268 TWO DIANAS IN ALASKA 



The Innuits are very full of weird superstitions, and 

 all believe in evil spirits who live far inland from the 

 coast, spirits who descend from the Nunataks, or 

 peaks, which are to be seen in the heart of the glaciers. 

 The special function of the Nunataks, so far as I 

 could gather, is to work havoc to the Innuit hunter 

 to steal the fish from the drying ground, cut the skins 

 of the canoes, drive away the seals to other waters, 

 and generally make themselves all round disagreeable. 



At nights around the camp fires I would try and 

 engage the men in such conversation as we could 

 muster, but I could never discover that there were 

 any good fairies in the country to counterbalance all 

 the evil sprites. The goblins of Grimm alone hold 

 sway. Oberon and Titania could not live in the 

 frozen ways of the Arctic regions, needing the suns 

 of the South to gild their revelries. 



M'uch of the folk-lore gleaned by the way from the 

 natives, more especially from the Aleuts, is extra- 

 ordinarily interesting and weird, but unfortunately 

 very many of the stories are not printable in these days 

 of High Moral Tone, Nonconformist Consciences, and 

 the rest. The older natives yarn away these strange 

 romances, full of fierce sad glamour, loves and hates, 

 and feuds and factions. Alas ! that the majority of 

 the legends must remain locked in the memory of the 

 hearer. The " bowdlerizing " of them for books is an 

 almost impossible task. There is one, less lurid than 

 many, which is very firmly fixed in my mind, perhaps 

 because it has for its raison d'etre the accounting for 

 the creation and appearance at some long-ago period 



