Nam-Bok the Unveracious
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| ✒ Author | Jack London |
| 📖 Pages | 28 |
| ⏰ Reading time | 1 hour |
| 💡 Originally published | 1902 |
| 🌏 Original language | English |
| 📌 Type | Stories |
| 📌 Genres | Psychological, Realism |
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"A Bidarka, is it not so!
Look! a bidarka, and one man who drives clumsily with a paddle!"
Old Bask-Wah-Wan rose to her knees, trembling with weakness and eagerness, and gazed out over the sea.
"Nam-Bok was ever clumsy at the paddle," she maundered reminiscently, shading the sun from her eyes and staring across the silver-spilled water.
"Nam-Bok was ever clumsy.
I remember…."
But the women and children laughed loudly, and there was a gentle mockery in their laughter, and her voice dwindled till her lips moved without sound.
Koogah lifted his grizzled head from his bone-carving and followed the path of her eyes.
Except when wide yawns took it off its course, a bidarka was heading in for the beach.
Its occupant was paddling with more strength than dexterity, and made his approach along the zigzag line of most resistance.
Koogah's head dropped to his work again, and on the ivory tusk between his knees he scratched the dorsal fin of a fish the like of which never swam in the sea.
"It is doubtless the man from the next village," he said finally, "come to consult with me about the marking of things on bone.
And the man is a clumsy man.
He will never know how."
"It is Nam-Bok," old Bask-Wah-Wan repeated.
"Should I not know my son!" she demanded shrilly.
"I say, and I say again, it is Nam-Bok."
"And so thou hast said these many summers," one of the women chided softly.
"Ever when the ice passed out of the sea hast thou sat and watched through the long day, saying at each chance canoe,
'This is Nam-Bok.'
Nam-Bok is dead, O Bask-Wah-Wan, and the dead do not come back.
It cannot be that the dead come back."
"Nam-Bok!" the old woman cried, so loud and clear that the whole village was startled and looked at her.
She struggled to her feet and tottered down the sand.
She stumbled over a baby lying in the sun, and the mother hushed its crying and hurled harsh words after the old woman, who took no notice.
The children ran down the beach in advance of her, and as the man in the bidarka drew closer, nearly capsizing with one of his ill-directed strokes, the women followed.
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