Page:The Netsilik Eskimos (1931).djvu/287

is you who someday will kick the pillars of the world down (silap ajaguktäk).^[1] Let me see you kick that mountain there."

Nârssuk merely made the slightest hint of a kick with one leg inside the napkin. and the mountain at once collapsed, being all broken up.

So enormous is the strength of Nârssuk. He became an evil spirit, a spirit of the air, to revenge himself upon those who had no coinpassion for the orphaned, and when he loosens his napkin and makes a tremendous draught up in the air, the winds rise and mankind cannot go hunting, but must starve.

The Netsilingmiut still seem to be so much inland dwellers that to them, as to the Caribou Eskimos, the moon is of no great significance. It is true that they have a few tales and traditions, but there is some difficulty in explaining the moon's special functions. Nevertheless there is a general idea that the moon can bring luck to the hunter and fertility to woman. This is why small boys, when they discover it for the first time up in the air, have to express their joy by splashing water up in its direction. Water is the best thing of all to one who thirsts, and a great hunter is often thirsty. And this is why no woman may sleep on her platform exposed to the moon, for then the moon. will give her a child.

In other respects the relation of the moon to mankind is somewhat vague. It is as if they look upon it as the great hunter for the dead in the Land of the Sky. It is considered to be a marvellous walrus hunter, and this, they say, is a distant memory of the time of the Tunrit. When it is out hunting it cannot be seen in the sky. It distributes hunting shares to all in the land up there, although the shares that Uvloriasugssuk gets are the biggest, for he gets the whole of one side of a walrus. Uvloriasugssuk was once a breathing-hole hunter himself; now he has become one of the largest stars in the sky (the constellation Venus).

Like the sun and Venus, the moon was once a man on earth, but wickedness sent him up into the heavens as it did Nârssuk. The moon and the sun were brother and sister, but they had a bad mother who would murder the moon; she failed in her purpose and the brother and sister took revenge by murdering her instead. Ashamed. at what they had done they wandered out into the world and lived