The Eskimo Invasion Read Online Free

might be a social error which would offend

her pride. So he simply watched her. As she straightened up again,

breathing hard in her tattered caribou-skin parka, she looked him

straight in the eye, which startled him, and he grinned. To his surprise,

she grinned back, not at all shyly, her white teeth gleaming, her dark

eyes sparkling. Her gaze was unflinching. Not exactly the traditional

self-abasing Eskimo woman, he thought, beginning to suspect these isolated

Eskimos might be rather different from the traditional Eskimo ideal Hans

Suxbey had in mind.
     
     
"Cut meat!" the other woman said loudly to her, and both women crouched

beside the seal carcass. They giggled in traditional female fashion,

and the other woman returned to the lamp, which was the female command

center of the tent.
     
     
Dr. West stared at the cooking lamp because it was not the traditional

shallowly hollowed soapstone slab. Dr. West thought it might have been

smashed out of a whiteman's white porcelain bathroom fixture. But it had

such a shallow curve it couldn't have been broken from an ordinary toilet

or urinal. Nearly two inches thick, two feet long and nearly as wide,

its whiteness was disguised by gummed seal oil and soot. Its shape was a

jagged oval so shallow he thought it could have been a fragment of -- even

a gigantic hollow ceramic ball. He gave up speculating for the moment. His

main desire was that these people should like him. He didn't want to start

asking questions like a nosy ethnologist, which he was not. He grinned,

thinking Suxbey wouldn't approve of this un-Eskimo seal oil lamp.
     
     
In the framework of sticks above the cooking lamp hung a square

soot-blackened artifact. Boiling inside this ancient five-gallon gasoline

can, the chunks of seal meat began to bubble their rich aroma, whetting

Dr. West's gustatory memory. While Edwardluk courteously made small talk

about the early summer, so early the open leads surely would freeze again,

Dr. West equally courteously asked no questions of his host. He watched

the woman behind the strange ceramic lamp using a bone splinter to press

down the long floating wick of cotton grass into the seal oil, shortening

the smoky line of flame. He realized these Eskimos had added a wall of

clay inside the mysterious concave ceramic object to separately contain

the chunks of seal fat. Warmly melting, the fat seeped oil replenishing

the lamp.
     
     
Since the lamp was the female power center of the household, Dr. West

thought the woman tending it must be Edwardluk's wife. With a forked stick

she prodded from the can a steaming chunk of meat. Smiling, she dropped

it on a floor stone to cool. The other young woman, who had carried his

pack, promptly picked up this hot chunk. Smiling down at it instead of up

at him, she handed Dr. West the fat-dripping meat. "Best piece for you."
     
     
Having lived in Alaskan Eskimo hunting camps, Dr. West unhesitatingly

sank his teeth into the juicy meat. Slicing in front of his nose with his

stainless steel hunting knife, he chewed heroically, gulped and swallowed,

his eyes squeezing shut with delight. "Good!"
     
     
With savage joy he filled his stomach with more meat than he'd eaten

for five years. To his surprise, he realized he was even outeating

Edwardluk. This is impossible. An Eskimo can outeat any whiteman. Perhaps

he's just being polite, allowing me to seem the more impressive eater.
     
     
With unrestrained Eskimo pleasure, Dr. West belched cavernously.

Delightedly, the housewife urged more meat upon him until he leaned

back on the sleeping platform. The other young woman's folded knees had

provided his backrest. "This person will chew your boots," her voice

said against the back of his neck.
     
     
Dr. West laughed the way Edwardluk laughed. "This person is so pleased

that you think of him. But the skin of my boots is always dry and does

not need to be chewed. It is called silicone rub-ber . It