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"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."