last with a vicious snap and gleam upon the Boy. Then it was that for the first time he spoke.

"Nuh! nuh!" interrupted Muckluck, chattering volubly, and evidently commending the Boy to the Shaman. Several of the old bucks laughed.

"He say Yukon Inua no like you."

"He think white men bring plague, bring devils."

"Got some money?" whispered Muckluck.

"Not here."

The Boy saw the moment when he would be turned out. He plunged his hands down into his trousers pockets and fished up a knife, his second-best one, fortunately.

"Tell him I'm all right, and he can give this to Yukon Inua with my respects."

Muckluck explained and held up the s.h.i.+ning object, blades open, corkscrew curling attractively before the covetous eyes of the Shaman.

When he could endure the temptation no longer his two black claws shot out, but Nicholas intercepted the much-envied object, while, as it seemed, he drove a more advantageous bargain. Terms finally settled, the Shaman seized the knife, shut it, secreted it with a final grunt, and stood up.

Everyone made way for him. He jerked his loosely-jointed body over to the sick man, lifted the seal-oil lamp with his shaky old hands, and looked at the patient long and steadily. When he had set the lamp down again, with a grunt, he put his black thumb on the wick and squeezed out the light. When he came back to the fire, which had burnt low, he pulled open his parki and drew out an ivory wand, and a long eagle's feather with a fluffy white tuft of some sort at the end. He deposited these solemnly, side by side, on the ground, about two feet apart.

Turning round to the dying fire, he took a stick, and with Nicholas's help gathered the ashes up and laid them over the smouldering brands.

The ighloo was practically dark. No one dared speak save the yet unabashed devil in the sick man, who muttered angrily. It was curious to see how the coughing of the others, which in the Kachime had been practically constant, was here almost silenced. Whether this was achieved through awe and respect for the Shaman, or through nervous absorption in the task he had undertaken, who shall say?

The Boy felt rather than saw that the Shaman had lain down between the ivory wand and the eagle's feather. Each man sat as still as death, listening, staring, waiting.

Presently a little jet of flame sprang up out of the ashes. The Shaman lifted his head angrily, saw it was no human hand that had dared turn on the light, growled, and pulled something else from under his inexhaustible parki. The Boy peered curiously. The Shaman seemed to be shutting out the offensive light by wrapping himself up in something, head and all.

"What's he doing now?" the Boy ventured to whisper under cover of the devil's sudden loud remonstrance, the sick man at this point breaking into ghastly groans.

"He puts on the Kamlayka. s.h.!.+"

The Shaman, still enveloped head and body, began to beat softly, keeping time with the eagle's feather. You could follow the faint gleam of the ivory wand, but on what it fell with that hollow sound no eye could see. Now, at intervals, he uttered a cry, a deep ba.s.s danger-note, singularly unnerving. Someone answered in a higher key, and they kept this up in a kind of rude, sharply-timed duet, till one by one the whole group of natives was gathered into the swing of it, swept along involuntarily, it would seem, by some magnetic attraction of the rhythm.

_"Ung hi yah! ah-ha-yah! yah-yah-yah!"_ was the chorus to that deep, recurrent cry of the Shaman. Its accompanying drum-note was m.u.f.fled like far-off thunder, conjured out of the earth by the ivory wand.

Presently a scream of terror from the bundle of skins and bones in the corner.

"Ha!" Muckluck clasped her hands and rocked back and forth.

"They'll frighten the old man to death if he's conscious," said the Boy, half rising.

She pulled him down.

"No, no; frighten devil." She was shaking with excitement and with ecstacy.

The sick man cried aloud. A frenzy seemed to seize the Shaman. He raised his voice in a series of blood-curdling shrieks, then dropped it, moaning, whining, then bursting suddenly into diabolic laughter, bellowing, whispering, ventriloquising, with quite extraordinary skill.

The dim and foetid cave might indeed be full of devils.

If the hideous outcry slackened, but an instant, you heard the sick man raving with the preternatural strength of delirium, or of mad resentment. For some time it seemed a serious question as to who would come out ahead. Just as you began to feel that the old Chief was at the end of his tether, and ready to give up the ghost, the Shaman, rising suddenly with a demoniac yell, flung himself down on the floor in a convulsion. His body writhed horribly; he kicked and snapped and quivered.

The Boy was for s.h.i.+elding Muckluck from the crazy flinging out of legs and arms; but she leaned over, breathless, to catch what words might escape the Shaman during the fit, for these were omens of deep significance.

When at last the convulsive movements quieted, and the Shaman lay like one dead, except for an occasional faint twitch, the Boy realised for the first time that the sick man, too, was dumb. Dead? The only sound now was the wind up in the world above. Even the dog was still.

The silence was more horrible than the h.e.l.l-let-loose of a few minutes before.

The dim group sat there, motionless, under the spell of the stillness even more than they had been under the spell of the noise. At last a queer, indescribable scratching and sc.r.a.ping came up out of the bowels of the earth.

How does the old devil manage to do that? thought the Boy. But the plain truth was that his heart was in his mouth, for the sound came from the opposite direction, behind the Boy, and not near the Shaman at all. It grew louder, came nearer, more inexplicable, more awful. He felt he could not bear it another minute, sprang up, and stood there, tense, waiting for what might befall. Were _all_ the others dead, then?

Not a sound in the place, only that indescribable stirring of something in the solid earth under his feet.

The Shaman had his knife. A ghastly sensation of stifling came over the Boy as he thought of a struggle down there under the earth and the snow.

On came the horrible underground thing. Desperately the Boy stirred the almost extinct embers with his foot, and a faint glow fell on the terror-frozen faces of the natives, fell on the bear-skin flap. _It moved!_ A huge hand came stealing round. A hand? The skeleton of a hand--white, ghastly, with fingers unimaginably long. No mortal in Pymeut had a hand like that--no mortal in all the world!

A crisp, smart sound, and a match blazed. A tall, lean figure rose up from behind the bear-skin and received the sudden brightness full in his face, pale and beautiful, but angry as an avenging angel's. For an instant the Boy still thought it a spectre, the delusion of a bewildered brain, till the girl cried out, "Brother Paul!" and fell forward on the floor, hiding her face in her hands.

"Light! make a light!" he commanded. Nicholas got up, dazed but obedient, and lit the seal-oil lamp.