A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 23: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE SMOKING LAND . 23 boy, who had worked with me for three months, suddenly caught hold of the stranger who was eating beside my fire and said, laughing, and in broken Eng- lish, that he had found, at last, a man from the Smoking Land! CHAPTER 6 Blood on the Snow OW that I had been so long on the rim of the Arctic, there was noth- ing unusual about the scene. I re- member that the land, the sea-ice, and the sky, were all one pale tone of café-au-lait. It was one of those backgrounds that make objects near at hand look big, and darker than the fact. The dogs had been fed, and we were cooking our own meal when the stranger showed up and squatted to take his part of the hand out. That’s the way with Esquimaux. They always have a hand out for whatever they can get. A really first- class Esquimau doesn’t much mind what he receives as long as it is something. He never complains, as long as he is on the plus side of the ledger. I must say that they treat strangers just as they would themselves be treated, and if hobos could stand the cold, they would never have to do a lick of work in an Esquimau village. T asked my boy what a village would do with a— professional loafer, and he took the matter under advisement for a long time. At last he said that if fate sent such a person among the Esquimaux, the bur- den would have to be endured. At any rate, I was accustomed to the . begging of the northmen, and I paid little attention to this fellow, simply giving him the smallest third of our rations—there happened to be enough for all hands. I began to notice the stranger a little more during the meal. In the first place, his dialect was one that I had never heard before during my wanderings among the Esquitnaux, All of that year, I had been going after the language as hard as I could, and I was pretty proficient, but now and then I ran into some outlander whose talk was a puzzle to me. This chap was the worst of all. In the second place, he had the look of a breed—about three-quarters white and the rest Esquimau, He had the bulk and the shoulders of a white man; he had the length of face, and the hollow cheeks, but I thought that the Esquimau blood showed in the size of his cheekbones, and in the rather cramped, slanting forehead. He had a white man’s beard, too, something that one very rarely sees among any full- blooded Esquimaux. In the third place, his furs, which were handsome to look at, were of a cut and make very different from any that I had ever seen. The stuff looked to me like sea-otter, though I couldn’t imagine even an ignorant outlander Esquimau wearing that frightfully expensive fur, In the fourth place, and almost more important than all the other items, he had a dog the like of which I had never seen. It looked like a cross between a small polar bear and a wolf. It was a dirty yellow white—the natural color for\ that northern region; and it must have weighed a hundred and fifty, or even more. The head and neck were snaky, like the bear's, but it had a wolf’s shoulders, and a wolf's magnificent legs, It was on account of the dog, chiefly, that I had been considering the fellow’s application for a job. He wanted to know if I was going south, and I said that I was. For I had had enough of the white land, and bucking blizzards, and all for the sake of a fool’s dream. “Bound north of Alaska for the Smok- ing Land,” had rung in my ears for so long that I was sick of the thought of it. I was even a little sick of the thought of Cleve Darrell. Mind you, I had been very fond of Darrell; but still my reasan was always telling me that he had died back there in a southern land, and the broken side of the mountain was the token and seal of his passing. Yes, I was going back to the southland, and perhaps there I should find out the best site for a new dude ranch—no, I was tired of talking; but I would begin to be an honest man, and run cattle, and get poor again. In these days, it costs money to be honest and a hard worker! So I told the strange Esquimau, and had my other boy translate, my firm in- tention of trekking south. And the stranger seemed interested.. He wished to see the southland, he said, and because