But it was an early and savage autumn. All through September
there were continuous gales that broke up the smooth seal-ice
when it was only four or five feet thick, and forced it inland,
and piled a great barrier, some twenty miles broad, of lumped
and ragged and needly ice, over which it was impossible to draw
the dog-sleighs. The edge of the floe off which the seal were
used to fish in winter lay perhaps twenty miles beyond this
barrier, and out of reach of the Tununirmiut. Even so, they
might have managed to scrape through the winter on their stock
of frozen salmon and stored blubber, and what the traps gave
them, but in December one of their hunters came across a tupik
(a skin-tent) of three women and a girl nearly dead, whose men
had come down from the far North and been crushed in their
little skin hunting-boats while they were out after the long-
horned narwhal. Kadlu, of course, could only distribute the
women among the huts of the winter village, for no Inuit dare
refuse a meal to a stranger. He never knows when his own turn
may come to beg. Amoraq took the girl, who was about fourteen,
into her own house as a sort of servant. From the cut of her
sharp-pointed hood, and the long diamond pattern of her white
deer-skin leggings, they supposed she came from Ellesmere Land.
She had never seen tin cooking-pots or wooden-shod sleighs
before; but Kotuko the boy and Kotuko the dog were rather
fond of her.

Then all the foxes went south, and even the wolverine, that
growling, blunt-headed little thief of the snow, did not take
the trouble to follow the line of empty traps that Kotuko set.
The tribe lost a couple of their best hunters, who were badly
crippled in a fight with a musk-ox, and this threw more work on
the others. Kotuko went out, day after day, with a light
hunting-sleigh and six or seven of the strongest dogs, looking
till his eyes ached for some patch of clear ice where a seal
might perhaps have scratched a breathing-hole. Kotuko the dog
ranged far and wide, and in the dead stillness of the ice-fields
Kotuko the boy could hear his half-choked whine of excitement,
above a seal-hole three miles away, as plainly as though he were
at his elbow. When the dog found a hole the boy would build
himself a little, low snow wall to keep off the worst of the
bitter wind, and there he would wait ten, twelve, twenty hours
for the seal to come up to breathe, his eyes glued to the tiny
mark he had made above the hole to guide the downward thrust of
his harpoon, a little seal-skin mat under his feet, and his legs
tied together in the tutareang (the buckle that the old hunters
had talked about). This helps to keep a man's legs from
twitching as he waits and waits and waits for the quick-eared
seal to rise. Though there is no excitement in it, you can
easily believe that the sitting still in the buckle with the
thermometer perhaps forty degrees below zero is the hardest work
an Inuit knows. When a seal was caught, Kotuko the dog would
bound forward, his trace trailing behind him, and help to pull
the body to the sleigh, where the tired and hungry dogs lay
sullenly under the lee of the broken ice.

A seal did not go very far, for each mouth in the little village
had a right to be filled, and neither bone, hide, nor sinew was
wasted. The dogs' meat was taken for human use, and Amoraq fed
the team with pieces of old summer skin-tents raked out from
under the sleeping-bench, and they howled and howled again, and
waked to howl hungrily. One could tell by the soap-stone lamps
in the huts that famine was near. In good seasons, when blubber
was plentiful, the light in the boat-shaped lamps would be two
feet high--cheerful, oily, and yellow. Now it was a bare six
inches: Amoraq carefully pricked down the moss wick, when an
unwatched flame brightened for a moment, and the eyes of all the
family followed her hand. The horror of famine up there in the
great cold is not so much dying, as dying in the dark. All the
Inuit dread the dark that presses on them without a break for
six months in each year; and when the lamps are low in the
houses the minds of people begin to be shaken and confused.

But worse was to come.

The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the passages,
glaring at the cold stars, and snuffing into the bitter wind,
night after night. When they stopped howling the silence fell
down again as solid and heavy as a snowdrift against a door,
and men could hear the beating of their blood in the thin
passages of the ear, and the thumping of their own hearts,
that sounded as loud as the noise of sorcerers' drums beaten
across the snow. One night Kotuko the dog, who had been
unusually sullen in harness, leaped up and pushed his head
against Kotuko's knee. Kotuko patted him, but the dog still
pushed blindly forward, fawning. Then Kadlu waked, and gripped
the heavy wolf-like head, and stared into the glassy eyes.
The dog whimpered and shivered between Kadlu's knees. The hair
rose about his neck, and he growled as though a stranger were at
the door; then he barked joyously, and rolled on the ground, and
bit at Kotuko's boot like a puppy.

"What is it?" said Kotuko; for he was beginning to be afraid.

"The sickness," Kadlu answered. "It is the dog sickness." Kotuko
the dog lifted his nose and howled and howled again.

"I have not seen this before. What will he do?" said Kotuko.

Kadlu shrugged one shoulder a little, and crossed the hut for
his short stabbing-harpoon. The big dog looked at him, howled
again, and slunk away down the passage, while the other dogs


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