He had grown gentle. His fierce and
formidable face was now like that of a man. His wounds had healed; his
teeth no longer grinned wildly all the time. The people gathered round
him in wonder.
He was dying. This was after the white men had come. They sent for a
priest. He found the Chenoo as ignorant of all religion as a wild
beast. At first he would repel the father in anger. Then he listened
and learned the truth. So the old heathen's heart changed; he was
deeply moved. He asked to be baptized, and as the first tear which he
had ever shed in all his life came to his eyes he died. [Footnote: This
strange and touching tale was told to Mr. Rand by a Micmac Indian,
Louis Brooks, who heard it from his grandfather, Samuel Paul, a chief,
who died in 1843, at the age of eighty. He was a living chronicle of
ancient traditions. The Chenoo can be directly identified with the
so-called Inlander of the Greenland Eskimo. He is a cannibal, a giant,
a mysterious being who haunts the horrible and almost unexplored
interior. He assumes different forms; in one shape he is supposed to be
a man who has become a recluse and a misanthrope. But no such being as
a Chenoo could ever have been imagined out of an arctic country. The
conception of the heart of hardest ice and the gradual civilization of
the savage by kindness; the tact with which this is done, as only a
woman could do it; the indication of the old nature, as shown by eating
the liver of his conquered foe, and his final conversion, display a
genius which is greatly heightened by the simplicity of the narrative.
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