In the beginning the Eskimos had treated him with the good-natured tolerance of their race. They accepted his presents, ate his food, and begged or borrowed from him in accordance with their code:The white man who outwits us is a better man than we, and we admive him; the white man we outwit is a fool.The unsuspecting little missionary, confident that he was making great strides into their friendship, was unusually generous; but the moment he tried to preach the word of his God, the moment he attempted to interfere with their customs, he found himself up against a glacial wall of resentment.
"Leave us alone! Leave us alone!" Milli-ru-ak, the hunter, had said to him in the squirrel-hunting season when the missionary went to remonstrate with him for biting off the nose of his wife's lover. "Leave us alone! Does the Eskimo force his way on the white man who invades his country? Why does the white man force his way on the Eskimo? Leave us alone!"
"But, Milli-ru-ak—to bite off the nose of thy neighbour"
"Listen, white man, to the law of my fathers!" The hunter's dark eyes narrowed. "Had my neighbour come to me and said: 'Milli-ru-ak, thy woman hath found favour in my eyes. Let us change wives during the squirrel-hunting, that our families may be allied when the children are born,' then would I have been proud that my neighbour should have taken his pleasure with my wife and I with his. But my neighbour was without honour. He waited until I was gone to the hunt, then like a thief he goes to my woman. I found him there. I bit off his nose. Such," said Milli-ru-ak, turning on his heel, "was the just law of my fathers."
Aghast at this disclosure, the little missionary persistently attempted to convince the hunter of his sins, and after a week Milli-ru-ak shot at him—by accident. The bullet passed harmlessly between the white man's arm and his body, embedding itself in the shaky pulpit he was building at the time. He could see the splintered hole now as he placed his open Bible upon it and reached for the dangling bell-rope behind the pulpit.
The ding-dong that marked the Sabbath day was caught up by the blizzard and carried with the boom of the devil-drum out over the Polar wastes. Every Sunday and Wednesday since the completion of the meeting-house the missionary had doggedly rung the first and second bell summoning an indifferent people to listen to the word of his God. Not a soul had ever responded.
He rang the first bell longer than usual. Now that the magic of Ah-king-ah had failed to change the wind, now that the dogs were starving and the people were eating the last of the mouldy seal-meat originally intended for the animals, surely, he thought, they were ready to abandon their ways of darkness for the light of Christianity.
He allowed the bell-rope to fall and poured a drop of oil from a deflated seal-skin container into the stone lamp in the middle of the floor, When the flame flared up from the moss wick he held his hands over it. Not for himself would he have used any of the precious oil, but he hoped that some curious Eskimo might come and, seeing the fire, spread the news of it in the village. The people might come to him then, since there was no oil in the native igloos—no oil for heating, no oil for melting ice for water,
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