been a number of deaths previous to a birth, the child may have several such guardian spirits.
Sometimes a child had dire need of guardian spirits. Such a one was Qalanganguasê; his parents and his sister were dead; he had no kindred to care for him and he was paralysed in the lower part of his body. When his fellow-villagers went hunting, he was left alone; and then, in his solitude, the spirits came and whiled away the hours. Once, however, the spirit of his sister was slow in going (for Qalanganguasê had been looking after the little child she had left when she died), and the people, on their return, saw the shadow of her flitting feet. When Qalanganguasê told what had happened, the villagers challenged him to the terrible song-duel in which the Angakut try one another's strength;[21] and they bound him to the supports of the house and left him swinging to and fro. But the spirit of his mother came to him, and his father's spirit, saying, "Journey with us"; and so he departed with them, nor did his fellow-villagers ever find him again.[22]
Qalanganguasê was an orphaned child and a cripple; his rights to life—in the Polar North—were little enough. Mitsima was an old man. He was out seal-catching in mid-winter; a storm came up, and he was lost to his companions. When the storm passed, his children saw him crawling like a dog over the ice, for his hands and feet were frozen—his children saw him, but they were afraid to go out to him, for he was near unto death. "He is an old man," they said, and so they let him die; for the aged, too, have little right to life in the Polar North.
Perhaps it is necessity rather than cruelty in a region where life is hard. Perhaps it is that death seems less final, more episodic, to men whose lives are always in peril. Perhaps it is the ancient custom of the world, which only civilized men have forgotten. "We observe our old customs," said a wise elder to Knud Rasmussen—and he was speaking of the observation of the rites for the dead—"in order to hold the
