girl started, laid her mittened hand and then her head to the
ice floor of the hut. Kotuko followed her example, and the two
kneeled, staring into each other's eyes, and listening with
every nerve. He ripped a thin sliver of whalebone from the
rim of a bird-snare that lay on the sleigh, and, after
straightening, set it upright in a little hole in the ice,
firming it down with his mitten. It was almost as delicately
adjusted as a compass-needle, and now instead of listening they
watched. The thin rod quivered a little--the least little jar
in the world; then it vibrated steadily for a few seconds,
came to rest, and vibrated again, this time nodding to another
point of the compass.

"Too soon!" said Kotuko. "Some big floe has broken far away
outside."

The girl pointed at the rod, and shook her head. "It is the big
breaking," she said. "Listen to the ground-ice. It knocks."

When they kneeled this time they heard the most curious muffled
grunts and knockings, apparently under their feet. Sometimes it
sounded as though a blind puppy were squeaking above the lamp;
then as if a stone were being ground on hard ice; and again,
like muffled blows on a drum; but all dragged out and made
small, as though they travelled through a little horn a weary
distance away.

"We shall not go to Sedna lying down," said Kotuko. "It is the
breaking. The tornaq has cheated us. We shall die."

All this may sound absurd enough, but the two were face to face
with a very real danger. The three days' gale had driven the
deep water of Baffin's Bay southerly, and piled it on to the
edge of the far-reaching land-ice that stretches from Bylot's
Island to the west. Also, the strong current which sets east out
of Lancaster Sound carried with it mile upon mile of what they
call pack-ice--rough ice that has not frozen into fields;
and this pack was bombarding the floe at the same time that
the swell and heave of the storm-worked sea was weakening and
undermining it. What Kotuko and the girl had been listening to
were the faint echoes of that fight thirty or forty miles away,
and the little tell-tale rod quivered to the shock of it.

Now, as the Inuit say, when the ice once wakes after its
long winter sleep, there is no knowing what may happen,
for solid floe-ice changes shape almost as quickly as a cloud.
The gale was evidently a spring gale sent out of time, and
anything was possible.

Yet the two were happier in their minds than before. If the floe
broke up there would be no more waiting and suffering. Spirits,
goblins, and witch-people were moving about on the racking ice,
and they might find themselves stepping into Sedna's country
side by side with all sorts of wild Things, the flush of
excitement still on them. When they left the hut after the gale,
the noise on the horizon was steadily growing, and the tough ice
moaned and buzzed all round them.

"It is still waiting," said Kotuko.

On the top of a hummock sat or crouched the eight-legged Thing
that they had seen three days before--and it howled horribly.

"Let us follow," said the girl. "It may know some way that does
not lead to Sedna"; but she reeled from weakness as she took the
pulling-rope. The Thing moved off slowly and clumsily across the
ridges, heading always toward the westward and the land, and
they followed, while the growling thunder at the edge of the
floe rolled nearer and nearer. The floe's lip was split and
cracked in every direction for three or four miles inland,
and great pans of ten-foot-thick ice, from a few yards to twenty
acres square, were jolting and ducking and surging into one
another, and into the yet unbroken floe, as the heavy swell took
and shook and spouted between them. This battering-ram ice was,
so to speak, the first army that the sea was flinging against
the floe. The incessant crash and jar of these cakes almost
drowned the ripping sound of sheets of pack-ice driven bodily
under the floe as cards are hastily pushed under a tablecloth.
Where the water was shallow these sheets would be piled one atop
of the other till the bottommost touched mud fifty feet down,
and the discoloured sea banked behind the muddy ice till the
increasing pressure drove all forward again. In addition to the
floe and the pack-ice, the gale and the currents were bringing
down true bergs, sailing mountains of ice, snapped off from the
Greenland side of the water or the north shore of Melville Bay.
They pounded in solemnly, the waves breaking white round them,
and advanced on the floe like an old-time fleet under full sail.
A berg that seemed ready to carry the world before it would
ground helplessly in deep water, reel over, and wallow in a
lather of foam and mud and flying frozen spray, while a much
smaller and lower one would rip and ride into the flat floe,
flinging tons of ice on either side, and cutting a track half a
mile long before it was stopped. Some fell like swords, shearing
a raw-edged canal; and others splintered into a shower of
blocks, weighing scores of tons apiece, that whirled and skirted
among the hummocks. Others, again, rose up bodily out of the
water when they shoaled, twisted as though in pain, and fell
solidly on their sides, while the sea threshed over their
shoulders. This trampling and crowding and bending and buckling
and arching of the ice into every possible shape was going on as


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