Between Two Worlds Read Online Free PDF Page A

my face tingle, and Marie’s cheeks were already red.
    Just a few days before, I’d never have thought that I’d be seeing Marie again, and going on a journey with her. Should I take her hand the way I used to do? Three summers had passed since her last voyage to Itta, and she wasshy with me. Mitti Peary came strolling up. I waited for her to greet me, but she just stared.
    “Mother,” Marie cried. “It’s Billy Bah!”
    Mitti Peary held me by the arms and looked me in the eyes. “Billy Bah! I
didn’t
recognize you. How you’ve grown up!”
    I returned her smile. How good it was to see her again.
    Smoke poured out of the
Windward
’s two smokestacks. The captain sounded the horn, and the ship began to move, steaming out through the floes of ice. Angulluk and I couldn’t return to shore now, even if we wanted to. We were on our way, our lives moving in unforeseen directions.

CHAPTER FIVE

    Captain Bartlett said our journey on the
Windward
to Musk Ox Land would only take a day and a night, but we’d hardly traveled any distance at all and three days had gone by. Gigantic ice floes towered over the ship and crowded the sound, and our perilous path between them was winding and slow. Marie and I watched the sailors climb high into the rigging and chop off points of blue ice that hung over the deck. She collected the fallen chunks that clinked together with the tiny songs ice can make. Qaorlutoq, that Bag of Bones, built play igloos with the slabs of ice.
    “I build igloo, give Marie,” Qaorlutoq said. Marie crawled into it.
    Marie smiled at me through a space in the flat roof. “Come on in, Billy Bah!”
    “No. You play.” I was too old for children’s games.
    I remembered the tar-papered house with the flat roof where Marie’s parents had lived when she was born. I’d hide behind rocks along with the other children in our village and watch Mitti Peary, big with child, walk in andout. She was the only white woman we’d ever known. We wanted to see what kind of a baby would come out of her.
    The morning after Marie was born, a big crowd of villagers gathered around the house with gifts of furs and carved ivory animals. Everyone loved this tiny, fair-haired child. I called her the snow baby. My mother used to sing nonsense songs for her, like
“Ah-nee-gee-ta-ta-ee.”
Everyone started calling her Ah-neeg-he-toe.
    I visited Marie every day, and watched Mitti Peary give her a bath. Mitti Peary would lay her to dry on the soft caribou skins. Once, Peary wrapped her in the red, white, and blue material he called the stars and stripes and took her outside to photograph her. In the spring, my mother made Marie her first outdoor clothes: caribou skin trousers with little fur boots attached to them, and a fox skin
kapatak
.
    Now, on the ship, Marie often kept me company in the forward saloon, a large room at the front where our people slept on furs on the floor. Or Marie sat with us outside on deck where we ate seal meat, and Angulluk entertained her with his string games. Mitti Peary offered me kind smiles and thanked me for watching over Marie. Oddly, though, she never invited me to their cabin.
    But on the fourth day of our voyage, Marie crawled out of the ice house and said, “Let me show you where I live, Billy Bah.” She tugged my hand.
    “Don’t pull me.” But I could hardly keep from grinning.
    We crept through a narrow hallway past glossy wooden doors with bright metal doorknobs. The rooms behind the doors, Marie said, belonged to the captain and his officers. She took me into the place where they ate their meals, and I ran my hands across the smooth wood of the table. Wood—so foreign, such a luxury! It was hard to believe that the whole ship was made of it. Marie guided me to a tiny room where she lifted up a board. “This is where Mother and I go to the toilet,” she said, “and here is toilet paper.” She paused. “I’ve seen the Eskimos squatting over buckets. Why don’t you use the