Of Bears & Men

TOP OF THE WORLD (236 pp.)--Hans Ruesch--Harper ($2.75).

The first white man's camp that Eskimo Ernenek ever saw on his hunting grounds in the Canadian Arctic made Ernenek tremble with curiosity. He decided to load his wife Asiak and the kids on his dog sled and pay the explorers a visit.

The visit was disillusioning. When Ernenek followed the old Eskimo custom of rummaging through his hosts' baggage somebody rapped him sharply across the knuckles. Then somebody else offered him whisky, a drink that made him miserably hot, so he decided that white men were an unfriendly lot at best. Turning his back on the explorers, he built an igloo nearby and settled down with his family for a sleep--only to be awakened shortly afterward by an uninvited anthropologist. While the "lemming-faced" white intruder busily sketched everything in sight, hospitable Ernenek brought out his choicest delicacy, "a thoroughly chewed hodgepodge of caribou eyes, ptarmigan dung, auk slime and fermented bear brain," which the visitor rudely refused. Then wife Asiak had a happy idea: "Maybe he is not hungry. Maybe he just wants to laugh with a worthless woman." Beamed Ernenek: "Make yourself beautiful!"

Joyously, Asiak complied by combing her hair with a fish spine and rubbing melted blubber all over her face. But the Eskimos still had the visiting anthropologist wrong. When Ernenek showed signs of leaving and Asiak made signs of seduction, the visitor dived for the tunnel. Enraged Hunter Ernenek hauled him back by the seat of his pants. "How dare you so insult a man?" roared Ernenek, and bashed out the anthropologist's brains.

Frozen Grandmothers. When parts of his episodic novel appeared in U.S. magazines, so many incredulous readers wrote letters to Author Hans Ruesch that he decided to forestall further inquiries with a prefatory note: "I now wish to state beforehand that the social, sexual, and alimentary habits, the religious beliefs, the medical practices, and other modes and manners described in this book . . . are sober anthropological facts, applying chiefly to the Central Eskimos." Even thus warned, readers will shiver at some of the "cold facts" that turn up in Top of the World.

Because women were scarce in a land where mothers often killed their female Dabies, Ernenek spent many a six-month night sharing his friends' wives before he found a bride. After he had given Asiak's parents a lamp in trade for her, he felt 'proud that as a married man he now was in a position to repay other husbands for what little favors he had received from them." Tied down in one spot for a year by Asiak's mother, who was too old to travel and whose teeth, "used down to the gums, were incapable of softening hides any longer," Ernenek and Asiak unhesitatingly decided to follow their tribe's time-honored custom of euthanasia; they took her for a one-way ride, left her out on the frozen sea to die.

"In this region," writes Ruesch, "all life was exclusively carnivorous. Bear was man's biggest prize. Man was bear's biggest prize. Here it had not yet been decided whether man or bear was the crown of creation." But polar man knew a pretty sure way to kill polar bear. After spotting his game, he hid a tightly coiled splint of whalebone in a ball of blubber, froze it intact, and bowled it across the snow to the bear. After a few suspicious licks, the hungry bear usually gulped it down. Soon the blubber melted, releasing the coiled splint and wounding the bear. In the second phase of the hunt, the bear loped off in pain, dropping bloody dung which its pursuer sometimes ate to keep his strength up. After a flight that sometimes lasted several days, the bear finally sank down in mortal exhaustion and submitted to the man's spear.

Jealous Gods. Italian-born Author Ruesch, who was a world-traveling racing-car driver until a crackup made a writer out of him, saves his sympathy for the Eskimos and his wrath for missionaries who, with "tea and keks," are trying to change the Eskimos' manners & morals. Readers who gobble up Author Ruesch's enticing fictional blubber-ball may never suspect that it is dialectical bear bait until the later pages, where an aged anga-kok (medicine man) sums up his people's primitive philosophy, and makes it sound as up-to-date as a modern university lecture by a materialist philosopher:

"An angakok doesn't consider sinful what a white preacher considers sinful, but knows only one kind of sin -- that which harms the community . . . An angakok . . . believes in every spirit [but] the white men are exceedingly narrow-minded and conceited people, and that's the reason why they dare say there exists, at the most, one spirit--theirs, of course! . . . Each tribe has the god it deserves, for gods are made in the image of those that believe in them. Therefore the stupid have a stupid god, the intelligent an intelligent god, the good a good god, the wicked a wicked god. The god of the white men is jealous, selfish and greedy because they themselves are jealous, selfish and greedy . . . The white men's religion is designed to restrain the wickedness of a very wicked people--and a people exceedingly afraid of dying. Their love of their god has been built on their fear of death."

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