Page:The Netsilik Eskimos (1931).djvu/291

the father of the young ones, while being killed up on the platform where he lay shouted: qitornak'a qautiva galuaribka anina'ta pijaga'se: It was no use my telling you, children, that her brother would kill you."

Then Aningâ, who was a great shaman, healed his sister's sores and they wandered on.

And they walked on and on and continued to walk. Then they came to a village where they found gulped-up meat on the refuse heap. It was the land of the bottomless ones. There the people had no bottoms. That was why their food could not go through them, and when they had sucked the good out of a piece of meat they had to gulp it up again.

"I am thirsty, go in and ask for water," said the brother.

His sister went over to a house and shouted in: "My brother is thirsty and asks for water."

"Let him come in and have something to drink," they answered.

They were people who had nothing evil in their minds.

After that brother and sister stayed in the land of the bottomless ones and both married. The people were clever caribou hunters and tremendous runners. They laced their bellies in with thongs and ran the caribou down. The women were not merely bottomless but they also lacked some of the other openings that humans have. The women had no genitals.. When they became pregnant and a child was to be born, they slit open their stomach and took it out.

Now when the sister became pregnant and later on was about to give birth to the child, there was an old woman, her mother-in-law, who began to sharpen her ulo. Then Aningâ said: "nutaraq aqutiJaqarpǝq: There is a way for the child, you need not slit her belly open."

The sister gave birth to a boy, and the old mother-in-law took him up, and when she saw that he had a proper hole in his end she cried. aloud with joy, and, so that she might be the same as her grandchild, she took her meat fork and stuck a hole for herself in her end. But she fell down and died.

The bottomless ones were very fond of holding song feasts, and when people gathered in the qaxfge, and Aleqâ was alone with her child, it often happened that a man came in and lay with her. It was dark, and she could not see who it was. So one night she blackened his face. The same night she examined all the men, and Aninga was the only one that was blackened.