Sammy pushed off his kayah from shore.  It was a funny sort of boat, according to our notions.  It was only nine inches deep, and about a foot and a half wide in the middle, tapering to a point at either end and curving upward.  It was about sixteen feet long.  Its frame was of very light wood, and this was covered with tanned seal-skin.  Sammy’s mother was a Greenlander, and she could sew on seal-skin very handily, using sinews for thread; and she had covered her little boy’s boat with seal-skin, leaving a hole in the centre just large enough to receive Sammy.

When he had dropped into his place, he then laced the lower border of his jacket to the rim of the hole, and there he was all snug—­not a drop of water could get in.  Grasping his single oar, about six feet long, with a paddle at either end, and flourishing it in the water right and left, away swept the young fisherman.

“I should think his craft would be top-heavy, and over he would go,” says some reader.

One naturally would think his craft would be top-heavy and over he would go, as the kayah has no keel and carries no ballast, and if we should try a kayah, it would certainly be on land.  But those Greenlanders learn to handle themselves so well that their kayahs will go dancing over the big billows and then fly through a ragged, dangerous surf.  From their kayahs, too, they will fight the fierce white bear.

Ah!  Sammy, what is the matter?

“Ugh-h-h-h!”

Sammy gives a melancholy groan.  He begins to suspect that his boat is leaking.

Could any one have slit the seal-skin bottom?

The kayah is really settling.

Sammy feels troubled.  “I must go home,” he says.

He turns his back upon the bright, beautiful sea, tufted with cakes of ice that seem in the distance like the white, pure lilies on a glassy pond, and paddles off home with good-by to the fishing, good-by to the black-headed seals, good-by to the low islands with their gulls and mollimucks and burgomeisters and tern and kittiwakes and eider-ducks—­good-by to the long day’s fun!

“It makes me feel like a mad whale,” said Sammy, “to be cheated out of my fishing.  I wonder who cut my kayah!”

Just then he looked off to the shore, and there stood Billy Blubber, an ancient enemy.

“There’s the fellow,” said Sammy.  “He slit my kayah, I know.  If I had him, I’d eat him quicker than a tern’s egg.  Just see how he looks!”

Billy did look exasperating.  He saw everything and he enjoyed everything.  Plainly he was the miscreant.  He was waddling round on his stout little legs, flourishing a huge jack-knife, and grinning as if he were going to have a big dish of whale-fat for dinner.  He looked comical enough.  He was dressed in seal-skin, and was bobbing up and down in his mother’s seal-skin boots.  The women’s boots are of tanned seal-skin, bleached white and then colored.  The boots of Billy’s mother were very gay.  They were bright red ones.  When Billy from his tent-door saw Sammy coming, he crawled into the huge big boots, and bare-headed rushed—­no, waddled out, to greet the discomfited fisherman.