Free Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas Preston Page A

nearly vertical wall of ice, Mene announced he wanted to return to Smith Sound, and MacMillan let him go. A second Eskimo, Tau-ching-wa, deserted only a few hours later. (Another Eskimo told MacMillan that Mene had decided to return to Greenland to enjoy the company of Tau-ching-wa's wife. This other Eskimo had alerted Tau-ching-wa, who decided that the expedition came second to his wife's virtue.)

    A year later, however, Mene rejoined the expedition, "very repentant over his failure of the year before," according to MacMillan. In the end, he proved himself an able explorer.

    There is an interesting story attached to the other Eskimo, Uisâkavsak, who survived his trip to New York. He returned to Greenland in 1898 aboard the Windward, and as far we know, he was the first adult Polar Eskimo to visit the white man's land and return to tell about it. (Miss Bill had been too young to understand much of what went on around her.) A Danish explorer, Knud Rasmussen, was in Greenland around the time of Uisâkavsak's homecoming, and he described the Eskimo's return (quoted by Rolf Gilberg in his excellent monograph The Big Liar, translation from the Danish by Gilberg):

    When Uisâkavsak returned, he gathered around him a large audience to tell them of the marvels he had seen. "The ships," he said, "sailed in and out there, like eiders on the brooding cliffs when their young begin to swim. There weren't many free drops of water in the harbor itself; it was filled with ships. You'd risk your life if you tried to go out there in a kayak, you'd simply not be noticed, and you'd be run down unmercifully. People live up in the air like auks on a bird cliff. The houses are as big as icebergs on a glacial bank, and they stretch inland as far as you can see, like a steep chain of mountains with innumerable canyons that serve as roads.

"And the people. Yes, there are so many of them that when smoke rises from the chimneys and the women are about to make breakfast, clouds fill the sky and the sun is eclipsed...."

    Rasmussen went on to report that Uisâkavsak was "intoxicated by his listeners' amazed expressions" and that "he could not stop talking." He told them about "streetcars, big as houses, with masses of glass windows as transparent as freshwater ice. They raced on without dogs to haul them, without smoke, full of smiling people who had no fear of their fate. And all this because a man pulled on a cord." Rasmussen reported that "Uisâkavsak's listeners began to doubt him seriously, but he gave them no time to think, and went on to tell them about the 'distance shrinker' (the telephone). He, Uisâkavsak, had stood and talked to Peary, who was visiting another village. Without shouting to one another, they had talked together through a funnel, along a cord."

    At this point, Rasmussen said, the tribe's respected leader stood up and shouted angrily, "Uisâkavsak, go tell your big lies to the women!"

    Eskimos consider lying to be a gravely serious matter, and Uisâkavsak, who had hitherto held a position of esteem among the Polar Eskimos, lost a great deal of respect and was relegated to an inferior position in the society. He was given the name "The Big Liar."

    "Rasmussen," Gilberg writes, "tried to restore Uisâkavsak's honor by confirming what was said, but one of the influential Polar Eskimos discreetly advised him against this, for it might hurt [Rasmussen] personally."

    Uisâkavsak very sensibly stopped talking about his experiences in America, and he later moved south, away from the tribe, and discovered a rich hunting land unknown to them. Here was a place, he may have thought, where he could restore his honor and reputation. He later returned to his tribe's area loaded with wealth, and was accepted as a powerful hunter. Unfortunately, his wife died, and as there was a shortage of women in the tribe, he stole the wife of another Eskimo. This Eskimo, who had been with Peary on his trip to the North Pole in 1909, didn't take