dark face. The sky above them was an intense velvety black,
changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon, where the great
stars burned like street-lamps. From time to time a greenish
wave of the Northern Lights would roll across the hollow of the
high heavens, flick like a flag, and disappear; or a meteor
would crackle from darkness to darkness, trailing a shower of
sparks behind. Then they could see the ridged and furrowed
surface of the floe tipped and laced with strange colours--red,
copper, and bluish; but in the ordinary starlight everything
turned to one frost-bitten gray. The floe, as you will remember,
had been battered and tormented by the autumn gales till it was
one frozen earthquake. There were gullies and ravines, and holes
like gravel-pits, cut in ice; lumps and scattered pieces frozen
down to the original floor of the floe; blotches of old black
ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gale and heaved
up again; roundish boulders of ice; saw-like edges of ice carved
by the snow that flies before the wind; and sunken pits where
thirty or forty acres lay below the level of the rest of the
field. From a little distance you might have taken the lumps
for seal or walrus, overturned sleighs or men on a hunting
expedition, or even the great Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear
himself; but in spite of these fantastic shapes, all on the
very edge of starting into life, there was neither sound nor
the least faint echo of sound. And through this silence and
through this waste, where the sudden lights flapped and went
out again, the sleigh and the two that pulled it crawled like
things in a nightmare--a nightmare of the end of the world at
the end of the world.

When they were tired Kotuko would make what the hunters call a
"half-house," a very small snow hut, into which they would
huddle with the travelling-lamp, and try to thaw out the frozen
seal-meat. When they had slept, the march began again--thirty
miles a day to get ten miles northward. The girl was always very
silent, but Kotuko muttered to himself and broke out into songs
he had learned in the Singing-House--summer songs, and reindeer
and salmon songs--all horribly out of place at that season.
He would declare that he heard the tornaq growling to him, and
would run wildly up a hummock, tossing his arms and speaking in
loud, threatening tones. To tell the truth, Kotuko was very
nearly crazy for the time being; but the girl was sure that he
was being guided by his guardian spirit, and that everything
would come right. She was not surprised, therefore, when at the
end of the fourth march Kotuko, whose eyes were burning like
fire-balls in his head, told her that his tornaq was following
them across the snow in the shape of a two-headed dog. The girl
looked where Kotuko pointed, and something seemed to slip into
a ravine. It was certainly not human, but everybody knew that
the tornait preferred to appear in the shape of bear and seal,
and such like.

It might have been the Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself,
or it might have been anything, for Kotuko and the girl were
so starved that their eyes were untrustworthy. They had trapped
nothing, and seen no trace of game since they had left the
village; their food would not hold out for another week,
and there was a gale coming. A Polar storm can blow for ten days
without a break, and all that while it is certain death to be
abroad. Kotuko laid up a snow-house large enough to take in the
hand-sleigh (never be separated from your meat), and while he
was shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the
key-stone of the roof, he saw a Thing looking at him from a
little cliff of ice half a mile away. The air was hazy, and the
Thing seemed to be forty feet long and ten feet high, with
twenty feet of tail and a shape that quivered all along the
outlines. The girl saw it too, but instead of crying aloud with
terror, said quietly, "That is Quiquern. What comes after?"

"He will speak to me," said Kotuko; but the snow-knife trembled
in his hand as he spoke, because however much a man may believe
that he is a friend of strange and ugly spirits, he seldom likes
to be taken quite at his word. Quiquern, too, is the phantom of
a gigantic toothless dog without any hair, who is supposed to
live in the far North, and to wander about the country just
before things are going to happen. They may be pleasant or
unpleasant things, but not even the sorcerers care to speak
about Quiquern. He makes the dogs go mad. Like the Spirit-Bear,
he has several extra pairs of legs,--six or eight,--and this
Thing jumping up and down in the haze had more legs than any
real dog needed. Kotuko and the girl huddled into their hut
quickly. Of course if Quiquern had wanted them, he could have
torn it to pieces above their heads, but the sense of a foot-
thick snow-wall between themselves and the wicked dark was great
comfort. The gale broke with a shriek of wind like the shriek of
a train, and for three days and three nights it held, never
varying one point, and never lulling even for a minute. They fed
the stone lamp between their knees, and nibbled at the half-warm
seal-meat, and watched the black soot gather on the roof for
seventy-two long hours. The girl counted up the food in the
sleigh; there was not more than two days' supply, and Kotuko
looked over the iron heads and the deer-sinew fastenings of
his harpoon and his seal-lance and his bird-dart. There was
nothing else to do.

"We shall go to Sedna soon--very soon," the girl whispered.
"In three days we shall lie down and go. Will your tornaq do
nothing? Sing her an angekok's song to make her come here."

He began to sing in the high-pitched howl of the magic songs,
and the gale went down slowly. In the middle of his song the


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