next door, as it were, to the very Pole.

Kadlu was an Inuit,--what you call an Esquimau,--and his tribe,
some thirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut--"the
country lying at the back of something." In the maps that
desolate coast is written Navy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name
is best, because the country lies at the very back of everything
in the world. For nine months of the year there is only ice and
snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that no one can realise
who has never seen the thermometer even at zero. For six months
of those nine it is dark; and that is what makes it so horrible.
In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other
day and every night, and then the snow begins to weep off on the
southerly slopes, and a few ground-willows put out their woolly
buds, a tiny stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom, beaches
of fine gravel and rounded stones run down to the open sea,
and polished boulders and streaked rocks lift up above the
granulated snow. But all that is gone in a few weeks, and the
wild winter locks down again on the land; while at sea the ice
tears up and down the offing, jamming and ramming, and splitting
and hitting, and pounding and grounding, till it all freezes
together, ten feet thick, from the land outward to deep water.

In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to the edge of this
land-ice, and spear them as they came up to breathe at their
blow-holes. The seal must have open water to live and catch fish
in, and in the deep of winter the ice would sometimes run eighty
miles without a break from the nearest shore. In the spring he
and his people retreated from the floes to the rocky mainland,
where they put up tents of skins, and snared the sea-birds, or
speared the young seal basking on the beaches. Later, they would
go south into Baffin Land after the reindeer, and to get their
year's store of salmon from the hundreds of streams and lakes of
the interior; coming back north in September or October for the
musk-ox hunting and the regular winter sealery. This travelling
was done with dog-sleighs, twenty and thirty miles a day, or
sometimes down the coast in big skin "woman-boats," when the
dogs and the babies lay among the feet of the rowers, and the
women sang songs as they glided from cape to cape over the
glassy, cold waters. All the luxuries that the Tununirmiut knew
came from the south--driftwood for sleigh-runners, rod-iron for
harpoon-tips, steel knives, tin kettles that cooked food much
better than the old soap-stone affairs, flint and steel, and
even matches, as well as coloured ribbons for the women's hair,
little cheap mirrors, and red cloth for the edging of deerskin
dress-jackets. Kadlu traded the rich, creamy, twisted narwhal
horn and musk-ox teeth (these are just as valuable as pearls) to
the Southern Inuit, and they, in turn, traded with the whalers
and the missionary-posts of Exeter and Cumberland Sounds; and so
the chain went on, till a kettle picked up by a ship's cook in
the Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber-lamp
somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic Circle.

Kadlu, being a good hunter, was rich in iron harpoons, snow-
knives, bird-darts, and all the other things that make life easy
up there in the great cold; and he was the head of his tribe,
or, as they say, "the man who knows all about it by practice."
This did not give him any authority, except now and then he
could advise his friends to change their hunting-grounds;
but Kotuko used it to domineer a little, in the lazy, fat Inuit
fashion, over the other boys, when they came out at night to
play ball in the moonlight, or to sing the Child's Song to the
Aurora Borealis.

But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was
tired of making snares for wild-fowl and kit-foxes, and most
tired of all of helping the women to chew seal- and deer-skins
(that supples them as nothing else can) the long day through,
while the men were out hunting. He wanted to go into the quaggi,
the Singing-House, when the hunters gathered there for their
mysteries, and the angekok, the sorcerer, frightened them into
the most delightful fits after the lamps were put out, and you
could hear the Spirit of the Reindeer stamping on the roof;
and when a spear was thrust out into the open black night it
came back covered with hot blood. He wanted to throw his big
boots into the net with the tired air of the head of a family,
and to gamble with the hunters when they dropped in of an
evening and played a sort of home-made roulette with a tin pot
and a nail. There were hundreds of things that he wanted to do,
but the grown men laughed at him and said, "Wait till you have
been in the buckle, Kotuko. Hunting is not ALL catching."

Now that his father had named a puppy for him, things looked
brighter. An Inuit does not waste a good dog on his son till the
boy knows something of dog-driving; and Kotuko was more than
sure that he knew more than everything.

If the puppy had not had an iron constitution he would have died
from over-stuffing and over-handling. Kotuko made him a tiny
harness with a trace to it, and hauled him all over the house-
floor, shouting: "Aua! Ja aua!" (Go to the right). Choiachoi! Ja
choiachoi!" (Go to the left). "Ohaha!" (Stop). The puppy did not
like it at all, but being fished for in this way was pure
happiness beside being put to the sleigh for the first time.
He just sat down on the snow, and played with the seal-hide
trace that ran from his harness to the pitu, the big thong in
the bows of the sleigh. Then the team started, and the puppy
found the heavy ten-foot sleigh running up his back, and
dragging him along the snow, while Kotuko laughed till the tears
ran down his face. There followed days and days of the cruel


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