drew aside right and left to give him ample room. When he was
out on the snow he barked furiously, as though on the trail of
a musk-ox, and, barking and leaping and frisking, passed out of
sight. His trouble was not hydrophobia, but simple, plain
madness. The cold and the hunger, and, above all, the dark,
had turned his head; and when the terrible dog-sickness once
shows itself in a team, it spreads like wild-fire. Next hunting-
day another dog sickened, and was killed then and there by
Kotuko as he bit and struggled among the traces. Then the black
second dog, who had been the leader in the old days, suddenly
gave tongue on an imaginary reindeer-track, and when they
slipped him from the pitu he flew at the throat of an ice-cliff,
and ran away as his leader had done, his harness on his back.
After that no one would take the dogs out again. They needed
them for something else, and the dogs knew it; and though they
were tied down and fed by hand, their eyes were full of despair
and fear. To make things worse, the old women began to tell
ghost-tales, and to say that they had met the spirits of the
dead hunters lost that autumn, who prophesied all sorts of
horrible things.

Kotuko grieved more for the loss of his dog than anything else;
for though an Inuit eats enormously he also knows how to starve.
But the hunger, the darkness, the cold, and the exposure told on
his strength, and he began to hear voices inside his head, and
to see people who were not there, out of the tail of his eye.
One night--he had unbuckled himself after ten hours' waiting
above a "blind" seal-hole, and was staggering back to the
village faint and dizzy--he halted to lean his back against
a boulder which happened to be supported like a rocking-stone
on a single jutting point of ice. His weight disturbed the
balance of the thing, it rolled over ponderously, and as Kotuko
sprang aside to avoid it, slid after him, squeaking and hissing
on the ice-slope.

That was enough for Kotuko. He had been brought up to believe
that every rock and boulder had its owner (its inua), who was
generally a one-eyed kind of a Woman-Thing called a tornaq,
and that when a tornaq meant to help a man she rolled after him
inside her stone house, and asked him whether he would take her
for a guardian spirit. (In summer thaws the ice-propped rocks
and boulders roll and slip all over the face of the land, so you
can easily see how the idea of live stones arose.) Kotuko heard
the blood beating in his ears as he had heard it all day, and he
thought that was the tornaq of the stone speaking to him.
Before he reached home he was quite certain that he had held a
long conversation with her, and as all his people believed that
this was quite possible, no one contradicted him.

"She said to me, 'I jump down, I jump down from my place on the
snow,'" cried Kotuko, with hollow eyes, leaning forward in the
half-lighted hut. "She said, 'I will be a guide.' She said,
'I will guide you to the good seal-holes.' To-morrow I go out,
and the tornaq will guide me."

Then the angekok, the village sorcerer, came in, and Kotuko told
him the tale a second time. It lost nothing in the telling.

"Follow the tornait [the spirits of the stones], and they will
bring us food again," said the angekok.

Now the girl from the North had been lying near the lamp,
eating very little and saying less for days past; but when
Amoraq and Kadlu next morning packed and lashed a little hand-
sleigh for Kotuko, and loaded it with his hunting-gear and as
much blubber and frozen seal-meat as they could spare, she took
the pulling-rope, and stepped out boldly at the boy's side.

"Your house is my house," she said, as the little
bone-shod sleigh squeaked and bumped behind them in
the awful Arctic night.

"My house is your house," said Kotuko; "but I think that we
shall both go to Sedna together."

Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Underworld, and the Inuit
believe that every one who dies must spend a year in her
horrible country before going to Quadliparmiut, the Happy
Place, where it never freezes and the fat reindeer trot up
when you call.

Through the village people were shouting: "The tornait have
spoken to Kotuko. They will show him open ice. He will bring
us the seal again!" Their voices were soon swallowed up by the
cold, empty dark, and Kotuko and the girl shouldered close
together as they strained on the pulling-rope or humoured the
sleigh through the ice in the direction of the Polar Sea.
Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told him to go
north, and north they went under Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer--those
stars that we call the Great Bear.

No European could have made five miles a day over the ice-
rubbish and the sharp-edged drifts; but those two knew exactly
the turn of the wrist that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock,
the jerk that nearly lifts it out of an ice-crack, and the exact
strength that goes to the few quiet strokes of the spear-head
that make a path possible when everything looks hopeless.

The girl said nothing, but bowed her head, and the long
wolverine-fur fringe of her ermine hood blew across her broad,


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